An agreement fell through in August over Tenet Healthcare’s return to work agreement that would have prevented some nurses from returning to their previous positions. Tenet Healthcare has sought to permanently replace nurses on strike as the hospital faces fines from the state for closing down inpatient behavioral health beds due to the strike. I don’t think any of us imagined the strike would be going into its ninth month with no end in sight, but I’m proud of our resolve,” said James Traweek, a miner who has worked for four years at Warrior Met Coal in Brookwood, Alabama.Īt the Tenet Healthcare-owned St Vincent hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, about 700 nurses have been on strike since 8 March over understaffing and cuts at the hospital before and during the pandemic, the longest strike in Massachusetts’ history. “The past eight months have been some of the hardest times of our lives. One of the year’s most important strikes is playing out in the deep south where about 1,100 coalminers at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama have been on strike since 1 April, as workers fight for better wages after accepting concessions in their previous union contract. Then they go to the bargaining table, and they’re basically disposable because the companies continued to profit through the pandemic and then say, ‘Thanks, but we’re not going to compensate you, we’re not going to protect you, we’re not going to value and reward you for making those sacrifices.’” Those are the folks that really made the sacrifices and the whole time, they were told that they were essential. Shuler added: “When I was walking the line with those Nabisco workers, and Kellogg’s workers, I kept thinking about all of them in the plant, making Oreos and the Ritz crackers, while the rest of us were inside consuming those. Shuler believes that the hardships of the pandemic – when so much focus was put on the sacrifices of workers in often manual jobs that were deemed essential – has sparked a reawakening of labor politics in America, especially as some companies have tried to go back to business as usual. Thousands of workers went on strike in 2021 at Frito-Lay, Nabisco, Kellogg’s, John Deere, Volvo, Frontier Communications, New York University, Columbia University, Harvard, carpenters in the Pacific north-west, hospitals, airports and at coalmines in Alabama, while workers at several fast-food and retail chains including McDonald’s, Walmart, Wendy’s, Burger King, Bojangles, Jack in the Box and Family Dollar, held walkouts or short-term strikes. But the one thing that’s been really consistent is the sentiment of the working people who are out there taking the risks is that they are absolutely fed up,” said Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the main union federation in the US. “I’ve been traveling a lot to picket lines all over the country in the last couple of months, been in so many different states and across all industries. The last few months of 2021 saw workers quit at record or near record rates, while an uptick of strikes occurred around the US in October and November 2021.
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