Nurses and others have won victories on the picket line they couldn’t achieve at the ballot box.
It’s not just actors, writers, and autoworkers powering this year’s strike wave in the United States. Healthcare workers, too, are flexing their collective muscles in greater numbers. And for good reason.
In just the last two months, 75,000 Kaiser workers in seven states and the District of Columbia struck, joining workers in other healthcare systems who marched on picket lines from New Jersey to Michigan to Los Angeles. Workers have had it with stagnating pay and soaring rent, fuel, and grocery bills. Inflation, while brutal on working-class pocketbooks, is good business for Wall Street, where CEOs have collected record profits.
For healthcare workers, you can tack on to those injustices the sacrifices they made under Covid: grueling work hours, dangerous short staffing, and basic safety equipment shortages—especially in the first months of the health crisis. Add to that staff burnout and a virus that killed more than 3,600 healthcare workers in just the first year of the pandemic.
As staff have been worked to the bone, they’re also outraged to see healthcare executives enrich themselves like never before. HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital system, reaped $5.64 billion in 2022 profits and paid CEO Sam Hazen $14.6 million—a 46 percent boost from 2018. Gregory Adams, CEO of Kaiser—technically a nonprofit—got $15.6 million richer the same year. The top five...
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