There is a lot to learn from the development of the health sector in the USA. The process of commercialisation is more advanced, some technological and scientific trends are more pronounced and, most importantly, the struggle between employers and health workers is more intense. Over recent months we have spoken to nurses in California and Minnesota and a medical engineer. Below you can find a write up of a conversation with a nurse from Chicago. Read about the struggle against department closures, about the influence of wildcat actions by graduates within the university hospital, the 2019 nurses strike and much more…
Introduction
My name is John Hieronymus. I’m a registered nurse at the University of Chicago Medical Center, which is a large, university research hospital. The hospital continues to expand into multiple offsite clinics. We have an international reputation as a center for cancer research as well as organ transplantation, in particular. We have patients coming for treatment from all over the world. But we’re also a community hospital. We are in the South Side of Chicago, which is, basically in the center of what we call a medical desert, because of various austerity measures, hospital and clinic closures since the 1980’s. The nearest public hospital is Provident, which is part of the Cook County Health System and has had its services severely restricted by the Cook County commission. The famous Michael Reese Hospital was shut down here about 15 or 20 years ago because of a Medicare fraud case perpetrated by the medical administration. Finally the next closest hospital is called Jackson Park Hospital, which is a small community hospital that has very limited resources.
The University of Chicago is the first unionized facility I’ve ever worked at. I started as a nursing assistant in a nursing home, back in 2003. I started working in nursing homes and then moving into something called long term acute care, which is like a long term vent rehab and wound care hospital. Then I got my LPN, which is a licensed practical nurse certificate, which is a one year certificate program, working in acute care and then in hospices. We moved to Chicago at that point, where I started working as an agency nurse, doing home hospice care. I was filling in for nurses who either couldn’t or wouldn’t travel to certain parts of the city. So I went to the underdeveloped, underfunded neighbourhoods of Chicago to provide care to patients and their families who otherwise would not receive care. Then I got my associate’s degree from a nursing school in the City College system. So in America, you can be a registered nurse with two years of education. My first job as a registered nurse was at a community hospital on the southwest side of Chicago, again in a medical desert called Holy Cross Hospital. I worked in the emergency department there for two and a half years, and finally couldn’t do that anymore. It was just a very intense place to work. There were a very high number of strokes and people who had been shot or stabbed – then we had to package them up and get them to higher levels of care.
So I moved to the University of Chicago around 2011 to work in the medical ICU in respiratory critical care. So it’s patients on ventilators, often with hospital acquired infections. It was a unit where for many of the patients there, no surgical intervention was going to change their course, or they were suffering side effects from treatments that were destroying their quality of life. Because of this situation we were therefore what is considered an underfunded and understaffed teaching unit. In most hospitals in the United States, the funding for the unit is based on how much money the patients bring into the institution, because many of the patients were costing the hospital money, our unit would be chronically understaffed. Not only are the patients not bringing in a lot of money, but they often are there for extended periods of time. For example, many of our patients would be on full life support, on continuous dialysis machines, ventilators and multiple vasopressor drugs. So we were a kind of catch-all for the rest of the hospital. So I did that for six and a half years. Finally I could not work there anymore because of burnout and exhaustion. You can only leave a unit crying so many times before you got to go on to something else. So I was thinking about becoming a nurse practitioner. I got into a masters program and then shifted into the perioperative care area.
Now I work in surgical prep and recovery, and specifically, in the PACU, the peri anesthesia care unit. Everyone who works in our unit is a critical care nurse. So we’ve all worked in ICUs for a number of years before we were able to transfer into our area. That means that our main focus is on the first hour to maybe six hours after surgery, ensuring that patients are safe, that they recover from anesthesia, that the surgeons haven’t left patients in unstable conditions after surgery. Our main job is to keep an eye out for surgical or anesthesia complications.
University of Chicago is now a level one trauma center. That wasn’t always the case. I think the adult trauma center was reopened in 2015, after an immense pressure campaign by the community, as well as members of my nurses’ union. It had been a trauma center until the 1980s when Michelle Obama, when she was a member of the administration of the University, shut it down for cost savings. So we do everything from elective same day surgeries, a lot of joint replacements, knees and hips, to biopsies and diagnostic tests, pacemaker, various sorts of cardiac interventions and solid organ transplantation and trauma cases. The University of Chicago is the busiest trauma center for penetrating trauma in the entire United States, meaning, trauma from violence, like stabbings and shootings. This was something that we weren’t quite aware of until the Defense Department started a special program. They’ve decided that the University of Chicago is the closest you can come to practicing battlefield medicine in the US.
Currently we have around 30 theatres in the adults operating rooms. Yeah. We also have two adjacent buildings. One is our pediatric hospital, which I believe has between 4 and 8 operating theaters. And then we also have an outpatient clinic, which is called DCAM, which is almost exclusively same day surgeries. So it’s a high turnaround, high volume area of the hospital, where all of our cataracts come for joint repairs as opposed to joint replacements. They have around 12 operating rooms. So that’s around 50 operating rooms in total, across all buildings.
The union
I believe right now we have 2,500 nurses in our bargaining unit. Not every nurse at the university is in the union. There’s a very small group of nurse educators outside the union, and the campaign to bring them into the union failed. In total we are around 15,000 employees, which would include all of the resident doctors and interns which just joined a union at the university, called the CIR – the Council of Interns and Residents, as a part of SIEU healthcare. We have support staff like our transporters, our unit secretaries, our pharmacy technicians, who are all organised into a Teamsters Local, a different trade union. Our engineers, maintenance workers and ground keepers are organised within the SEIU trade union, they had a strike last summer. Then there are several other smaller groups, like our nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists, respiratory therapists, surgical techs etc. who are not in the union.
I’m in the California Nurses Association, which is also known as National Nurses United, but California Nurses Association is the largest part of that union. They do have nurse anesthetists and nurse practitioners in that union, but this is more a result of a legacy, not because of a current strategy of the union. Union staff give us many excuses why they don’t want to organize a campaign to bring in auxiliary nurses into our bargaining unit, even though it would make the union at our hospital more powerful. So you cannot become a member if you are not a registered nurse. The staff who run the union think power comes from nurses being a moral force in society, because the public trusts registered nurses more than any other group of workers, rather than from the ability to disrupt the normal hospital operations.
The nurses in our union in California were at the forefront of rehabilitating strikes as a tool for winning stronger contracts and providing a basis for state level reforms, with laws regarding nurse- patient ratios – how many patients an individual nurse can have. That transformation of our union began in the 1990s. And because of that transformation, nurses in California have the highest pay in the United States and better working conditions and shorter hours. The center of power in my union is the Kaiser hospital system. Those nurses have been able to achieve things like the ability to go on solidarity strikes. If they vote to strike in solidarity with other groups of workers, they can. Inside of the trade union system, that’s a really powerful step towards where unions should be in the United States. As they were reorganizing themselves from a professional organization including managers into an actual union, they were able to pull off many strikes and their strikes were very powerful and well organized. They also engaged in extralegal direct actions, including occupying the California State House. They were able to push through reforms like no other group of healthcare workers in the US has been able to. It’s not uncommon for nurses in California to work four eight hour shifts a week, which is 32 hours, and still make substantially more money than nurses who are working 36 hours here in Chicago – it’s like a 20 to 30% wage difference.
For example, in 2022, nurses at Sutter Health in Oakland California were able in 2022 to enforce a 30% wage increase across their bargaining unit. And workers there had the feeling that they could have achieved more, for nurses in their hospital system but in smaller less well organized hospitals that they could have changed working conditions, if there hadn’t been obstructions from the union staff who seemed to be colluding with management. That was after five separate strikes. And then, several of the nurses joined me and another group of nurses in our union to actually mount the first independent challenge to our union’s leadership. The minute all of our applications to run for union elections hit, literally the next day the Sutter Health nurses got this settlement that they were told they could never, ever get. As soon as the union leaders were challenged they somehow managed to get a better settlement.
Decertification campaign to change our union from INA to CNA-NNU
My union here in Chicago, we were not part of the California Nurses Association until 2010, I think. At the time there was an increasing pressure on the nurses in our hospital in terms of worsening relations between management and nurses, increased workloads, worsening working conditions. We were part of what’s called the Illinois Nurses Association. People thought the Illinois Nurses Association was not up to the task of being able to organise strikes, while the California Nurses Association was looking to expand outside of California.
The prelude to the strike started before I got my job at University Chicago Hospital. A group of rank and file nurses decided that they wanted to shift over to the California Nurses Association and National Nurses United. I believe there were two contract campaigns, prior to our strike in 2019. The first campaign coincided with the change from one union to the other, which is a complicated process. A decertification campaign can end in you losing your union entirely if it’s not handled well or if there’s not a lot of genuine support for moving into the new union. During the first campaign after decertification, there was a strike vote with nearly unanimous authorization. The bargaining committee was given an offer. I was part of the organizing, but only peripherally because I was still so new to the hospital. Our union has a strategy of recruiting activists, but keeping them on a short leash because our union is not a particularly democratic union outside of things like strike votes. Inside any hospital above a certain size, there’s always going to be nurses who have a certain sort of political orientation. And that might be liberal, it might be more socialist or communist or anarchist. Our union depends on having a base of these activist nurses who are willing to do anything because they believe in the principle of unions. As an activist it was expected that I take my free time to advocate for the union or do activist things for the union that aren’t necessarily where our power lies. I was one of these activists, going out and doing things like showing up at protests, helping bring nurses outside the union into our union by NLRB campaigns or organising various events to represent the union. Our first strike vote passed around 2014. There haven’t been any strikes or strike votes by Chicago nurses since the 1970s, perhaps even 1960s.
The struggle to re-open the trauma centre
In 2015 a local group started a campaign against the closure of the trauma centre, they were called STOP, South Siders Together Organizing for Power. They are an NGO that does tenant organizing work and kind of community advocacy work. They started a campaign to build pressure on the university to reopen the trauma center. This was around the time when there were some very large Black Lives Matter protests in Chicago, some of which actually got quite disruptive by blocking highway traffic and disrupting the main commercial district of Chicago. Our union also got involved. I participated in some of the pickets. It’s not a universally valued thing. There’s a sense that opening the trauma center makes our job more dangerous. Which is probably true. The university is an active participant in the power structure of the city of Chicago and it has one of the largest private police forces in the United States. They are notorious in the community, there’s an interaction between police violence and community violence. The people who have suffered from gun violence or interpersonal violence, when they come to the hospital, there are police officers. The police officers don’t mitigate the risk of violence coming into the hospital, the opposite is true. In 2023 there was an altercation in our surgical ICU, with family members getting into a fist fight, and one of the family members dropped a pistol on the ground, a loaded handgun. Then another family member, probably thinking they were being helpful, scooped the gun up and slammed it down onto the nurse’s station counter and a nurse snapped a picture of it. We put that on the flier and put it up outside where the president of the university lives and we were handing out fliers at the university, saying that the university cares more about making money than it does about the safety of its own workers and the community.
Some people don’t want to come to work to take care of people who have been shot or stabbed or almost beaten to death. They want to take care of everyone else. There’s a kind of a notion of deserving patients versus undeserving patients. That is not a universal sentiment, but it’s not an uncommon sentiment. But the actions for the reopening continued and there were various banner drops in support of the campaign and then, when the Black Lives Matter movement really kicked off in Chicago, the political and community pressure for the university to reopen was high enough. Then after the trauma center was reopened, they started collaborating with the army, with military health care workers, who use the cases to build the institutional knowledge around treating the after effects of violence. We said that if we’re such a valuable resource for the Defense Department, what are they doing to make sure that our emergency room is staffed the right way. We reopened the trauma center, but then they deliberately maintained barriers to care in our emergency room by chronic understaffing, because the emergency room is where the majority of people come who can’t pay. Lord help you if you show up in our emergency room as an adult at a certain time, you might not be seen for 12 hours if at all.
The graduate workers movement
The University of Chicago isn’t just a medical center, it’s also a large research institution. They have a base of graduate workers who are doing research, teaching assistants and other types of university workers. During the time before the 2019 strike, they were in the process of trying to have a union recognized. There was an enormous amount of organizing happening on campus to make that happen. As we were ramping up our own organizing in 2018, the grad workers, their organisation is called Graduate Students United, organised several wildcat walkouts and work stoppages on campus because they didn’t have a recognized contract and therefore no ‘no strike’-clauses.
As someone who lives near the hospital, I could watch grad workers do walkouts, which was really exciting. It’s incredibly exciting to watch a thousand workers just walk off the job. As someone who’s been a part of the neighborhood and trying to build worker power on the South Side, Chicago, for us the University of Chicago is the 21st century equivalent of a steel mill, it’s the largest employer. It’s how big it is and how many people work there and how much capital it accumulates. It’s like it’s pulling money in that generates all these things like gentrification and police violence. As the grad workers were doing walkouts, an active member of our union and I started building connections with them. ‘What can we do to support them and their work?’ That’s when we started the Chicago Labor Council, where we started talking to each other about what our shared issues were. And it’s remarkable at a large research university how similar the concerns are across areas, across diverse work areas, because we all have the same boss. It shouldn’t be surprising, but when you actually see it for the first time, it is. One other piece of context is that the university had brought in a chief nursing officer whose claim to fame was crushing a union drive at the Cleveland Clinic, which is another large research and teaching hospital. She had sold herself to the board of directors as someone who was going to basically crush our union finally. So we’re seeing increasing retaliation against workers, increased discipline, unilateral attempts to change work by management outside of the contract.
The 2019 strike
In 2018, at the beginning of bargaining they offered us another 0% wage increase, which just infuriated people. We started organising, I was part of the facility bargaining council. Every unit was supposed to send people to this bargaining council to discuss what our demands are and so on. Counterintuitively, their efforts to run an organised union busting campaign during that campaign really upset people. The union would call for a picket, and instead of having 20 or 30 or 50 nurses show up, they’d have like 200 nurses show up and people were getting way more involved than they had been in the previous contract campaigns. So we had this coinciding rise of worker militancy outside of the medical center, but for the same employer, things like grad workers’ wildcats were happening and in our own bargaining unit management was throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest. Then we voted to authorise a strike and it was a 96% or 98% strike authorization vote.
In our union there are not many shop stewards who organise day-to-day cases – there is a larger number of activists, but they mainly get mobilised to protests or events. Then we have the bargaining committee. It’s usually around 20 nurses. We had one bargaining committee member from our unit, who represented the perioperative nurses. That would be everybody from the operating rooms to the recovery, the prep and recovery areas across all areas, from pediatrics, across outpatient and across adults. That’s 1% representation on the bargaining committee itself. And the bargaining committee isn’t directly elected by the rank and file, but by the facility bargaining council. Only to the facility bargaining council you get nominated by your coworkers. In the facility bargaining council there would be closer to like 200 workers. The facility bargaining council tends to be more like a transmission belt for information. It’s very informal and I have seen it being manipulated to get outcomes that the union staff want. The union insists on majority strikes, because scabbing is a major issue. Strike ballots typically have to have 70% to 80% nurses voting, with 80% to 90% in favour of strike. It is not a ‘from the bottom up’ delegate system. The facility bargaining council will have us vote and we will put together our bargaining surveys that we put out to members. The bargaining committee takes these surveys into account, but in the end they treat their decisions as a ‘take it or leave it’ kind of thing.
The university reacted by offering a deal – before that the university had gotten into the habit of offering basically 0% raises to nurses. Until I worked at University of Chicago and joined the union I think the only raise that I ever got as a nurse was like 25 or 50 cents at a time. With inflation that’s essentially a pay cut. So nurses wanted to strike, first because of how our top management treated us like shit, second because the hospital wanted to offer us no raises. Nurses voted to strike in the summer of 2019, with a strike authorization vote over 95%, with 2/3rds of our nurses voting. The hospital threatened to lock us out for 5 days in addition to our 1 day strike. Because healthcare workers don’t have full union rights we legally have to give a 10 day notice for the hospital to bring in scabs. We struck in the first nurses strike in Chicago in 50 years, and 1500 nurses came to our picket lines, far more than the union staff or management expected. To come into a workplace and get regular 2% and 3% raises every year was like a big change for me and most nurses. After the strike we voted again to authorize a 2nd work stoppage, with over 80% in favor and a super majority turnout during one of the coldest days of the year. Because of how disruptive the first strike had been, the hospital offered us a 18% pay package which was the best raise we had gotten for years, but part of that contract also involves the introduction of wage tiers for the very first time. We had a very generous night shift differential of 20% and management basically said, you can’t have that anymore for new hires. Only nurses who had it prior, were able to keep it. These tiers, which are basically wage divisions between old and new workers, have been a problematic feature of workplaces since the 1980s. At General Motors the UAW finally got rid of tiers with their last strike. That was a huge win for all workers in the United States. So the fact that at a time when nurses militancy was rising, our union was willing to accept tiers at a hospital that had never had tiers was upsetting some people, but the contract was ratified with like 80 something percent of nurses voting in favor.
Scab workers in healthcare and management’s reaction to the strike
There is a ten days notice period that unions legally have to adhere to. Once that authorization hit, the university started moving pediatric patients out and we started closing down parts of the hospital. They also tried to bring scabs in for training. At any given time there’s a pool of about 30,000 scab nurses in the United States. So there’s hiring agencies. Agencies are widely used, there are units where the staffing has become so bad that the entire hospital or like entire units will be staffed with almost exclusively agency nurses or travel contract nurses. Those travel nurses are brought in not on a shift by shift basis like agency nurses, but they’ll be signing a contract for like one month, anywhere from one month to three months. They’ll travel from anywhere in the United States. Nursing licenses are state by state, but there’s a nursing compact which includes about 26 states where they’ve all agreed that if you get licensed in Indiana, you can work in Georgia, or you can work in Kentucky. Our state, Illinois, is not part of the nursing compact. This means that when nurses come in from out of state, the governor has to declare an emergency and authorize that, or alternatively, those nurses already have to have Illinois licenses, which they often have. Then you have a smaller pool of nurses who regularly travel to hospitals that are on strike, because they get paid or they get promised that they’re going to get paid a lot of money. Between 10,000 and 20,000 USD for a week. We often call limited strikes, a strategy that was devised by the California Nurses Association. If you have a series of limited strikes, you can create the same amount of disruption as one long extended strike without the risk that everyone’s going to get fired and replaced. Those scab nurses have groups and they are on Facebook talking to each other. People talk about how they can’t wait to come up here and make all this sweet money in Chicago. The goal of the institution during a strike, on the other hand, isn’t to run the hospital the way it’s normally run. The goal is to keep the doors open and show that the strike hasn’t permanently affected operations. Here it makes a difference whether a facility is a private facility or a state facility. In state facilities, management will seek legal injunctions that say that certain units are not allowed to strike. It’s usually the emergency room and the ICUs. The private institutions will also try and get injunctions, but judges are usually a lot less generous with management. At our hospital in 2020 they were, they were not able to win that injunction. But there’s always rumors that they’re going to make us work in critical care areas. As a union we publicly state that the entire bargaining unit will be on strike and there will be people on the picket line who are on call. If there’s a real emergency, in an ICU for example, then someone will go in for that unit, solve the emergency, and then come back out.
When we actually went on strike, the way that the university management reacted was that they wouldn’t let people cross a picket line. They consider it like a punishment for going on strike. So for our strike in 2019 we authorized a one day strike and then the university locked us out for a week. They did that because of the way the scab system works. They can’t promise a scab nurse one day’s worth of work, they have to promise at least a week’s worth of work. And when that happened, we weren’t on picket lines. We weren’t outside the hospital. We were told to basically go home and don’t worry about it. I guess the union strategy is to show that university bosses are willing to keep you away from your patients by locking nurses out for a week. That’s a strategy to turn public opinion against management. But longer lockouts are also an issue of the institutional resources, because they cost money. My hospital is a multi-billion dollar hedge fund that happens to take the form of a hospital that keeps the hedge fund going. They have very deep pockets. If they want to spend 10 or 20 million USD for staffing for a strike, then they’re willing to do that. The thing is that there’s a limited number of people who are willing to cross that picket line, and so they can’t lock us indefinitely out because at an institution like the University of Chicago, the doctors who do the surgeries that actually make the money for the institution will start leaving. To give another example, the nurses with the highest wages in the United States are in my union, they make up to 200,000 USD a year. They’re at Stanford and they have an independent nurses’ union called the Stanford Nursing and Nurses Association. Those nurses will strike indefinitely and usually by the seventh or eighth day of the strike, the surgeons start threatening to leave. And once the surgeons start leaving, that’s the game.
The strategy to strike only for a single day was enforced with some scaremongering: what can happen if you go on an indefinite strike. The union used an example of a strike of nurses in Minnesota, 2 or 3 years prior, at a smaller hospital. Those nurses did an indefinite strike and were on the picket lines for 2 or 3 months. People had to go into soup kitchens and stuff and they didn’t get a good contract. There’s another kind of famous example. It’s called Saint Vincent in Massachusetts. Those nurses authorized an indefinite strike and they ended up in a similar place. They basically all got replaced by scabs. The strike was called off after 2 or 3 months. It was really long and really bitter. And then many people quit, and the nurses who came back in were talking to these new scab nurses, and a scab was like: “Man, you know what? This place could do with a union!” The problem is that the union strategy is determined by the director of bargaining who’s never been a nurse. He tells you how to strike and what you will be able to win – and that is determined without any transparency at all and no democratic input. The more you know about it, the more infuriating it becomes. Most people don’t have the emotional energy to find out all this stuff, because we’re all already doing a very hard job that’s emotionally draining and we have our normal, hard 21st century neoliberal American lives.
Apart from moving pediatric patients and getting scabs in, management started attacking us in the press as greedy nurses. I think the reason why we ended up going on strike fairly quickly is because the union saw that our information picket had gone from being a 20 to 30 person affair to like a to 300 nurses showing up on their days off. Plus the clinic nurses, who hadn’t been in a union, threatened to strike over recognition at the same time. Our strike happened, and then we had the lockout. The thing about the strike that was really amazing was that out of the 2,200 nurses, 1,500 hundred nurses showed up at various points on that day. It was more like a party because you never get a chance to get together, it was like a reunion. You get to meet all the people that you’ve used to work with, you haven’t seen in years. It’s like a festival, coworkers showing up with their own instruments and their own picket signs and all this stuff. And it was really a lot of good energy. As the day went on, a summer day, we started getting more frisky. So we start blocking streets and trying to block the supply ramps. They were only able to bring in 2 to 300 nurses. They also brought in additional auxiliary staff, like nursing assistants. The scab agency called Huff Master had their own security team. The security people were dressed up like stormtroopers, looking like fascists. On the morning of the strike, they marched the people from the morning shift out like prisoners or criminals. It was really upsetting. Then there was an effort to reach potential scab nurses in their respective federal states, places where we think that they should be in unions. We dropped literature on hospitals to make sure that potential scab nurses could see how much more money they could be making if their hospital was unionised.
The union avoids antagonising the scabs, but me and my coworkers were very excited about antagonising the scabs, because these people are going on to social media talking about how great it was that they’re going to make all this money and how much we suck. They bring them in in these big and very nice coach buses. They’ve got it all arranged. The police are trying to shield the scabs from us. So me and about 50, 60 nurses, we all got together and found out where all the scabs were being loaded and unloaded at the shift change. We stayed there and we’re shouting and singing and trying to do our best. Nurses can be intimidating, you know. There were some of the sweetest coworkers screaming their lungs out at these people. A lot of these people, who already know that what they’re doing isn’t the best thing in the world, didn’t show up the next day. It was considered a disaster for the hospital in terms of PR. In the lead up to the strike people were afraid to show support for the strike or talk to the press, but when you have 1,500 of your coworkers all there at the same time you dare to speak openly about why you were on strike. That was important because it was the first time nurses had struck in Chicago in decades. When we struck, apparently within days the union started getting flooded with people asking “what can I do to get a union”. There are multiple hospitals that are in the union now because our strike happened. We also encouraged other hospitals to go on strike, for example nurses at UIC authorized their first strike, and they’re still in the Illinois Nurses Association. The nurses at Cook County authorized their first strike. There is this wave of strikes going through 2020. I don’t think enough people understood that this was the first time such a wave happened.
The health care assistants and other workers who could not join the strike were enthusiastically supporting us, they were looking at what we were doing as an example that they wished they could have followed. There were people who called in sick on strike day. There’s no obligation to do that, because if someone is on strike, you are not obligated to cross a picket line and you can refuse to go into work. It’s considered, legally protected, concerted activity amongst workers. A lot of these workers were hoping that when their contract negotiations came along, they would be able to follow our lead. Unfortunately, the leadership of the Teamsters are even less democratically responsive than our union. This is prior to the campaign that unseated the old leadership of the Teamsters. Our Teamster local is considered to be part of the old guard still.
Healthcare worker militancy after the 2019 strike at University of Chicago
Our strike also inspired workers in other sectors. The 2019 Chicago teachers strike happened about a month after our strike and nurses were out supporting the CTU, there were connections and movements. At the same time my union is not like the CTU, which is much more democratic. Their House of delegates is a very active and inclusive democratic body. My union’s staff don’t want us to be too involved with each other. There’s a known tension between CTU and our union, or at least there was up to a point. There is a lot of local competition about who is the progressive union in town. I and other nurses spoke at the 2019 CTU strike rallies and we used the Labor Council to build a really robust local support for their picket lines. That had never happened before. And we were able to pull together, from all of our work organising across the campus, a mass demonstration in our neighborhood, which also had never happened before. We had three separate snake marches, completely unpermitted. Chicago police panicked, trying to cut us off with their cars when people were taking over the commercial district in our neighborhood. It ended in a big rally outside of one of the high schools. That sort of stuff could only have happened, because we had built the rank and file organization that we had in the neighborhood prior to that strike. Following that we had a Mayday action. It was attended by all the different unions coming together. And we marched through the medical center campus and the university campus as workers. It was hundreds of us, and it was a powerful moment for us all to come together, a tradition that carried on for a few years afterwards.
Our last contract campaign wrapped up in early 2024. We ended up getting a 24% wage package, which was like the largest wage package we’d ever gotten. We’d authorised a strike. It was another one of those 95 plus percent voting in favour. The university offered 24% and the bargaining committee accepted it without strike. Some of my co-workers said “I can’t wait for the next strike. I just can’t wait for it”. Since the strike in 2019 we have had 50% turnover at least, so only half of the current workers had that experience. Going through that process, and seeing how the union works from the inside, and learning about how other more democratic unions work are some of the reasons why I got involved with union reform work inside my union. So I helped set up a rank and file reform organization inside of our union called Shift Change, we ran the first rank and file challenge to California Nurses Association/National Nurses United leadership in the history of the union.
Further reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_trauma_center_campaign
https://chicagomaroon.com/26175/news/hundreds-graduate-students-participate-pro-unioniz/
https://chicagomaroon.com/26906/news/university-chicago-labor-council-draws-crowds-may/
https://inthesetimes.com/article/healthcare-workers-strike-university-illinois-chicago
https://www.shiftchangennu.org/
https://strangematters.coop/national-nurses-united-shift-change-interview/
