I
spent last Saturday night on the picket line, where about 60
mental health care workers are striking the Parry Center,
allegedly an inpatient treatment center for about 36 pretty
mentally disturbed kids, ages eight through 14 years old. I use
the word “allegedly” quite specifically, because
whether the Parry Center is a treatment center, as its managers
allege or is something else, is exactly what this strike is
about.
I got hooked into doing some
picket duty through the familiar route. The union on strike is
SEIU Local 503, my old union, and home of most of my friends. So
a friend asked me what I was doing on Saturday night, and could I
help picket? I said, “Sure!” (the American Saturday
night party scene is vastly over-rated anyway.)
I won’t bore the reader with a lot of details over what the
workers have proposed in bargaining, or what the company has
proposed. (More information can be found at
http://www.seiu503.org, the
union’s website.)
Suffice it to say, the Parry
Center wants to break the union, and the mental health workers on
strike want a wage where they can eat and pay the rent at the
same time. But this strike is a very personal thing for the
striking workers, because it gets to them right at the personal
core of why they do the work they do.
So, it’s cold and rainy, and I’m guarding a side
entrance with three Parry strikers, let’s call them Amy,
Sylvia and Ted because the real individuals might have to find
similar work in the same town, and most employers don’t
like prospective employees who might have job-related opinions
and strike histories.
So, as I was saying, it’s
cold and rainy and nighttime and nothing is happening; no scabs
are trying to come in, and nobody is leaving. So, we got to
talking…. Mostly because I didn’t have a clue
what the strike was about and thought this might be a good time
to ask.
So I ask, “What finally
put you guys over the edge? What convinced folks that you needed
to strike?” A short pause, and Ted, maybe in his mid to
late 20s says, “You know, I decided to strike when I heard
that the Parry Center’s lawyer told the union’s
negotiators that the kids aren’t a priority.”
“You mean, like the kids don’t matter?” I ask.
Ted says, “Exactly, the kids don’t
matter.”
From there, Ted
left to go home; he’d already been on the picket line 6
hours longer than he needed to. Meanwhile, Amy, Sylvia and I
continued the conversation about what the Parry Center really did
with its kids, how the place worked, where the therapy for these
very disturbed kids really lay, what the treatment philosophy of
the institution was really all about.
Amy and Sylvia are both pretty experienced in the mental health
field, and I believe both are registered psychiatric nurses. I
have a degree in psychology and some social work training, so we
got pretty technical in our discussion.
It was pretty clear through our discussion that when kids did get
better, it was because of the nurturing relationships that
developed between the staff and the kids. These relationships
seem to be the best medicine when it comes to drawing these kids
out of the delusions in their heads and their fear of most every
kind of social contact and relationship; just good old patience,
care, and a consistency that said today’s people of help
will be there tomorrow.
“Wait,”
I ask, “So if half of the kids have been moved out of the
Parry Center to other Trillium facilities (Trillium is the
holding company, they own three other similar institutions…
incidentally, where there isn’t a union) because of the
strike, isn’t that going to do major damage to the kids’
therapy; to the relationship building?”
“Oh yes… Major damage”, Sylvia and Amy tell
me. But this was just one little piece of the overall problem
according to my informants. Amy told me about a woman, a mental
health worker, who is an artist, and was able, time and time
again, to draw these kids out through art.
“But she
had to quit”, Amy told me. She couldn’t afford to
work at the Parry Center any longer… Seems she couldn’t
find a way to eat and pay the rent at the same time. Most of the
staff being quite young, very recently out of the university, and
Sylvia being maybe in her 40s, said, “Even if they (the
Parry Center) paid off the student loan debts, that would help a
lot.”
But the bottom line is that the folks who
provide the real therapy are starving if they decide to stay at
the Parry Center. So, they decide they have to move on, probably
to something much more important in the world, like selling real
estate. And this is the way the Parry Center likes it, it keeps
the business costs down.
But the human cost is this, Amy
told me about a kid she’s been working who said, “Why
should I talk to you? I talked to the last two people and they
left, and you will too”. So the business costs do stay
down, because the treatment staff comes and goes like they are in
a revolving door, and the kids shut down, and few anyway (except
for some strikers, some of the kids’ parents, and a few
others) are interested in the human costs of all this; it’s
just business as usual.
Sylvia told me
things have only gotten worse over the last year or two. “You
ever seen a hospital where the doctor goes by, looks into the
room for a second, and then signs the chart that they visited and
evaluated the patient?” Sylvia asked me. “Well, yeah,
I know what you mean,” I said. “Well, that’s
what the professional therapists do all the time around here…
That’s because they get paid nothing, and their cases are
too many.” So I guess they too just sign off… even
if all they did was look in the room.
Maybe an hour later, Sylvia, Amy and I decided that nothing was
happening at the side entrance we were guarding, so we decided to
go down to the main gate and see what was up with the main body
of picketers. Here I ran into the chief spokesperson for the
union’s negotiating committee, a guy named Mischa Novick. I
don’t know Mischa well, but I couldn’t pass up the
opportunity to ask a couple of questions.
“Hey
Mischa,” I asked, “is it really true that the lawyer
for the Parry Center told your bargaining team that the kids
don’t matter?”
“Not really”,
Mischa told me, “But he did say that the kids were not the
Parry Center’s key priority. Priority number one for the
institution is the financial endowment, and the second priority
was something else financial…. The kids were the third
priority according to the lawyer,” Mischa told me. “But
he might as well have said the kids don’t matter, that’s
the way we took it,” Mischa told me.
On the way up to the Parry Center, my friend Andy Boeger, one of
the research guys at SEIU Local 503, told me about the head guy
at Trillium and the Parry Center; a guy named Kim Scott. “Makes
$150,000 a year,” Andy told me.
“Jeez,”
I asked, “is that the salary alone, or are there other
little benefits and perks?”
“Well let’s
say $178,000 per year….” “Bonuses,” is
what Amy told me Kim Scott and the other upper managers get. “Bet
he tells all his friends what a good guy he is and how he treats
severely disturbed kids for a living”, Amy tells me with a
sarcastic smile a few hours later. I learned a lot.
So, the next morning, Sunday, as I usually do, I got up and took
a look at the news on my computer. A major headline; The Sutter
Hospital chain, a conglomerate of 13 hospitals in Northern
California had locked out 7,000 SEIU Local 250 hospital workers
in retaliation for the union doing a one-day strike on December
1. There’s nothing particularly new about US corporations
crapping on workers, but this story had a funny twist. The strike
wasn’t about wages, or benefits, pensions or any of the
usual kind of stuff.
Instead, it seems SEIU Local 250 had
called the strike to try to force Sutter to hold to minimum
staff-to-patient ratios; a minimum staff-to-patient ratio that’s
a piece of California law, which Sutter evidently routinely
violates.
So, Sutter Hospitals has
“gone to the wall” in a death fight against its own
workers, who themselves seem far more interested in the quality
of care provided to patients than does the Sutter Corporation,
with its $465,000,000 annual profit and CEO, Van Johnson,
who personally makes $2,339,500 per year.
Sutter’s lockout turned out to be a fiasco. It was done so
illegally and arrogantly and with such a rousing protest from
labor-friendly politicians across northern California, that
Sutter had to eat its own lockout. I know too that my old union,
SEIU Local 503, is attempting to move heaven and earth to put the
Parry Center and Trillium, its holding company, under the State
of Oregon’s scrutiny, which is where every dollar going to
the Parry Center and Trillium comes from. And time will tell if
this works….
But it has gotten
to be a strange and odd world after 30 years of unrestrained,
“no-holds-barred” capitalism in the United States.
Used to be, many years ago, that capitalism was touted as the
system that produced goods and services efficiently and cheaply,
in everybody’s best interests. Well, that was then, and
this is now.
After Reagan, after Bush,
and Wall Street’s love affair with Bill Clinton, and W.
Bush, and Enron, and universal corporate “account-cooking,”
and corporate bankruptcy as a way of getting out of your labor
commitments, the veneer is off. Anybody with any ability to
observe a wider social and political reality knows damned well
that America is about greed and profit first, greed and profit
second, greed and profit third, and quality products and services
a long tenth… maybe.
And it’s
pandemic, this profit, corporate growth, and “screw the
product-screw the workers-screw the public” mentality. It’s
everywhere in the US. I went in last week to buy more talk time
for my cell-phone and the whole store had changed. AT&T had
just merged with Cingular. The store had been totally
re-decorated, the same employees were still there, but now they
all wear bright uniforms with the new corporate colors. All the
products are on high-tech display; the cell-phones with cameras
built in, new options added faster than you can think, all with
financial plans that will have you paying for your cell phone
service for years to come. Yet 70% of the time, I still have to
go outside and face in a general north-west direction in order to
make or receive a call on my cell-phone, and that hasn’t
changed in two years I’ve had the damned thing.
What a strange contradiction it is! So now, it’s the
workers who are insisting that the product matters; not the
corporations…. And some workers are ready to fight, like
those at the Parry Center and those at Sutter Hospital chain. And
where there is no union, and no fight, workers live consciously
neck deep in the their cynicism and the cynicism of their
employers.
So, back to Sylvia, Amy, the
Parry picket line, and me:
I told Amy and Sylvia that I
wanted to bounce an idea off of them:
“What would
you guys think”, I asked, “if instead of banks making
loans on the basis of their maximum profit, we re-did the banking
system in this country so that when a firm asked for a loan, the
loan was looked at in terms of whether it helps or hurts the
community, whether the firm pays a decent wage or not, whether
the loan will harm the environment or not, whether the loan will
add to, or detract from the quality of peoples’ lives? And
if the loan is in the social interest, you get a discount rate….
If the loan isn’t in the social interest, the firm gets
gouged on the interest rate, or the loan just gets rejected?”
Amy just smiled, she’s a trooper
and a fighter, and knows that the fight is for the long haul.
Sylvia said, “What a good idea!” I felt like maybe I
had more fight left in me than I thought. It was a good night.