COVID-19: Nursing Home Staff in the Front Lines. Senior Care at Risk.

Source: Hard hit West Virginia nursing home reporting 28 virus cases

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

I remember being on picket lines back in the 1980’s and 90’s as what was then SEIU local 250 trying to organize nursing home workers. These were, and still are, some of the poorest paid jobs around. I visited a friend in an alzheimers home recently. She didn’t recognize me at all and never even spoke. She was in a room with four other women. I stepped out for a while and when I came back, a patient in another bed had soiled herself. The stench was overwhelming, but cleaning her was a Latino guy and he was treating her with kindness and respect speaking to her softly. Almost all the workers that fed them at lunch were Latino. The scene made me curse the immigrant haters and racists. My friend has since died.

In the present situation, these workers, who have always been “essential” workers no matter what, have not been given the respect or adequate pay for doing such incredible work. In capitalist society, caring for people is not seen as being successful, exploiting them is. Most of these facilities, like US health care as a whole are privatized.

As the Coronavirus gains traction in the US with 83, 507 cases and 1201 deaths as of March 26^th, what is already a very dangerous job has become even more so. And if you don’t think this work is physically demanding, ask them or ask a physical therapist or chiropractor.

Nursing homes are facing drastic staffing problems. One facility, Life Care in Washington lost a third of its staff in three days. Nursing homes face severe understaffing with double or triple the amount of work. Roughly 80% of the care work is done by nursing aides who make around $14 to $15 an hour”, according to the Wall Street Journal.

COVID -19 has been spreading like wildfire in nursing homes with the federal government claiming cases in at least 147 nursing homes across 27 states. And this is occurring as staff are being laid off or quarantined.

Couple with this is the lack of equipment. Nursing homes have reported that they are having difficulty getting, “….masks and other protective equipment to protect workers, as well as prompt testing to confirm cases.” (WSJ).

We are beginning to see resistance from workers in the form of protests and work stoppages. Sanitation workers in Pittsburg PA refused to work without better equipment and are seeking hazard pay. Workers in Contra Costa County, the next county to where I live, have also requested hazard pay. These would be public sector workers. In Australia some workers working for a supplier to a major grocery firm walked off the job with similar complaints.

As always, especially when public sector workers like teachers garbage collectors or health care workers are forced to strike, they are attacked for being greedy and unwilling to serve the people, the nation and all that propaganda from the billionaires' mass media.

In the above case, the head of the Sherriff’s Association and the Firefighters Union opposed it: "This is ridiculous. We are public servants. Serve the public and do your part.", he told the media. Investigators working for the DA also opposed the idea that workers should get hazard pay.

This idea that workers are greedy is a ploy. There will be millions made by the parasitic US ruling class as they take advantage of “good crisis” to use Rahm Enmanuel’s term. The airline CEO’s and their investors, along with their class colleagues in other industries have stashed billions of dollars away through profiting over decades. Many companies asking for money from the taxpayer paid no tax at all. We must reject this phony “public duty” claim when workers ask for more of the pie. 

The workers we are talking about here have served society honorably and with great sacrifice long before this virus hit. So have workers at the DMV, the supermarkets, the transit companies and throughout the industries that provide essential needs of a society. And they have always been abused for it led by the rich folks mass media. How often do people blame workers at the DMV or social services for the delays and lines that are a product of the neglect capitalism imposes on anything public that threatens the lie that the free market is more efficient.

We will see a lot more resistance in the days ahead and when we return to some form of normalcy. It will not be easy take back what they are forced to give in a crisis, a crisis that the market and capitalism is incapable of handling and is in effect, the cause of. How food production, medicine, all important aspects of life are industrialized and based on profit in a capitalist system leads to these crises from the coronavirus, to weather patterns and the most critical of all, climate change.

I was in New Orleans after Katrina, there to support the fight against evictions. and I stated in a FEMA compound as we were under martial law.  While I was there, there were reports of the massive waste as FEMA money (federal emergency funds) was available.  I recall that there were two major garbage companies that got contracts to pick up the waste. It was estimated that Katrina dropped thirty years of waste on the city in three days. The dumps were ill equipped to deal with this. In particular, garbage like fridges and other appliances had to be taken to an environmental facility and it wasn’t equipped either. What one contractor was doing was picking up these items in one neighborhood and dumping them in another but billing for it as collected trash.

The free market and its adherents can’t be regulated especially in times of social crisis like we are experiencing at present.

We must not go back. That’s what this crisis teaches us. The health industry, transportation, energy, the financial industry which also means the allocation of capital, must all be nationalized and taken under public ownership. Bernie Sanders should be calling for this. He is a socialist. He has said that we must ensure that any stimulus, any money that goes out must go to the people who need it, we have to hold them accountable. There is no holding “them” accountable, they are only accountable to the profit god. When there is public money, they’ll get their snouts in that trough.