Introduction
My name is Nick. I’m a registered nurse here in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the United States. Right now I work in the community. I work with a number of day programs for adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Previously, I was doing some community vaccine work, and before that, I worked in a hospital, at the University of Minnesota, on the West Bank. There I was in the float pool, meaning I was working in five different units, from medical surgeries, to rehab, to our emergency room. I left the hospital a few years ago. It just wasn’t safe, unfortunately. The moral injury was high. I wasn’t able to deliver the kind of care that I felt I needed to deliver to patients. I was a steward within the Minnesota Nurses Association. I’m no longer officially a member of the Minnesota Nurses Association, but I’m still highly active in organizing around labor and keeping track of what’s going on, trying to improve things for nurses. I also have a podcast, Socialist News and Views, that comes out every Thursday here in Minneapolis.
The national health system
I work on contract for a third party company. I work in day-programs that are run by private non-profits. They don’t really have enough work for a nurse for a full time position, which is why I work on contract with different non-profits. This company I work for is run by nurses. They don’t provide benefits or proper contracts, but they try to run the service as well as they can. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we don’t have a well-organized and well-run health care system in this country. It’s very piecemeal. Everything is done in pieces, and we’re seeing more and more of that with the cuts that Trump is making to the little bit of a framework for public funding of health care that we have in this country. This influences the health care system even in Canada, where people are now supposed to call ‘tele-health medicine’ when they have basic issues, but the calls are answered by outsourced workers in the US.
Recent health workers struggles
There was a big strike in 2022, we had 15,000 nurses walking out. That was in the Twin Cities, which is Minneapolis and Saint Paul. It was around staffing. They did win some concessions but there was a push from the union bureaucracy to go back to work. At the beginning, there was a process put in place to try to work on staffing but it didn’t really have any teeth to it. The union then tried to focus on the political level, they had an occupation of the Capitol, but there was no force to it, it ended up being mostly full-time staffers from the union. The rank and file was not properly mobilized. One of the big local players, Mayo Health Care, intervened and said that if the state changes anything to the regulation of staffing, they would leave the federal state. Our governor, Tim Walz, intervened, who was getting a little attention lately because of the things going on with ICE in Minneapolis. Basically he gave Mayo Health Care a carve out. With staffing issues, the most immediate way to address it is in the moment. When I was a steward and I saw that we are massively under-staffed, I sent an email right away and I signed 5 or 10 fellow workers on to it. I would send it to management and say that staffing is not safe.
Migrant workers and protests in Minnesota
As far as migration overall, the number of immigrants in Minnesota is actually significantly smaller than in a lot of other states. I think they said it was like 1% of the population. But we do have a very diverse population. We have the largest Somali population, outside of Somalia, including Somali Americans that were born here. The Somali community has a huge amount of self-organization that has added strength to our movement here against ICE in the Twin Cities, for example amongst Amazon or Uber workers.
ICE is meant to discipline and intimidate a workforce, including plenty of people that aren’t even immigrants like what we said. A judge here stated that the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration had failed to comply with 96 legal requirements. They’re operating well beyond even the law of bourgeois democracy. These are not just workplace raids. They are driving up in the middle of traffic and running somebody off the road and pulling out their guns and breaking their window and dragging them out through the window.
Resistance is forming against this. I can’t overstate the number of normies, or average, regular people, that were getting right into the movement against ICE. We didn’t see that to the same extent during the George Floyd rebellion or Occupy. I saw many people that had never done anything before, really coming out to protest. We need to get rid of ICE and we need to get 4,000 people out of ICE custody. The resistance against ICE is part of daily neighbourhood life. When they say that Alex Pretti was at a protest, that’s actually not true. He wasn’t at a protest. He was right in his own neighborhood, right outside of his own house, defending people in the street that are coming under attack. There’s plenty of people that wouldn’t even go to a protest, but that are out in the streets, defending their own neighborhoods.
At the county medical center they’ve been dealing with a lot of ICE related stuff. ICE brought in people that they had abducted or that they were detaining. There was even a case where they brought a guy to the hospital, and they tried to say that he ran headfirst into a wall on his own. Not surprisingly, the nurses had to dispute that claim because it’s completely nonsensical, as he had multiple blunt force trauma to his head. Health workers on the front-line have to deal with these things, which results in a collective politicisation. I’m a certified public health nurse. I keep saying that ICE has caused a public health crisis. We got people that haven’t left their house in weeks, people hiding out, people not going to school, not going to work.
The general strike against ICE
On the 23rd of January we had a general local strike. On that day 700 businesses closed. These were many small businesses that closed because their employees weren’t going to come to work or because they only had a couple employees or no employees and they wanted to show support. There were 80,000 people in downtown Minneapolis that would have been working that day. That was a pretty significant number. A lot of people have said that it wasn’t really a general strike because the trade unions were not going on strike. There’s some truth to that. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to work with the conditions of American labour laws. So yes, the local transport didn’t shut down, though many people called in sick. And the bigger warehouses kept operating. But there’s a lot of people that are getting a political education, right now, every single day. ICE and the resistance against it has definitely been a point of conversation everywhere. They see that we are having a fascist government.
One of the outcomes of the general strike against ICE is a workers’ assembly. It’s been organized by a number of organizations. We’ve had these worker assemblies before in the past, but I think potentially we have so many new people coming in. Some unions are backing the assembly, like the Communication Workers of America, which is headed by a strong, long time Minnesota activist and organiser. We have the Minneapolis Federation of Educators. We got the DSA. There’s a worker solidarity circle. And the Health Care Workers for Palestine. Building these connections within different healthcare organisations, between nurses and the support staff and between different sectors is going to be hugely important.
This workers’ assembly took place and gathered together 400 workers. Some who are activists in their unions, some who are not in unions, and many who are in political organizations like The Democratic Socialists of America or Black Cat Workers Collective. Discussion was concerned the signing on to an upcoming rent strike being called by tenants organizations and one resolution calling for a “February 27th: Mass Day of Action for Eviction Moratorium.” One resolution that passed was for supporting a “National Day of Solidarity and Care for our Youth” as well as a resolution to endorse National Day of Action on May 1st called by the May Day Strong coalition and to organize for May 1st: No Work, No School, No Shopping in our unions, workplaces and communities.
Here also are the links to the workers assembly packet of information that was made available before the assembly and shared with those who attended. And the minutes from that meeting.
