Interview with an Ascension Nurse on the picket line in Austin
The recently-unionized nurses in Austin have been struggling for safer conditions and better staffing from the multi-billion-dollar “non-profit” Ascension, culminating in a one-day strike in unison with nurses in Wichita, KA on June 27th. The record-breaking strike—the largest nurse strike in either state to date—was met with a three-day lockout of nurses and the hiring of scab workers, making the situation worse for the patients while bolstering the profits of Ascension.
As the struggle continues and intensifies, we wish to broadcast the voices of the workers on the front lines of the class struggle to support their fight for increased organization and better conditions. Below are excerpts from an interview with an Ascension nurse and union organizer who was on the picket line in Austin.
If you are a worker organizing your workplace, interested in exposing exploitative conditions, and/or want to show solidarity with Ascension nurses, please contact us at TheWorkerPaper@proton.me
The Worker correspondent (hereafter abbreviated as TW): Recently we’ve been seeing a huge upsurge in strike activity, union activity, such as the potential UPS strike and the ongoing actor and writer strike. How do you feel about this surge in strike activity and how do you think it connects to the nurses unionizing and organizing?
Nurse: I think it triggered I’m guessing all of it kind of. The start of just COVID and lack of protections of that and just how the essential personnel were treated terribly. We’re not getting any hazard pay, PPE was locked up—we had it but it was locked in the manager’s office. We were already using N-95s ten or twenty times, sterilizing them with un-researched means and doing the best with what we had. We were the ones that were more vulnerable too, we were underpaid, our families were vulnerable from us bringing it home to them, lack of insurance…. And then there were delivery workers, restaurant workers having to deal with it at curbside and often without affordable healthcare. There’s just so many of them. So, just seeing people get sick and die is like, it’s not worth it anymore. Our pay and how they treat us is not worth our lives. And just seeing people step up demanding protections has had a domino effect. We’ve seen Amazon—it was huge in the media, and then Starbucks was very much in the media. And then there were more nurses stepping up in groups and saying this is not acceptable, while hospital companies told the media, “Oh everything’s fine, we can handle this.” And we’re like, “Nobody knows what they’re doing, we’re just winging it and it’s not safe inside.”
TW: Were there issues that existed pre-COVID that you feel were exasperated by COVID?
Nurse: Yes, so we’ve always had staffing shortages—or it’s not so much that there was a shortage of staff, it was that we would run as lean as possible. Unlike doctors and other specialists, nursing care is lumped into the patient’s room charge. If you have 20 patients, the hospital is billing the same amount for nursing care whether they are staffing that floor with ten nurses or five nurses. The hospital is getting paid the same so why would they pay for more nurses to take care of the patients if they can just pile more work on them and we keep up? We crush ourselves to take care of our patients, whether we don’t go to the bathroom or we don’t take breaks, chart after work; nurses neglect their own physical needs because we will take care of the patients first and hospitals know that. Sometimes we are drowning at work, but leadership canceled some nurses for that shift just to save money. So staffing shortages have always been an issue, but not like it is now…. But it’s worse now than it was during the height of the pandemic…. People weren’t as worn out but as time has gone on and people were not seeing improvements, seeing management get hostile towards people that would speak out about safety, why would anyone stay in a profession like this? Nursing is often said to be a ‘calling’ and hospital administrators love to remind us of that when they’re actually taking advantage of us. But at this point, they’re not even giving us the resources to be able to take care of our patients safely and refusing to address workplace violence [according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare workers accounted for 73% of all nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses due to violence among privately-owned industries in 2018, an amount that has increased since the pandemic]. We are unable to fulfill our calling now and that leaves nurses two options: either quit working at the bedside or we stand up and do something about this.
TW: Is there any kind of message you would want to give to either unionized workers or workers in general fighting for unions?
Nurse: We’ve seen what doing nothing and not speaking up has gotten us, and it’s not just the status quo from years past. Conditions in healthcare as a career and as a patient has continued to plummet, and if we keep leaving or jumping jobs, nothing will ever change. And it’s not just for our own lives, it’s for our patients’ lives, our families’ lives, and our communities’ lives…. Our patients can’t speak for themselves—mine literally cannot because I care for babies. But even adults that are hospitalized are often so sick that they cannot speak to advocate for themselves. So, if not us, then who’s going to stand up for those patients?
TW: What would you say to workers who want to organize, want to fight back, but don’t really know where to even begin?
Nurse: Talk to coworkers that you trust and see who is all having the same concerns. And ask them, what do you think are options to make this better? What have we tried in the past that didn’t work? Or what have we tried in the past that maybe got some movement? And then just grow it from there, as long as you can keep it from management, because when management finds out they start on their anti-union campaign hardcore….
In April or May, our management started calling us into the office one by one, saying, “We’ve heard there’s been talk of a union.” These meetings actually were the best talking point because they were presented in a strange way that made coworkers suspicious of management…. And it helped us! They say the boss is the best organizer, and that, that really helped us at least start conversations with people once the cat was out of the bag.
I had contacted several other co-workers that I knew had issues and had just beat their head against the wall trying to get them fixed and not having any success at all. And they ended up developing into a couple of our union leaders that helped get this off the ground and still are very vital in the process. This ties in with a strategy that is well known to every organizer called mapping. You identify who the leaders are in different social groups at work and figure out how to get them on board. One worker in Group A may not carry much sway with the social leader of Group B, but you definitely know someone else that would be able to talk to Group B’s leader, so you figure out who that is.
TW: What kind of support have you all received from the public?
Nurse: The community support has been absolutely amazing from day one when we went public and started flyering, just having families say, “Oh, that’s awesome! I totally support you guys.” We’ve had no negative community interactions that I know of. We’ve had multiple other unions that were local turn out for events and various leaders in the community…. It’s a great feeling, and I feel like I’m trying to return the favor to other unions too, like the UPS picket, and some nurses showed up to one of the VIA 313 [a pizza chain where workers in Austin have been fighting to unionize] actions recently when the new location opened up in Bee Cave. So, I feel like in Austin we’re trying to build more inter-union solidarity with each other.
TW: What do you see as the long-term goals of the struggle?
Nurse: Better working conditions for us and better conditions for the patients in the hospital. And we’ll be able to attract and retain nurses because a lot of it just goes down to staffing. The better the staffing, the better the patient care is, the less the burnout there is for the nurses that are there.
That’s basically the goal of us unionizing. It’d be great to have this. Spread into other hospitals, and the rest of the state, the other states, and other workers obviously realize they can do something about their workplace and their working conditions, and just kind of ripple outwards and go from there. And our co-workers realize our power and that our labor is running this whole system, and that we can say this is not acceptable, this is not safe, this needs to be fixed, and we will not stop bringing this up or stop pushing back until this is fixed.
