CNA Nurses on strike in California: San Leandro hospital picketed

This picket line is at the San Leandro Hospital in San Leandro CA a small town just south of Oakland.  Some 6,000 nurses, members of the California Nurses Association at nine hospitals in the San Francisco and Los Angeles area, have been brought out on a one day strike to oppose cuts in their benefits like sick leave and pensions, a familiar story.  The bosses in retaliation have locked them out for two days more a staffer told me although a nurse said it was one day.  So the nurses will be losing three days pay possibly.  One official told me that this was better than usual as they normally lock them out for 5 days to punish them in these circumstances. What is happening here is what is happening throughout the country, with some success.  As we have mentioned many times on this blog, even in Wisconsin where we saw an unprecedented 100,000 workers occupying city hall, not one demand improving wages, benefits or working conditions conditions was made.

All concessions in Wisconsin were acceptable to the top Labor officials and the Democratic politicians who claimed to be in support of the Wisconsin events.  The two issues of concern for these parties were dues check off which is the employers collecting members' dues money through payroll and collective bargaining rights.  Dues check off is important for obvious reasons to the Democrats as well as the officials give a lot of money to them at election time.  The right to bargain is also important but the right to bargain concessions is more about the role of the negotiator than workers' rights and benefits.

The nurses have been a fairly aggressive exception to most Unions but the bosses are now after them more aggressively after their successful campaigns against the autoworkers and those of us in the public sector. Two local politicians came down to this picket line as these folks normally do. One was the mayor and the other a council member who is the representative of the Labor officialdom on the city council. Neither of them said anything substantial other than that they "support" the workers and the usual platitudes.What they will actually do wasn't clear.

The council member made reference to the Alameda Central Labor Council where he was a delegate and when I spoke I asked the crowd who had heard of the Central Labor Council, no one except the two politicians acknowledged that they did; the council member also never specified exactly what the Central Labor Council would do to help the nurses achieve a victory.  I did not find a rank and file striker who had heard of it.  The politicians knew of the CLC as this AFL-CIO county structure is one way the Democratic Party (the other Wall Street party) infiltrates the workers movement.  Candidates (not only Democrats) go to the Central Labor Council for endorsements and many of the affiliated locals go along with the CLC's recommendations.  Almost all the nurses I spoke to agreed with me when I said that if the council was mobilizing its 60,000 members in a unified offensive against the attacks on all workers including nurses they certainly would have heard of it?

I was on this picket line about three years ago as well but the climate has changed for the worse.  No Union can defeat these attacks alone as the bosses are serious about driving us back to the conditions that existed prior to the great struggles of the 1930's and the formation of the CIO.  The problem is that the Union leadership's strategy from the top down is a defensive one, trying to get the employers to be less aggressive and impose slightly reduced cuts.  Their primary goal is to get Democrats in to office and hope they curb the excesses but events have show that this has not worked.  The employers are very confident given that the heads of organized Labor have not shown any serious indication that they might organize a real offensive of our own, of all workers, nurses, Teamsters, public sector workers, Janitors at the hospitals and of course the unorganized.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has shown that if we have the numbers we can defy their anti-Union laws and start down the road to winning a better life for all workers.  The money is there and workers in and outside of Unions have the power to get it.  It's hard to say how this strike will end up but the future is not good if the present strategy is not cast aside for a more aggressive direct action approach and for workers to build our own party independent of the two Wall Street Parties and big business. Unions and decent wages do not attract business and that is the goal of the present political establishment, the Democrats that claim to support workers.  Low taxes and low wages attract business that's why companies move to China.

Nurses are the people that take care of us when we're sick.  Hospitals are not nice places to end up in, it is them that make it bearable for us.  Support them in their struggles against the corporations in the sickness industrial complex business--they deserve it.