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West Bank Healthcare Workers Go On Strike

The emergency section of the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah seems too calm for the city’s largest public hospital. Fewer than ten people sit in the waiting hall, the floor tiles still shining clean as an employee mops the floor every five minutes. Inside the emergency hall, four nurses stand behind the central counter, while behind closed curtains, patients lie on beds, some waiting to be transferred to a specialized section or to be seen by the ER nurses. Three of the beds are empty. Abeer, a woman in her forties, comes from behind one of the curtains and exits to the waiting area, where she sits.

On Nakba Anniversary, Health Workers Call For Boycott Of Israeli Medical Association

Seventy-eight years after the Nakba, Palestinians continue to resist occupation, displacement, and the systematic destruction of their health system. In this context, health workers are advancing the struggle with a campaign to boycott the Israeli Medical Association (IMA). The new campaign initiated by Doctors for Gaza (Netherlands), Global Health BDS (UK), Health Workers for Palestine (Spain) and the People’s Health Movement (PHM) is fighting to hold the IMA accountable for neglecting medical ethics, including violations of the World Medical Association (WMA) Declarations of Geneva and Tokyo.

New York City Home Care Workers Announce Hunger Strike On Mamdani’s Watch

New York City home care workers announced Wednesday they will start a hunger strike on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s watch beginning next week if promised City Council legislation ending mandatory round-the-clock shifts in the industry isn’t brought to the floor for a vote. “We have been here for more than a month and we have’t seen the mayor,” home care workers rallying outside City Hall said through an interpreter on Apr. 8. “They all made the promise. We will not wait again. We call on everyone, come back April 13, we continue the sit-in—and April 16 we go on hunger strike!” City Council Speaker Julie Menin [D-5th District] pledged to bring Intro. 303—the No More 24 bill—to the floor for a vote when she met with home care workers on Mar. 19—the second day of their latest sit-in outside the gates of City Hall.

Teamsters Health Care Workers To Picket Hospital For Fair Contract

Chicago, Illinois - University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) health care workers are “drastically underpaid” compared to other hospitals in Chicago, Debra Simmons-Peterson, president of Teamsters Local 743 told People’s World. Simmons-Peterson spoke at a rally Thursday in which hospital workers protested pay rates that don’t reflect the rising costs of living in the Chicago area. The health care workers’ collective bargaining agreement with the medical center expired on March 9. The rally included fellow Teamsters, SEIU Healthcare workers, as well as local pastors, alderpersons, and other elected officials, and the Chicago Federation of Labor.

Kaiser Strike Hits Fourth Week

More than 31,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers remained on strike Monday as the open-ended walkout entered its fourth week, disrupting patient appointments, surgeries and treatments across California and Hawaii. Bargaining teams for Kaiser and workers resumed negotiations after weeks of stalemate, but no agreement appears imminent. This is the latest of a number of major strikes to have roiled Kaiser in recent years, including a 10-week strike by mental health workers in 2022 and a 2023 dispute mediated by the then-U.S. Secretary of Labor.

Kaiser Permanente Strike Expands As Pharmacy, Lab Workers Walk Out

A major strike at Kaiser Permanente entered its third week on Monday, with thousands more workers joining the picket lines to protest what they argue are unsafe staffing levels at the California-based nonprofit giant. More than 3,000 pharmacy technicians, pharmacy assistants and clinical laboratory professionals in Southern California are joining the work stoppage, according to the United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals, which represents nurses and other workers already on strike.

Venezuelan Healthcare Workers Demand Maduro’s Release

Venezuelan healthcare workers marched to the United Nations (UN) headquarters in Caracas on Thursday to demand the release of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores following their kidnapping by US forces on January 3. During the march, nurse Betsy Caraballo emphasized her desire for the president’s return “to continue with his public policies,” particularly those focused on the healthcare sector.  “The empire must release him because this was a kidnapping. He is a constitutional president and the people are calling for his return,” she told reporters.

Health Care Workers Organize To Defend Their Patients From ICE

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have created a crisis in Minneapolis hospitals since escalating anti-immigrant operations in the Minnesota city in early December. Health care workers who spoke to Truthout report that the number of agents in hospitals has risen sharply since the beginning of the year, with ailing or injured detainees regularly brought into emergency departments at multiple city hospitals at all hours, including overnight. Meanwhile, workers told Truthout that those federal agents have intimidated hospital staff and disregarded federal law, medical best practices, and hospital policies, often with limited pushback from hospital administrators.

Health Care Workers Spoke Out For Their Peers In Gaza; Then Backlash

Chandra Hassan, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) College of Medicine, spent three weeks in Gaza in January 2024, treating patients who had survived tank shelling, drone strikes, and sniper fire amid Israel’s ongoing genocide. When Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis came under siege, Hassan and the MedGlobal doctors he was serving with were forced to flee. “We were evacuated when they bombed just across the street from the hospital [and] tanks were rolling in,” Hassan told Truthout. When Hassan returned home to Chicago, he was eager to share his experiences and advocate for an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has killed an estimated 68,000 Palestinians since October 2023.

Michigan’s Labor Revival

Michigan now has a more receptive environment for labor organizing and collective bargaining following the repeal of Right to Work laws within the past few years, and previous failures to retain unions in the private sector, according to a new report from Wayne State University’s Labor Workshop. One area of potential labor growth is in the health care sector, with a recent uptick of union organizing petitions. But the report also noted new challenges and political strain are on the horizon, including budget cuts, unfair labor practices and new anti-labor laws considering signals from federal and state leaders.

Health Workers’ Solidarity With Palestine Practiced On The Ground

In the coming days, dozens of civilian ships will depart from Tunisia, Spain, and Italy as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla – the largest effort yet to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza. On board will be several health activists from the People’s Health Movement (PHM). Among them is Moroccan pharmacist and human rights defender Aziz Rhali. In this interview, physician Juliette Mattijsen, member of PHM Europe’s coordinating group and researcher on planetary health education, speaks with Rhali about his path in the global health movement and his commitment to supporting Palestinian health workers during the genocide.

The Hippocratic Underground: Health Workers Defy Unethical Orders

In 1949, the US psychiatrist Leo Alexander, who had served as a medical adviser to the chief of counsel for war crimes in Nuremberg, issued a warning: “Science under dictatorship becomes subordinated to the guiding philosophy of the dictatorship.” It’s message that health workers in the United States today should heed. Alexander was keenly aware that physicians, far from resisting fascism, had often been its most eager enforcers. Nearly half of all German doctors joined the Nazi Party—double the proportion of any other profession. But Alexander also pointed toward another possibility: When the state or medical institutions make it impossible to fulfill one’s ethical duties, principled health workers find ways to provide care outside the law and beyond hospital walls.

Gazans Go On Hunger Strike In The Midst Of Famine

Wadea Abu Soud, a reporter for Yemen TV in Gaza and father of four, declared his hunger strike on July 20 alongside two of his colleagues. He says his hunger strike is a message to the world about the famine in Gaza, where most families can’t feed their children. “I am a starving journalist who is attempting to convey the suffering of his starving people,” Abu Soud says. Abu Soud is one of a growing number of journalists and first responders in Gaza who have declared that they are going on hunger strike in the midst of a famine. Their demand is that all of Gaza’s children must be fed. “Our voices are reaching the world,” Abu Soud says. “The occupation has failed to launder its lies to the world.”

Union Healthcare Workers Strike Across Minnesota

Minneapolis, MN – On Tuesday, July 8 around 300 registered nurses working at clinics for Essentia Health In Northern Minnesota began an open-ended strike. The nurses are represented by the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) and have filed unfair labor practice charges against their boss Essentia Health. Management is refusing to bargain in good faith with the unionized workers. Two days into the nurses’ strike, on July 10, around 430 MNA members, advanced practice providers (APP), also walked off the job in dozens of locations. These workers began an open-ended strike of their own against Essentia Health.

Health-Care Workers Mobilize Against Massive Medicaid Cuts

“Medicaid! “Saves Lives!” health-care workers chanted in call-and- response outside New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Washington Heights June 23. The overhead passageway between two buildings provided a bit of shade but no protection from the 93-degree heat. “Keep the hospitals open,” called out a woman with “Healthcare Hero” on the back of her shirt, despite the oppressive temps. The rally, a rotating cast of dozens of people in purple 1199SEIU T-shirts, maroon scrubs, and navy-blue mechanics’ gear, and environmental-services workers in sky-blue hair coverings, was one of 11 street actions the union organized in New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley to protest congressional plans to cut close to $1 trillion from Medicaid in next year’s federal budget.
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