CHICAGO, July 23—Progressive Labor Party (PLP) joined over 100 multiracial hospital workers downtown to protest racist and sexist working conditions promoted by the bosses’ healthcare industry. They led chants and blocked traffic, directly challenging the profit-hungry hospital bosses. This action planted seeds for future revolutionary communist struggle.
Workers organize to confront the bosses
The action was months in the making, organized through the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare local. Our main target was the downtown office of the Illinois Hospital Association (IHA), a powerful lobbying group of hospital bosses from all over the state. These bosses regularly meet to scheme on how to influence local government bosses and collectively agree upon the lowest standards of pay and benefits for hospital workers across the board. These mainly women workers make poverty wages under disgusting working conditions, despite serving and saving patients’ lives every day.
Comrades in working at a nearby hospital have been active in a campaign to unionize with our co-workers, and therefore have been connected with SEIU and were able to help plan this action. Workers decided to include an element of surprise against the IHA. Clearly visible were the hospital workers gathering in front of the IHA’s corporate office to hold a press conference; what the bosses didn’t expect were the workers and organizers on the edges of the lobby inside waiting to strike!
Black workers key to revolution
At the given signal, twenty hospital workers swarmed into the lobby and linked arms in a circle. A PL’er helped lead a mic check in the center of the circle, calling out the IHA for its racist, anti-worker attacks. Some Black women workers issued the collective demands of the hospital workers throughout the city area: a $15 per hour minimum wage, the right to unionize, dignity and respect on the job, and affordable health insurance from the bosses.
The scant building security was unprepared. They tried to break up the protest with intimidation, but the workers just locked arms tighter and chanted louder. The most inspirational moment came when dozens of hospital workers who had been standing outside spontaneously rushed the front doors to completely crowd the lobby and demonstrate working-class solidarity.
The demonstrators then spilled out into the street. They marched across the Adams Street bridge, temporarily blocking traffic. It ended at the nearby Presence Health System corporate office, which despite raking in millions in profits, was recently given a $5.5 million dollar handout in tax money from the racist city council (Chicago Sun-Times, 1/17). These are the same hospital systems that try to claim that they’re broke when workers ask for raises, new equipment, and more staffing!
A woman worker took to the bullhorn to detail the sexist working conditions that she faces while working for Presence Health, including intimidation from the bosses and wage freezes. Personal stories like these really drive home the rotten nature of the capitalist profit system.
Understanding reform limits and revolutionary change
Practically everyone who participated in the action came out of it feeling fired up. It’s important to analyze the balance of forces at play, and what signifies a lasting victory for the working class.
Even at their most militant and progressive, the role of trade unions under capitalism is to negotiate the terms of workers’ exploitation by the bosses, and to put a cap on any workers’ struggles that seek to directly challenge the existence of such an exploitative system. To achieve true workers’ power and an egalitarian society, the struggle needs a revolutionary mass movement led by the communist PLP to completely destroy the profit system.
What’s more, if the bosses were to provide a $15 per hour minimum wage, they would use their state power over the capitalist economy to regain those lost profits through charging more for our living essentials, such as housing, education, and medical care. In other words, what the bosses give up with one hand, they take away with the other.
We will continue to share ideas like these with our working-class sisters and brothers as we build the fight not only against our specific hospital bosses and the IHA, but also against the entire racist and sexist capitalist system. Black and Asian women hospital workers have been among some of the most active and outspoken organizers in the campaigns in which we’ve been involved, reinforcing our Party line that these sections of the working class have always represented a key revolutionary force.
Today, reform may have won. With struggle we will win our class to understand how workers create everything of value, and that communist revolution is the only way to ensure our needs are met.