Healthcare workers

Cops Out Of Our Unions And Hospitals

June 13, 2020 Socialist Healthcare Workers, Left Voice. Resist! Healthcare workers, Police, Police Abolition, Rebellion2020

Over the last few weeks, thousands have spilled onto the streets, joining Black youth who rose up in response to the savage murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless other Black people at the hands of police. Healthcare workers who are on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic are taking part, painting protests across the country with green and blue scrubs, white coats and surgical masks. This condemnation of the police and systemic racism has been expressed through the lens of health care with the words, “Police are a threat to public health.” Over 1,700 healthcare workers signed our statement condemning the racist murder of George Floyd. Actions have been organized in the name of “WhiteCoats4BlackLives” (WC4BL) and “Frontlines for Frontlines.”

Health Workers March To Expose Racism As A Health Crisis

June 11, 2020 Hannah Weinberger, Crosscut. Resist! COVID-19, Healthcare workers, Public Health, Racism

Seattle, WA - Dr. Nkeirika Banda’s phone was vibrating. “I’m scared to check it,” said the HealthPoint family medicine resident. Her mom, who lives in Zambia, is a worrier — and Banda had just sent her family a photo from the intersection of James Street and Sixth Avenue, where she was supporting the Seattle’s Doctors for Justice rally against racism and police brutality. “So I obviously didn't tell her that I was coming [to the protest],” Banda said. Banda and thousands of other health care professionals gathered at 10 a.m. June 6 at Harborview Medical Center in solidarity with Seattle’s Black community.

Health Is A Political Choice

June 11, 2020 The Tricontinental. Create! COVID-19, Health Care, Healthcare workers, Human Rights

In the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25 offers an expanded vision of what it could mean to be a human being. Human beings, it notes, have ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being’. This includes ‘food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services’; human beings also have the ‘right to security’, which means they have the right to compensation for any lack of livelihood due to circumstances beyond their control. Little of this vision has come to pass for the majority of the world’s people. What workers’ movements and anti-colonial movements have been able to gain in the past hundred years has been chipped away at by a regime of austerity that cuts public funds for the right to health and well-being, that sells the right to provide these services for profit to the private sector, and that therefore cheapens human rights into commodities that remain outside the reach of those without sufficient income.

Healthcare Workers: From ‘Heroes’ To Targets Of Police Repression

June 9, 2020 Take Back the Bronx and FTP4 Medics, Left Voice. Resist! COVID-19, Healthcare workers, New York City (NYC), Police abuse

We healthcare workers were arrested and prevented from assessing many protesters with serious injuries who were cuffed on the ground crying for help, some visibly bleeding. Police informed us they had their own medics but had only two FDNY EMTs to triage a crowd of more than a hundred people. Police also refused to allow us to help people whose hands were zip-tied and visibly purple, only loosening ties on one protester, borrowing our shears. After detainees – who were prevented from even shouting their names and identifying information to legal observers nearby – were packed into jail cells scattered across multiple boroughs, the NYPD then followed protesters offering jail support, again including medics and legal observers with the correct documentation, to their vehicles where they again arrested essential workers for “curfew violation.”

Medical Workers Die-In To Protest Police Brutality

June 7, 2020 Ben Verde, Brooklyn Paper. Resist! COVID-19, Healthcare workers, Public Health, Systemic Racism

New York - Hundreds of medical workers at SUNY Downstate staged a die-in on Thursday to protest police brutality and the health disparities that affect black Americans. Emergency medical residents and other hospital staff kneeled or lay on the ground for eight minutes and 46 seconds — the amount of time former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of 46-year-old George Floyd, killing him. “I can stand here as a brown, female, immigrant physician with a loud voice — and I can do this because of the sacrifices made by black people a long time ago,” said Dr. Smruti Desai, an emergency medical resident. “It is our turn to fight for them.” While hundreds of staff at the central Brooklyn hospital — which serves a predominately black patient population — kneeled or lay on the ground, speakers read aloud the names of victims of police violence.

Public Health Experts Say Pandemic Is Why Protests Must Continue

June 7, 2020 Shannon Palus, Slate.com. Resist! COVID-19, Healthcare workers, Public Health, Rebellion2020

There has been a lot of concern on how the protests over the past several days may produce a wave of coronavirus cases. This discussion is often framed as though the pandemic and protests in support of black lives are wholly separate issues, and tackling one requires neglecting the other. But some public health experts are pushing people to understand the deep connection between the two. Facing a slew of media requests asking about how protests might be a risk for COVID-19 transmission, a group of infectious disease experts at the University of Washington, with input from other colleagues, drafted a collective response. In an open letter published Sunday, they write that “protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported.”

Why The Neoliberal Agenda Is A Failure At Fighting Coronavirus

June 3, 2020 Richard D. Wolff, Brave New Europe. Educate! COVID-19, Healthcare workers, Neoliberalism, PPE

The utter failure of private capitalism to prepare for the coronavirus should have surprised no one. Private capitalism, as business school graduates repeat, focuses on profit. The “profit incentive,” they learn, makes private capitalism the superior, “most efficient” economic system available. That is its “bottom line” and “chief goal.” The problem is that to produce adequate numbers of testing components, masks, gloves, ventilators, hospital beds, etc., and then to store, secure, monitor, maintain and demographically stockpile them were not and are not privately profitable businesses. A private capitalist producer of those goods would have to wait, perhaps a long time, for them to become marketable. The risk is great, the future price unknowable, and profitability hard to count on.

Health Care Workers Call On Labor Movement To Take Action

May 30, 2020 Left Voice. Organize! Healthcare workers, Labor Unions, Police abuse, Systemic Racism

As health care workers, we condemn the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers as an act of racist violence. We condemn the murder of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police officers as an act of racist violence. We condemn the murder of Tony McDade by Tallahassee police officers as an act of racist violence. Their killings are just a handful of countless examples of police brutality responsible for the early deaths of many Black people in the United States. Black people are three times more likely than white people to die by police violence. As health care workers, we witness first-hand how widespread racist police brutality harms Black and brown people. We understand the anti-Black, racist origins of the institution of policing, initially created to patrol and entrap people who had escaped enslavement.

40 Million Health Workers Endorse Green Recovery

May 29, 2020 Olivia Rosane, Ecowatch. Create! Global Recession, Green New Deal, Healthcare workers, Pandemic

More than 40 million doctors and nurses are in, and they are prescribing a green recovery from the economic devastation caused by the new coronavirus. More than 350 health organizations representing some 40 million medical professionals, as well as more than 4,500 individual health workers from 90 countries, signed a letter to the G20 leaders Tuesday urging them to craft what they are promoting as a #HealthyRecovery by taking measures such as reforming fossil fuel subsidies and fighting pollution and deforestation. "A truly healthy recovery will not allow pollution to continue to cloud the air we breathe and the water we drink," the health professionals wrote. "It will not permit unabated climate change and deforestation, potentially unleashing new health threats upon vulnerable populations."

Frontline Healthcare Workers Are Becoming Socialists

May 26, 2020 By Igor Krasno, Révolution Permanente. Strategize! Anti-capitalism, COVID-19, Healthcare workers, Socialism

As the current Covid-19 pandemic spread throughout the country, healthcare workers again witnessed how the for-profit healthcare system, along with the capitalist economic system, was unable to respond. Frontline workers, already putting their lives at risk, were being more exposed due to lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies that should never be in shortage, especially in a country that allows an individual with a net worth of over $100 billion to exist. Hospitals, already short-staffed due to years of “cost-saving” measures, were near collapse from the influx of patients. This helped to further expose the system and drive healthcare workers to action. As they say, “the boss is the best organizer.” Nurses and other healthcare workers began organizing actions calling attention to the lack of PPE and other supplies in their hospitals. These actions then led, in some cases, to larger critiques of the for-profit healthcare system and the economic system as a whole.

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