Eight Hundred Pennsylvania Nurses Went on Strike This Week. Now They're Locked Out.

By Alex N. Press, Jacobin

22 November 20

Nurses at St. Mary Medical Center have been dealing with understaffing, long hours, low pay, and a lack of protective equipment throughout the pandemic. This past week, they decided to go on strike to push their hospital to take measures needed to keep patients safe.

hat led us to strike is the same thing that led us to unionize: patient safety,” says Beth Redwine, a “mother-baby” nurse who works in the maternity ward at St. Mary Medical Center in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Redwine is one of nearly eight hundred nurses who went on strike Tuesday in response to what she and her coworkers described as foot-dragging by Trinity Health, which bought St. Mary in 2015, during what has been a nearly yearlong contract negotiation.

Livonia, Michigan–based Trinity owns over ninety hospitals nationwide. As for St. Mary, nurses describe it as a profitable institution. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the hospital “made an average of $58 million in annual profit in the last three years,” according to Trinity financial documents, making it one of the region’s most profitable hospitals. They say that their problems began not with the pandemic, but when Trinity took over the hospital.

“We’ve had inadequate staffing since Trinity took over, and we tried to negotiate with them prior to unionizing, but they weren’t having any of it,” says Donna Halpern, a cardiac critical care nurse who has been at St. Mary for fifteen years. The nurses voted to unionize with the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP), which represents 8,500 nurses and health care professionals across Pennsylvania, in August 2019.

Safe staffing is the key point of disagreement in the ongoing contract negotiations. Safe staffing ratios delineate how many patients a nurse is expected to care for at one time. Given that nurses are tasked with monitoring patients’ health on a constant basis, catching each and every tell of a possible downturn, short staffing is particularly dangerous. In the context of a pandemic of an illness that remains volatile and little understood, it can be deadly.

Nurses at St. Mary say that while an intensive care unit (ICU) nurse should have one or two patients at the most, at their hospital now, nurses often have three. As for some of the designated COVID-19 units, Redwine describes them as “perpetually short-staffed.”

Related to the issue of staffing ratios is a more familiar demand: wages. At St. Mary, nurses say pay isn’t competitive with other nearby hospitals, which pay $6 to $7 more per hour, and that this has led to a loss of nearly 250 nurses over the past two years, creating the staffing crisis.

During a marathon negotiation last week that began at 9 AM Thursday morning and ended at 3:30 AM Friday, Trinity offered what nurses describe as a 5 percent raise for the first year of the contract, but say that this was according to a tiered scale, meaning that not all nurses would receive the raise. They say they were presented with the proposal around 2 AM and given thirty minutes to consider the offer. They rejected it.

In discussing the strike, nurses acknowledge the high stakes of such a workplace action at a hospital during the pandemic, but say that it is precisely these stakes that led them to strike.

“We aren’t abandoning our patients at this time. We’re out here for them,” says Redwine. She notes that rather than being angered by the action, the community has been honking in support and bringing food and drinks to the picket line. It’s a continuation of a relationship built at the start of the pandemic: back then, facing a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE), St. Mary nurses appealed to the public for equipment, and in response, community members gave them twenty thousand pieces of PPE, including N95 masks and gloves.

The strike was planned to last Tuesday and Wednesday. In response, Trinity brought in agency nurses to staff the hospital. Beginning Thursday morning, the hospital locked out the striking nurses until the expiration of the replacement nurses’ contract. This means St. Mary nurses won’t be returning to the hospital until Sunday.

“I’m so damn proud of all of them,” says Bill Engle of his fellow nurses who have braved the cold to hold the strike line this week. “We don’t know how this is going to turn out in the end, but taking a leap of faith, showing our solidarity, we’re believing in one another. We’re taking a stand, but when you start messing with nurses’ ability to care for our patients, that’s our line in the sand.”

The Coup Stage of Donald Trump's Presidency

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

22 November 20

little after 9 p.m. on Tuesday night, Donald Trump issued a victorious tweet that, unlike most of his other statements about the Presidential election, had a traceable relationship to the truth: “Wow! Michigan just refused to certify the election results!” In fact, the elections board of Wayne County, which contains Detroit, had deadlocked after its two Republican members claimed suspicions of irregularities. The crisis was over quickly, however; the board reversed itself and certified the results. In a public comment, a Michigan businessman, Ned Staebler, debunked the Republican members’ arguments and told them that “the Trump stain, the stain of racism . . . is going to follow you throughout history.” The address went viral, passing two and a half million views in three hours.

Democratic procedure had triumphed. Americans made fun of their President on Twitter. But something had changed. The unimaginable, once again, had happened—and even though it was quickly reversed, we now knew that it was possible. The next day, the Wayne County Republican commissioners asked to “rescind” their votes certifying the election results. According to Robert Costa, who has been reporting on the election for the Washington Post, the debacle in Michigan is consistent with the strategy of Trump’s personal election lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. “What they want—in MI, PA, NV, other states—is for the vote to not be certified,” Costa tweeted. “Their end game: try to force it to the House.” Giuliani and his team know that no number of recounts can give Trump the votes; their goal is to throw wrenches in the works. On Thursday, Trump invited Michigan Republican leaders to the White House, presumably to discuss ways to decertify election results, and Giuliani convened another unhinged press conference, in which he made a slew of false and bizarre claims about the election in Michigan and elsewhere.

Across a reassuringly wide political spectrum, observers hold that Trump’s refusal to concede the election results is not tantamount to a coup attempt. In the Washington Examiner, Timothy Carney wrote, “Trump is a con man, and his insistence that he can overturn the election is his latest grift.” In The Nation, Jeet Heer argued that, while Trump’s behavior is concerning, “it is very different than a coup. It is more accurately viewed as a cover-up,” adding that Trump is “interested in keeping his con game afloat.” My colleague Susan Glasser posed the question “Is it a coup or a con?” to a dozen of her smartest Washington sources, and they, too, tilted the needle closer to “con.”

They are probably right. Then again, we in the media don’t have a great record for recognizing coups when they are staring us in the face. One of the best critiques of American journalism, still taught today because it remains relevant a hundred years after its publication, is an essay by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, “A Test of the News,” which analyzed the Times’ failure to cover the Russian Revolution. But Russian journalists missed it, too. On October 25, 1917, my great-grandfather, Arnold Gessen, wrote a long article for Petrograd’s Birzheviye Vedomosti (Stock Market News)—the Wall Street Journal of its time and place. He had been serving as the paper’s parliamentary correspondent since the Russian parliament had been formed, twelve years earlier. Great-grandpa Arnold explained that the Bolsheviks ought not to be taken seriously, because they were a bunch of grifters with no political plan. His article was printed the following day—November 8, 1917, on the Western calendar—in what turned out to be the last issue of Birzheviye Vedomosti: it was promptly shuttered by the Bolsheviks, who had seized power.

“Con versus coup” might be a false dichotomy. A coup is a power claim made illegitimately, often but not always with the use of force, sometimes illegally but sometimes within the bounds of a constitution. A con is a mushy term: it can be a criminal act or simply an unethical one, perhaps just wily and manipulative. A con, in other words, is an illegitimate act of persuasion. A coup always begins as a con. If the con is successful—if the power claim is persuasive—then a coup has occurred.

You can see it better with failed coups. In August, 1991, the leadership of the Russian K.G.B. and some Politburo hardliners placed President Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest and declared themselves in charge of the country. On the second night of their coup, they held a press conference. Journalists who had for a few years enjoyed unprecedented freedom seemed to fall in line and accept the coup plotters’ power claim; they asked questions about, say, plans for rejuvenating the command economy. Then a twenty-four-year-old reporter named Tatyana Malkina rose and asked, “Do you realize that last night you committed a coup d’état?” Something shifted in the room. Journalists started bombarding the coup plotters with more combative questions, and the plotters themselves suddenly looked like lost, hungover men in ill-fitting suits. They ended the press conference, which state television had broadcast in its entirety, and in less than forty-eight hours the coup collapsed. We may never know what else was going on out of public view, but this is how many Russians remember it: the brave reporter in a frilly dress, the trembling hands of crooks and hustlers who didn’t believe in their own legitimacy, the end.

In July, 2016, a faction of the Turkish military attempted a coup. The government thwarted it within hours. The instant end of the coup was televised: people the world over saw tanks on bridges in Istanbul and immediately began speculating that the coup was merely a pretext for the larger crackdown that followed. Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s government arrested tens of thousands of people and fired many more, mostly on suspicion of belonging to the Hizmet movement, led by the émigré cleric Fethullah Gülen. Gülen denied that he had anything to do with the coup and suggested that it might have been staged by Erdo?an himself. Skeptics pointed to the holes in the coup plotters’ plans: they failed to secure total control of the media, they didn’t manage to arrest Erdo?an, they were poorly coördinated. Were they even serious? Similar conspiracy theories still circulate about the 1991 Russian coup: the plotters didn’t close the airports or turn off the Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s home phone. What kind of coup is that? A failed one.

Successful coup plotters don’t do everything right, either. No aspiring dictator can commandeer enough military power to be able to dominate an entire country that refuses to recognize him. No coup plotters can close every channel of communication and stop all movement. No one usurping power can force people to forget that different norms and expectations existed as recently as yesterday. What successful coup plotters do is con enough people into thinking that they have already taken power. No one can fully predict when such a claim will succeed or fail.

In the coup stage of his Presidency, Trump has continued to be Trump: he has shown no ability to plan or plot, but plenty of resolve and willingness to act. He fired military brass and the chief of election cybersecurity, Chris Krebs, for daring to contradict him. He garnered more than seventy million votes. He has showcased considerable power, in other words, but so far it doesn’t seem to be enough to persuade Americans that he will keep it. For now, Trump’s coup attempt seems doomed.

But, as is his way, Trump is succeeding even as he fails. His project all along has been to destroy the political order as we have known it. An overwhelming majority of Republican elected officials are hedging their bets on the coup attempt—whether in order to humor Trump or appease his base, they have neglected to recognize the results of the election. The Tuesday-night incident at the Wayne County election board showed that at least some election officials will do Trump’s bidding.

Meanwhile, Twitter, Trump’s favored channel of communication with the world, has tried meekly to address the issue of Trump’s lies. It did not flag Trump’s false claim that Michigan failed to certify the election. It has flagged other Trump tweets about election fraud by attaching the label “This claim about election fraud is disputed”—as if it were a matter of debate, as if election fraud in the U.S. were an observable phenomenon about which good people can disagree. Whenever Trump tweets that he won the election, Twitter adds, “Multiple sources called this election differently,” as though we didn’t know enough to say instead, “Trump lost.” Trump’s bad con continues to show how easy it would be to stage a good one. Then we would call it a coup.