Strike Blog
by Annalee Newitz
AlterNet
I've been reading the first blog ever written from a strikers' picket line. The picket line is outside several San Francisco hospitals, and the strikers are 800 health care workers from the Service Employees International Union's local United Healthcare Workers West. They're demanding that their employers provide them with better training and a way to resolve disputes through third parties. Members of the SEIU-UHW are mostly lower-paid hospital workers like nurse's assistants, janitors, and, as union rep Thea Lavin puts it, "the people who keep you and your room clean while you're in the hospital." Their grievances are all too familiar, but their method of organizing is not.
"Strikers are using text messaging to communicate on the picket lines," Lavin says, "and picket line leaders are coming home at night and describing what it was like that day." Workers on the lines are struggling to figure out what's going on in the hospitals during their absences, and they're constantly fighting the fear that they'll run out of money and be forced to take other work before the battle has been won. They're also struggling quite literally with Healthcare Contingency Staffing Services' scab guards, a gang of modern-day Pinkertons who have been terrorizing strikers (and, in one case, actually beating them, according to an Oct. 13 police report).
For anyone who has ever been on strike -- or just driven by and honked the horn in solidarity -- the blog at sutterstrikers.blogs.com is a reminder of the often tiring and confusing experience. It features regular entries from strikers like Emily Stone, who was happy that one of her regular patients came to chat with her on the picket line during a visit to the hospital for kidney dialysis. Tom, another strike blogger, talks about how he's worried about the welfare of patients he'd normally be attending.
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