Canada: Health care workers walkout, demanding N95 masks

Bradford health care workers walkout, demanding N95 masks. Source

Wendy Forrest

Health Care Worker Toronto Canada

It is not only the NHS that is witnessing the deplorable and deadly consequences of decades of underfunding and privatization of all public services.

While Canada’s Medicare system has never been as extensive and comprehensive as the NHS, over decades we have seen the same corporatization of health care, the same underfunding and creeping privatization. Decades ago the federal government abandoned their financial commitment to provinces responsible for providing health care.

In turn the provinces have, rather than push back forcefully, brought down drastic cuts to all public services, primarily to health care base infrastructure funding and service provision.

The dirty hands of philanthropy and corporate funding have been heralded as the answer in many cases, facilitating the withdrawal of base government funding.

Thirty years ago one would be hard pressed to see much evidence of corporate health care funding – now just about every hospital department and newly built hospital in Ontario proudly salutes corporate funding – naming major corporations as proud donors, soon to be owners. Entire buildings are now named after major corporations.

What were once occasional plaques in hospital entrances thanking wealthy donors sector for “charitable” donations – we have entire hospital wings named after wealthy capitalist individuals and corporations.

All of this happening at the same time as outsourcing of essential services such as labs, dietary and cleaning services – to private contractors and cuts to workers wages , working conditions etc.

Public-private partnerships have taken over construction and facility services. What was once the tip of the iceberg has become the base of our health care system.

In the case of the current pandemic – we are seeing the literally deadly results of decades of globalization, neoliberal policies and practices and austerity.

The prevailing mantra of all corporate management, both private and public, is LEAN. This means speeding up of work, extracting more labour from workers, increase surveillance of workers, rationing of care provision, elimination of comprehensive testing and medical procedures, just in time staffing and just in time supplies in order to provide “unnecessary “ stockpiling of supplies in efforts to “eliminate waste”.

Evidence Based Medicine and practice, not in itself bad, has within the current privatization agenda, morphed into a tool that emulates and enforces private insurers methods to restrict treatment and care to meet cost effective goals rather than care based on need.

In the US you see millions of people denied health care not just because of an inability to buy insurance, but related to minimal care coverage.

This seriously threatens the health of workers, unemployed, migrant non-status workers and workers in the gig economy. It virtually eliminates the possibility of poor, homeless and poorly/under-housed receiving health care. Women and radicalized workers and poor individuals and families are left without care, preventative, urgent and emergent.

We are seeing the same things happening in the UK and Canada.

Seniors in private long-term care facilities are dying in great numbers.

Homeless shelters are petrie dishes for infection – as provincial and municipal governments abandon them.

Federal and provincial governments are funding money to employers to keep workers on the payroll, worried sick about the economic disaster looming, rather than to the workers themselves.

Rescuing the same economy that created this crisis is their primary goal.

Health care workers in Ontario like their sisters and brothers are denied proper PPE. The fight for best possible protection for workers on the front line is emerging on the part of the provincial health care unions – but not aggressively enough.

The reality is setting in slowly among all workers on the front line that  “essential workers are becoming sacrificial workers”, that their lives are being put on the front line to rescue the very system that produced the dire, deadly consequences of Covid-19.

So will lessons be learned the hard way – while we maintain hope- hope will do little to bring about change?

It will require a huge and definitive change in the way we perceive ourselves as workers.

It will require a massive change in direction and leadership in our workers’ organization, in our trade unions, to roll back their compliance, their refusal to point fingers at capitalism as the enemy, as the root cause of the deadly effects of this pandemic and to mobilize a strong and effective fight back using every available tool in our toolboxes.

Many say that this pandemic is “uncharted territory ‘ as workers struggle to bring order into this chaos, as they get sick and die on the job- but in reality it is not.

The map has been drawn for decades – it is the refusal to acknowledge the accuracy and refusal to gear up to battle the onslaught of neoliberal practices in late capitalism.

This must occur on a micro level and build towards a major challenge to those who profit. Whether we begin by challenging the “team concept “ in our workplaces and whether we educate on a mass scale the disastrous imposition of LEAN management practices, into health care, education, and social assistance provision.

Whether we support and assist the activists and fighters in our unions to challenge collaboration with private sector and the corporations. Whether we do more than just “grieve “ employer abuses after the fact or become creative in direct action to challenge the onslaught on workers and poor people at home and internationally.

Last but not least would recommend that readers of this blog – check out and follow the work of the California Nurses Association and the NNU as well as Cliff Willmeng’s amazing work on We Do The Work.  Their unveiling of the dreadful realities of health care and health care providers in the US, their analyses from the frontline and willingness to directly challenge the abuses perpetuated on health care workers and patients is inspiring.