Editor’s note: On July 18, a 34-year-old healthcare worker named Pat Meade interviewed with Radio Free Labor about her ongoing strike as a member of the Illinois Nurses Association’s 720-member local in Joliet, Illinois. What follows are notes from her interview.
One of the flashpoints of Joliet’s Illinois Nurses Association July 4 strike was safe working conditions. Nurses are the only ones allowed to do some of the crucial tasks related to patient care such as moving a patient so they can breathe easier. Assistive workers could only do things such as IV’s or retrieve medicines. For this reason, their workplace was unsafe for the patients and themselves when they had to tend to 3, 4, or 5 Covid patients instead of the one Covid per nurse the hospital had agreed to in writing.
The hospital spent more money in their attempt to union bust than to meet the demands, which showed that it was about control of the workers and not money. Only one of the hospitals operated by Amita is unionized and on day one of the strike the nurses’ union was locked out. Lockouts are a retaliatory measure used by employers to keep workers out of the workplace, but is simply a show of hostility when workers have already walked out of the workplace to strike.
Rather than meet the union’s demands for safe working conditions, Amita hired agency nurses at a rate of $65/hour plus hotel accommodations and a charter bus to the hospital. As Pat Meade noted, in her 34 years of nursing, she has never earned that much. This was a union busting effort, not a disagreement in working conditions.
In the end, staffing levels did not see a change when the nurses returned to work on July 22. The union made some gains such as bonuses to union members and 2 percent raises for 2021 and 2022. The union also kept a key benefit known as the Extended Illness Bank, which enables full coverage of healthcare costs experienced by union members. Amita had tried to replace that benefit with a 50% option.
