Hospital workers forced to accept two-tier contract

Scan page 6

SAN FRANCISCO-Militant hospital workers on strike against Kaiser Permanente, worn down by bureaucratic pressure, voted 2881 to 1087 on Dec. 13 to accept a takeback two-tier contract. The hospital workers, with support from the nurses, had been on strike for seven weeks.

The new contract for the 8700-member union also substitutes so-called "bonuses" for wage increases: $1000 in the first year and $850 in the second. Only in the third year do the hospital workers get a 3-percent wage increase.

The "bonuses" differ from a simple wage increase in one important respect-they do not add to the basic hourly rate. Bonuses do not add to the base for calculating. overtime pay and are not cumulative.

The top bureaucracy of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had sent a platoon of officials to the San Francisco Bay Area to impose its concessions policy on strikers.

The adopted contract proposal was only a slightly sweetened version of two previous proposals rejected by the Kaiser strikers. The new contract means 15-percent lower wages for new Kaiser hospital workers at facilities in six California cities. New em -ployees at the San Francisco and Oakland facilities, however, will not be subject to the lower tier of the new wage scale.

Kaiser Permanente evidently hoped to induce strikers in San Francisco and Oakland, still centers of strong unionism, to vote for the two-tier contract. It didn't work. The center of opposition to the two-tier came from strikers in both these cities.

The two-tier policy has been the spearhead of the capitalist attack on the gains made by unions. It plays on hoped-for short-sightedness by union members who are not immediately affected by the reduced wages paid to the new hires.

The two-tier is a divisive measure which would be correctly seen by new employees as in direct conflict with a fundamental principle of unionism-equal pay for equal work.

But the two-tier is an attack against all union members-not just the new hires. The two-tier system gives employers a big incentive to get rid of the higher-paid workers and gradually reduce all to the Socialist Action/Asher Harer lowest pay and benefit levels. While rank-and-file unionists have not fallen for this trick, a significant layer of the union bureaucracy has.

Criticism of bureaucracy

At a meeting of the San Francisco strikers the night of the vote, unionists international representatives who engineered acceptance of the two-tier contract.

"The international is shoving this down our throats and making our people go back to work without any dignity," said Peggy Ferro-Guinto, a nursing assistant who served on the 31-member bargaining committee. This was the dominant theme expressed at the tumultuous strike meeting.

Speaking at a Socialist Action forum the day before the vote, Blanche Bebb, another member of the bargaining committee explained: "[The international] came here with a whole lot of people who are experts in the field. They didn't consult with the local people who had negotiated with Kaiser before. They did absolutely nothing to organize the picket lines during the Bebb described how inexperienced rank-and-file strikers were forced to organize effective picket lines and other strike functions without any help from the union "leadership."

Bebb's main theme, contrary to the mood of gloom and doom which dominated the union bureaucracy, was the inspiring She pointed out that essentially the same contract that was finally approved had been rejected a few weeks earlier despite a union announcement that strike funds were "exhausted" and would stop.

This episode in the deepening class struggle serves to illustrate the crisis of American labor. It is not the lack of capacity or willingness of the workers to fight back that explains the cascading series of labor setbacks. The pattern in the Kaiser strike is typical. The members say "no" to concessions but are worn down by the bureaucrats who prefer to give away their members' living standards rather than fight.

There are two inevitable consequences of this self-serving cowardice of the most overpaid and incompetent union officialdom ever to curse the upper echelons of the American labor movement: On the one hand, anti-union sentiment will be fostered by the bosses themselves, who will slyly use the treason of the top bureaucrats to undermine unionism. On the other, a new generation of militants will emerge to challenge the bureaucratic misleadership and replace them with class-struggle fighters.

people who built this city and this industry who are being shafted by the LTV bankruptcy.

Delores Hyrcyk of Solidarity USA, a national organization of LTV retirees, said, "We're not here to beg. We're just here to get what we earned. Give us what we bargained for. Families went to work for 30 or 40 years in the most deplorable conditions. LTV tells me I'm a creditor. I'm no creditor. They're thieves."

Pointing to the coalition of community and labor organizations represented at the rally, Valenta stated, "Organized labor is extremely proud of its past and very confident of its future."

UAW Region 2 Director Warren Davis pointed out that corporate leaders come out of bankruptcies with golden parachutes and million-dollar salaries while workers suffer abuse.

Valenta ended the rally by explaining that the message of solidarity for working people would be spread throughout the country in marches, rallies, and protest actions.

As protestors left to go home, the words of Solidarity Forever continued to echo through the City Council chambers.

Memoirs of a Radical Rank & Filer The story of one who turned radical during the Great Depression and was a militant rank-and-filer, through the '40s, '50s, and '60s. Today, in his seventies, he marches to the same drummer.

Price: $7.95 (189 pages)

Prometheus Press, Box 318 Gracie Station New York, N.Y. 10028

----- pull-quotes -----

response of Kaiser workers. "Kaiser and the international underestimated us," she said.