Leslie is joined by Tamara Lefcowitz, International Coordinator for the USW Health Care Workers Council. Tamara provides support to the union’s more than 50,000 health care workers across the United States and Canada. Tamara got her start as a community organizer in 2006, investigating police misconduct for the City of Pittsburgh Citizen Police Review Board. In 2009, she began working with organized labor advocating for health care workers. She now proudly bargains contracts, trains activists, and organizes workers to advocate for themselves, their patients, and our communities.

The two discuss how healthcare workers are taking safety into their own hands.

Health care workers made incredible sacrifices to help their communities during the Covid-19 pandemic, relying on each other to protect their patients and themselves. Now, they’re using that same solidarity to make huge improvements to their jobs, their workplaces and America’s care system.

Even before the pandemic, health care workers faced urgent threats to their workplace health and safety.

Workplace violence has long been a problem for health care workers. In 2016 the GAO found that health care workers were at least five times more likely to experience violence on the job as workers in other industries.

Now, threats against health care workers are rising. Legislation like the Workplace Violence Prevention for Healthcare and Social Service Workers Act would help provide meaningful protections, like compelling OSHA to establish an enforceable workplace violence standard. Unfortunately, it’s been twice held up in the Senate.

Longstanding problems with maintaining appropriate staffing levels were also exacerbated by the pandemic and also jeopardize health care workers’ health.

Nursing shortages are a real and urgent concern.
But turnover in other positions like environmental services and dietary also hurts workers across the board and the care they can provide.

The pandemic created additional hazards for health care workers, like a lack of adequate PPE and exposed glaring holes in the safety net, like the lack of OSHA guidance on infectious diseases.

More than 3,600 health care workers died in the first year of the pandemic alone.
And more than half are still reporting symptoms of burnout.

This ended up putting not only health care workers at risk, but their patients and communities as well. Now, workers are taking matters into their own hands.

One of the big things health care workers are doing is organizing.

New research from the AFL-CIO shows that 71 percent of health care workers would join a union if they had the chance.
Late last year roughly 500 Pittsburgh area health care workers voted unanimously to join the USW for a voice on the job.

Unionized health care workers are also winning good contracts.
Approximately 800 USW members at Oroville Hospital in Oroville, Calif., this fall ratified a contract that not only provides significant wage increases, but also establishes a labor-management safety committee that gives a real voice to the front-line workers who best know how to address the hazards they and their patients face every day.

USW members at Copper Country Mental health in Houghton, Mich., just this week ratified a contract that includes hard-fought workplace violence language.

Nurses at three Steward Health Care hospitals in Florida achieved protections from unsafe scheduling and the creation of an infectious disease task force in their new agreement, while workers at Kaleida Health in New York successfully fought for wages increases, a health and safety committee and the health system’s commitment to create 500 new positions to address unsafe staffing issues.

All of these successes come down to building relationships and working together – another way the USW is tackling workplace health and safety concerns in the health care sector – including a pilot program aimed at worker education and empowerment.

This collective action is now resulting in better patient outcomes, more inspections for workplace hazards and better access to personal protective equipment (PPE), among many other advantages, making it good not only for workers but for whole communities.

The website for the USW is www.USW.org and their handle on both Twitter and Instagram is @steelworkers. Tamara's Twitter handle is @TLefcowitz.