Fertile Ground for Union Fun
Workers at Starbucks and Ascension Should Join the U.S.’s Burgeoning Labor Movement
In a city and state with a strong socialist history it is likely that a growing number of workers with the means are seeking to unionize and join other localities in a growing U.S. labor movement.
Since the pandemic nurses (see for example National Nurses United) have been involved in labor action to protect their workers and gain power back from management or from the state (which could be city, county, state, and federal). Sources such as The Guardian, Jacobin, The Lever, shows that workers at Starbucks, and other retail/restaurant workers are joining with peers in the press industry, the rail labor industry, and other sectors of the health care industry to demand a just pay and better working conditions — like paid sick days off for starters.
Milwaukee with hoards of Starbucks and Ascension health care services, opportunity abounds for union action. But that doesn’t mean unionizing is fun and/or ease — it sometimes takes a spark — mass firings perhaps — for workers to consider taking on management, which again is scary.
For example, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, a white billionaire, hates unions and came back to the company with the sole purpose of stopping unionization in its tracks. Jacobin describes Schultz’s actions this way:
Schultz has overseen a scorched-earth policy against Starbucks workers who are trying to organize nationwide. His latest tactic: terrify workers with the threat of store closures. Along with the termination of union activists, the threat of workplace closures has been among employers’ most chilling anti-union tactics for decades.
The National Labor Relations Boards has not taken kindly to some of Schultz’s attacks on Starbucks workers’ efforts to form unions, but the NLRB is also a limited and underfunded federal agency. It can be a strong force for workers seeking to unionize, but it has seen better days. The Biden administration, despite its puffery to the contrary, is not pro-union, its priorities are elsewhere.
Nevertheless this NLRB page is a good source for learning about rights protected in the workforce, and the page has a lot more info including its labor violations cases. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union or UFCW is also a good source for learning how to unionize and getting help to do so.
Ascension Health, an outlandishly large nationwide for-profit health-care setup, with lots of expensive hospitals with several in Milwaukee, is also ripe for union action.
Ascension’s top management is raking in outlandishly large salaries, and workers need to unite to take some of that cash for themselves.
According to Urban Milwaukee’s Bruce Murphy, who writes a column dubbed “Murphey’s Law,” don’t let that stop you from reading his work, Ascension CEO Joseph Wanker, or something like that, “earned” more than $13 million in pay and the company itself is sitting on an $18 billion dollar cash reserve.
From Murphy’s piece:
In addition, Ascension’s chief financial officer and five executive vice presidents all earned anywhere from $2.8 million to $8.3 million that year. All told the seven men in Ascension’s executive office earned $40.7 million in 2015 and $41.8 million in 2014.
Much of that money has been made by operating like for-profit conglomerate, building an empire of hospitals and ruthlessly trimming expenses and cutting staff, as [The New York Times’] story reported:
‘At one point, executives boasted to their peers about how they had slashed $500 million from the chain’s labor costs … In Michigan alone late last year, the chain had 1,100 nursing vacancies. The head of an Ascension hospital in Baltimore last year blamed staffing shortages for the emergency room being dangerously overcrowded.’
Murphy’s piece notes some city and/or state lawmakers have denounced Ascension as “greedy” profit-making machine, which it is. But barking about how greedy Ascension is won’t land workers better pay and receive humane treatment in the workplace. As Murphy’s reporting notes, Ascension is closing services in parts of the city and firing its staff in ruthless manner.
Ascension’s atrocious and filthy treatment of workers can and in some cases will result in frontline workers taking matters into their own hands, as happened with Ascension nurses in Austin, Texas.
At Ascension Seton Medical Center, its nurses in fall 2022 announced its union with the National Nurses United, following ruthless cuts to staff made at the center. The Daily Texan reported that with 800 nurses it was now “the largest private sector hospital in Texas to unionize.”
Julianna Pisano, a Seton Medical Center nurse, said “I became a nurse so that I could advocate for patients, and being stretched thin with short staffing makes me feel like I’m not able to do that to the best of my abilities.”
Pisano is not only brave for standing up to Ascension, she’s also a wonderful nurse — a patient advocate, we need a lot more of those and more oversight and regulation of for-profit “health care” providers and their tentacles.
