The three-day strike by 7,000 New York City nurses at Mount Sinai and Montefiore hospitals earlier this month, which was scuppered by their union without addressing strikers’ demands, allows workers to draw essential lessons about the union apparatus and those around it.
Among the nurses there was support for a broader struggle that would unite all hospitals in the city, expressed in a series of near-unanimous strike votes. But the New York State Nurses Association split them into separate surrender agreements, undermining their unity.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) played a vital role in this capitulation. This organization also played a role in the betrayal of the Michigan Medicine nurses’ contract fight last year, giving the union “left-wing” cover. The DSA is a middle-class organization made up of union officials, Democratic Party representatives and other careerists whose role is to prevent workers, who are radicalizing and moving to the left, from finding a truly independent path. .
Nationally, DSAs are part of the leadership or provide significant support to the leadership of many large unions. Air Hostesses Association President Sara Nelson is a member of the DSA and was a leading candidate for the AFL-CIO president.
The conduct of the DSA shows that it is a pro-capitalist organization which has nothing to do with socialism. In December, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and two other DSA members in the House voted to ban a strike by 120,000 railroad workers. The DSAs also played a key role in parliamentary maneuvers that allowed the two parties to unite against railroad workers, while providing some semblance of political cover for Democrats on the issue of sick leave. This contributed to a major crisis that erupted within the organization.
In healthcare, the role of the DSAs is not limited simply to preventing or limiting strikes. originated by Trump and the far right, but now endorsed by the entire political establishment. The magazine Jacobin, the DSA’s de facto internal body, interviewed signatories to the Great Barrington Pro-Infection Declaration at the end of 2020, which called for schools to reopen. Therefore, DSAs are politically in solidarity with the health policies that have produced the near collapse of the health care system and the very conditions of understaffing and overwork that nurses are fighting against.
During the strike in New York, the DSAs were directly involved in the bureaucratic organization of the strike and in contract negotiations. As part of their “Campaign for Union Power”, the DSAs organized tables with the AOC team [l’équipe de campagne d’Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, membre des DSA] and promoted Democratic Party politicians who spoke at picket lines.
New York City DSAs have a long history with the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA). In 2019, according to Politico, the New York branch of the DSAs targeted the NYSNA as one of the few unions on which it particularly focused its work and resources. An internal document stated that “DSAs already have a density of nurses within NYSNA” and that a NYSNA reform caucus “has created an active and strong presence at Montefiore Medical Center.”
Former NYSNA President Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez (2013-2021) has strong ties to the DSAs and has attempted to “swing union leadership positions to DSA-affiliated members, according to multiple people familiar with the union.” of the situation”. Sheridan-Gonzalez was also part of the 13-member contract negotiating team at Montefiore during the recent strike.
After the end of the strike, the semi-official publication of the DSA, Jacobin, published an interview article by Montefiore intensive care nurse and DSA member, Michelle Gonzalez, with the following headline: “Nurses at two New York hospitals have just won historic strike victories” . Gonzalez is also a member of the NYSNA executive committee at Montefiore Moses and was also a member of the negotiating committee responsible for the new contract. She has participated in many DSA events and panels in the past.
In the interview, Gonzalez proclaims, “This is a phenomenal victory for us nurses.” Asked about the concrete demands of the nurses and whether they were met in the agreement in principle, she raised the issue of the lack of personnel: “I think that the nurses in this institution are very demoralized by the being short-staffed every day…I’m excited about the language we were able to negotiate for nurses”. US Democratic Congresswoman and DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mirrored that rhetoric on the floor of the House of Representatives the day the nurses’ strike ended.
In reality, the new nurses’ tentative agreement does nothing to enforce safe staffing ratios. Rather, it institutionalizes understaffing by allowing management to violate set staffing ratios in exchange for payment of fixed financial penalties that are less than the cost of hiring additional nurses. The 170 new positions created at Montefiore by the agreement represent less than a quarter of the vacant positions, while the annual increases of 7, 6 and 5 percent will be more than absorbed by inflation.
In a pre-strike interview with another pseudo-left publication, Left Voice, Gonzalez was asked about the experience of NYSNA nurses in 2019, when the union blocked a strike, and how the situation is different today. Here, she took the opportunity to defend the division of nurses by hospital as a supposedly pragmatic maneuver.
“Last time we took part in negotiations across several hospitals and those of us who were in favor of a strike were outvoted. We’ve learned that multi-hospital negotiations don’t work for us at Montefiore, so we’re negotiating separately.” These words were echoed by Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez at an event last weekend at the People’s Forum in New York, as part of a debate on Joe Burns’ book, Class Struggle Unionism. class struggle). Burns is the Director of Collective Bargaining for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union and also writes for Jacobin.
In fact, 17,000 nurses at eight city hospitals voted overwhelmingly to authorize the strike. This showed a great desire for unity and for building a broad struggle in defense of health care. The fact that most of these nurses never went on strike is entirely because the NYSNA announced separate tentative agreements behind their backs.
In an online post-strike forum, Sean Petty, a DSA member, NYSNA bargaining committee member, and former NYSNA board member, responded at length to someone who had shared a WSWS article about adoption of NYSNA nurse contracts. The person said they thought more hospitals should have gone on strike together. This person commented that the fight sounded like a betrayal from NYSNA bureaucrats and that he had heard the same thing from workers.
Petty dismissed the remarks and hailed the strike as “a victory for ‘self-activity’ and activism by rank-and-file nurses, not bureaucrats.” He spoke of “major advances” for the “material conditions of grassroots nurses”. The DSA leader then blamed the nurses for stopping the strike, falsely claiming that they “had control over when they returned, not the NYSNA bureaucrats.”
It’s a lie. In fact, the NYSNA called off the strike on short notice just hours after the tentative agreement. The nurses were not even given copies of the tentative agreement, let alone the opportunity to vote on it, before the picket lines were lifted, in order to break the nurses’ momentum and better ensure the adoption of contracts.
To cover the bureaucracy’s trail, he then blamed the nurses themselves for being divided by hospital, claiming that, despite near-unanimous strike votes, a unified struggle by nurses was both impossible and unpopular. “NYSNA staff … did not have and do not have the clout to be able to ‘get all the hospitals off the hook at the same time’. The idea that this idea can even be raised reveals a rather great naivety as to the current state of consciousness”. This totally reverses reality. The nurses all wanted to walk out together; it was the union bureaucracy that did not want them to do so.
The more workers strike in defense of their jobs and standard of living, the more they come up against a well-developed corporatist system of control over them, which combines union bureaucracy with the state apparatus and corporate management. The DSAs turn out to be an important part of this conspiracy.
Workers need to know who their friends are and who their enemies are. The right to real grassroots control means exposing the methods and actors of this conspiracy, including the DSA. It also means a struggle against the bureaucratic repression of their struggles through the formation of rank-and-file committees, that is, new democratic organs of power run by the workers themselves and not by the bureaucratic apparatus: organs to unite the workers and not to divide them.
(Article published in English on January 27, 2023)
