by Samuel Messidor
Ascension nurses in Austin and Wichita went on strike in unison on June 27. This one-day strike was the largest nurse strike in Texas and Kansas to date.
Months of contract negotiations have been deadlocked by Ascension since the nurses won their unionization battle in Austin in September 2022. This one-day strike represents a further step in a long-term fight.
Ascension responded to the declaration of the strike with a planned three-day lockout of the nurses in both cities. A day after the strike, nurses gathered to return to work but were blocked from entering the hospitals in the two cities by security guards. The hospitals were staffed with scab workers, a common practice to continue making profits while undercutting the power of the strike. The union has filed an unfair practices complaint to the National Labor Relations Board.
With usual malice and hypocrisy, Ascension claims that, in asking for safer working conditions and less patients per care-giver, nurses are putting their own comfort above the patients’ lives, that the strike is just an act of selfishness. But who does it serve when nurses and patients are exposed to unnecessary health hazards and put at risk of getting sick? Who does it serve when patients are underserved and treated by overworked nurses? It serves Ascension, the so-called “non-profit” with $18 billion in cash reserves, and its CEO, who within a four-year period received nearly $60 million in compensation—more than double the amount received by the CEO of the next largest healthcare “nonprofit.” Sitting atop millions and billions of dollars, these are the CEOs who chide nurses for selfishness.
The hiring of scab workers is the most obvious example of their hypocrisy—not only are scab workers paid significantly more than regular nurses, but they cannot provide the quality care of regular nurses who are familiar with the hospital and have established relations with their patients. If Ascension is concerned with providing quality care to patients, then why not meet the demands of the nurses and avoid the strike in the first place? Of course they won’t, because ultimately they are not concerned with the well-being of anyone—nurses or patients—but with profits.
The grievances at Ascension are the same experienced by nurses and healthcare workers across the country: dangerously high patient-to-caregiver ratios, gruelingly long hours, unsanitary conditions, and increased work tempo. Pay and benefits also come into the equation given the rising cost of living and the burden of the years-long stagnation of healthcare workers’ wages in the country.
Just before the Ascension strikes, over 1,800 nurses and home healthcare workers in Oregon went on a week-long strike—the largest of its kind in Portland in more than 20 years. They too have yet to settle their contract dispute, and their union has likewise filed a complaint over the strike-breaking activities of the employer Providence Health & Services.
Grievances reflect across industries because they are rooted in the same fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Nurses and teachers in the USA often lead the way in strike actions, and the recent Ascension strike should be viewed not only as part of the struggle to improve the conditions of Ascension nurses, but an act of class struggle that highlights the need to organize and take united action as a class to win anything.
Further organization means workers uniting more within their industry and across industries, most critically with the hardcore, strategic sectors of the proletariat—those who are exploited at the point of production and have the biggest impact on capitalist production.
The fight goes on, and it demands greater organization and greater strike actions if better conditions are to be won and defended against the bosses rolling victories back—and as long as the capitalists have political power, this will be an ever-present threat. It is justified to fight, to unionize, to strike, to broaden and deepen organization, and to take a stand against the parasiteswho make their profits at the expense of the patients and from the sweat of the workers.
