“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"
I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"
To shrug.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Relax. This isn’t an Objectivist article.
Yesterday, Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in California, Colorado, Oregon, Virginia, and Washington walked out of their hospitals and began a three-day strike. This is a shot across the bow: the largest union involved in the strike has threatened a “longer, stronger” strike in November if their demands aren’t met.
Here are their demands:
A $25 hourly minimum wage
Wage increases of 7 percent for the next two years, and and 6.25 percent each year afterwards. Please keep in mind that inflation was 8.3 percent in 2022
Fully staffing hospitals, instead of chronically understaffing and running workers ragged to save money
$25 per hour for the (literal!) shit nurses deal with every day is criminally low. These are the people who risked their lives throughout the COVID pandemic. Many of them died. These are the people we trust to care for us when we are at our most vulnerable, people whose actions can determine whether we live or die. How little do we value our own lives that we would stand by and allow them to make only $25 per hour?
But Kaiser Permanente is not paying them $25 per hour. They are, apparently, paying some of them less than that.
If you’ve dealt with the healthcare system, you’ve probably dealt with at least one nurse from hell, and you’ve probably dealt with a lot more nurses that range from competent to saintly. Most people get into nursing and other medical specialties because they want to help people. Hospitals have been using this desire against healthcare workers for years.
The hospitals have gone too far this time, though. Part of the reason for this strike is that hospital workers believe that decisions to understaff actively endanger patient lives. What if it didn’t, though? What if it just endangered their lives? What if the only people hurt by the horrible working conditions in hospitals were hospital workers?
Two days ago, as the walls were closing in around him, Kevin McCarthy explicitly refused to offer any concessions to Democrats. Many people, including myself, including perhaps McCarthy, thought the Democrats would vote against the motion to expel him from the speakership anyway. Democrats, by and large, like to govern. Not only do they believe the government should continue to provide the services it currently provides, many of them believe it should provide far more services. They are not, under normal circumstances, obstructionists. A successful motion to vacate would virtually guarantee weeks, perhaps months, of chaos and gridlock. Surely they would vote to keep the goverment functioning, even if it meant supporting someone who actively despises them and in fact recently launched a spurious impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden based, as far as I can tell, on sheer spite.
Nope.
No more being held hostage. No more negotiating with terrorists. No more being pilloried as ChiCom traitors while simultaneously expected to take the high road every time.
Push people too far, and things start happening. UPS. Auto workers. Healthcare workers. Politicians. Who’s next? What is the next group of people that will look around them—at the unpaid bills and the hard decisions at the grocery store and the prospect of their children having a worse life than they did—and say, enough is enough?
Atlas Shrugged, which I read once as a teenager and again as a young adult, is—spoiler alert for a 66 year old book I do not recommend anyone read—the story of a world that oppresses and tortures the best and brighest amongst us: the CEOs and inventors and creators of this world. John Galt, the dead-eyed hero of this 1192-page behemoth, travels around the country and convinces them to quit, one by one: to take their millions and move to Colorado, where they create a utopia while the rest of the world falls into ruin.
I think this is very silly for a variety of reasons I plan to write about someday (I am re-reading the book for the third time and filling notebooks with furious scrawled notes), but look beyond the premise that the richest amongst us are the true oppressed class, and the capitalist worldview generally, and Rand’s horrifying denial that sadness and despair are a fundamental part of life, and assertion that any sadness you feel is something inflicted upon you by the moochers and looters and death culture, and etc—look beyond all that, and there’s a kernel of truth at the heart of it.
No one should sacrifice themselves for a world that hurts them.
UPS workers should not sacrifice themselves for the sake of the supply chain. Auto workers should not sacrifice themselves for the sake of the economy. Nurses should not sacrifice themselves for the sake of the sick and dying, and you should not sacrifice yourself for whatever it is you’re doing.
If your job is so damn important for the functioning of this nation, you should be able to afford groceries, raise a family, and enjoy a vacation once in a while.
And that’s a bargain. We’re not event talking about surplus labor here. The people who own these factories and hospitals and other forms of capital—some of whom also create value, but not anywhere close to the millions and billions they receive—should thank their lucky stars that worker demands are so low. If a business cannot keep their business afloat and pay their employees a living wage, that business is built on the suffering of others and should not exist. We are the wealthiest country the world has ever seen, GDP-wise: there is no reason why everyone in this country should not be able to live, at baseline, a decent life that includes both work and leisure, necessities and small pleasures. From CEOs to janitors: everyone deserves to thrive and enjoy the bounty of their labor.
If Kaiser Permanente continues to refuse to meet its healthcare workers’ incredibly baseline demands, I hope the strike continues. I hope the strike continues even if it results in preventable injury and death. It has to. We cannot be held hostage any longer by our own better natures. We have to fight for ourselves, and our families, and the families of our fellow citizens.
It’s time.
And it’s happening.
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Image by Daniel Roberts from Pixabay
From the excellent book "How Artists Work" : "The Benzedrine helped Rand push through the last stages of The Fountainhead, but it soon became a crutch. She would continue to use amphetamines for the next three decades, even as her overuse led to mood swings, irritability, emotional outbursts, and paranoia—traits Rand was susceptible to even without drugs."
She was on speed, that sure explains a lot, doesn't it?
Another good entry Laura! One quibble - I don't think we can still say that people take nursing jobs primarily because they want to help people. Across rural America it's viewed as The Way Out of Poverty, especially for women. With that shift, rural attitudes like vaccine skepticism and anti-trans mindsets have begun to creep like an infection into the industry. That's not to say they don't deserve a raise, because they do, but honestly I just don't see the profession as all that noble anymore.