Worcester, MA—Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) continue to stand by the 700 nurses and other members of the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), who have proudly been on strike since March 8. Recently this collective passed the 200-day mark, making this the longest strike in Massachusetts history! Party members championed these workers with a bull horn rally at the picket line in front of St. Vincent Hospital and distributed copies of CHALLENGE newspaper. We also created and distributed revolutionary flyers, calling out the hospital bosses for their racist attack on healthcare standards and putting forth that while this historic moment is one to be celebrated, a healthcare system under profit driven capitalism will never serve the working class. We proudly chanted FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM, POWER TO THE WORKERS!
Improper working conditions, Improper patient care
The strike demands are primarily centered around safe staffing ratios (no more than 4 patients per nurse on medical floors) and better patient care. Nurses on the picket line have been drawing attention to the deteriorating quality of healthcare for workers in Worcester and around the country. PLP also made the connection to the deterioration of healthcare for the international working-class.
Like so many capitalist institutions, St. Vincent Hospital is owned by Tenet Healthcare Corporation, a for-profit outfit headquartered in Dallas, TX, which owns 60 community hospitals and 460 other healthcare facilities, including surgical hospitals and imaging centers. They make billions providing substandard healthcare.
Now, in an effort to improve their profit margins, they’ve minimized hospital staff, pay the lowest wages, and bust unions. In fact, Tenet is so determined to break the strike that they have spent over $65 million, including $100 an hour to pay “replacement” nurses (eg. scab nurses hired specifically to break the strike).
Capitalism in crisis robs the working class
The greed of the Tenet bosses is deep and vicious. During the pandemic, Tenet took $2.8 billion of taxpayers money from the CARES ACT in 2020, and then proceeded to lay off and furlough thousands of desperately needed hospital staff as hundreds of thousands of workers were losing their lives to a deadly disease.
As a result of this opportunistic corruption, Tenet has made $500 million in profits since the beginning of the pandemic, while reports from hospital staff revealed that “patients suffered preventable falls and bedsores, dangerous delays in receiving medications and other treatments,” all due to staff shortages (telegram.com).
The money, which now lines Tenet’s pockets was designated to fund the extra expenditures needed during the pandemic. Instead it is being used to pay for scab nurses and police protection, and to assault the working class, both as patients and healthcare workers. Now Tenet, blaming the nurses, has cut back services and 80 inpatient beds, intensifying the Covid-19 surge in Massachusetts.
This is why a capitalist healthcare system that is motivated by profits will never be designed to serve the sick and in-need. The working class must design and call for a healthcare system that puts the health of their fellow class brothers and sisters first. A communist healthcare system in which all workers are encouraged to champion each other and the only compensation is a healthy working class.
The medical monster machine
Tenet, the “Amazon of healthcare,” represents everything that is wrong with profit driven healthcare in the U.S. It treats patients and healthcare workers' lives as expendable, as it boasts to its shareholders about holding three billion in cash - 10 times what it had in 2019, while patients and staff members suffer.
If Tenet is able to crush this strike, it will set a dangerous precedent for reducing staffing ratios across the state and the country.
Over the course of the strike, PLP members and friends have walked the picket line consistently, have called for increased militancy, and exposed the racism and sexism endemic in our healthcare system. The drive to improve profit margins under this racist system has led to far worse outcomes and inhumane treatment for Black and Latin workers.
Community hospitals like St. Vincent, which disproportionately serves Black and Latin workers, has become the testing ground for ever more dangerous cost-saving measures that drag down the quality of healthcare overall, while insurance premiums skyrocket.
The only way to end this attack for good is for the working class to revolt against for-profit healthcare and fight for communism. Under communism, we can prioritize the lives of hospital workers and patients and not the petty greed of a handful of wealthy capitalists.
PLP is calling on other hospital workers, other unions, and particularly MNA unions in other hospitals: to strike in solidarity. Our strikes become schools for communism, teaching the working-class how to fight arm in arm for one another! The fight for safe staffing and conditions in healthcare institutions is all our struggle and our responsibility.  We must rally to ensure these brave working class fighters emerge victorious from this struggle until a communist revolution is on the horizon.