WorkWeek looks at the growing attack on healthcare workers from nurses at Kaiser to UC nurses, service and technical workers.
Healthcare workers face massive understaffing, stress and threats against their benefits and conditions.
Protests were held at both Kaiser in San Francisco and UCSF to warn of the growing dangers in healthcare.
First, we hear from the 19,000 nurses at Kaiser who are fighting for a contract and are charging that there are serious problems of staffing at Kaiser hospitals. Kaiser’s membership has increased in California by 600,000 members but the NNU CNA nurses say that there has been no real commensurate increase in staff.
They spoke out at a rally on September 8. On October 12th, UC NNU nurses, AFSCME 3299 and UPTE CWA members protested at the UCSF campus and discussed the staffing issues there as well as the effort by UC Regents and executives to eliminate defined pensions and put workers into a 401k.
Next, WorkWeek looks at the real conditions for workers at the Amazon “fulfillment” warehouses. Jason Storalik was a worker at the Kenosha Wisconsin Amazon warehouse when he began to find serious health and safety problems. We will hear from him about his struggle for health and safety and his retaliation.
Amazon owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos has become one of the largest employers in the country with 400,000 workers most of whom work at the massive warehouses. Last month two workers died in these warehouses. The introduction of automation and technology has speeded up the work of the remaining workers putting them in further danger.
Now with more than 351,000 workers it was one of the largest employers in the country.
Jason Storalik began work at the Kenosha, Wisconsin warehouse in 2015. He began to find serious health and safety violations and brought them to the attention of the management. His complaints were ignored.
On August 15, 2015 the New York Times published an article detailing the serious health and safety problems at the company. On the same day Jason Storalik filed a complaint with OSHA about the failure to remedy health and safety problems. He was later terminated and has been fighting for OSHA to defend him as a whistleblower who was retaliated against. He has discovered that OSHA officials are in collusion with the executives of Amazon to make his complaints disappear. Lets hear from Storalik about his story. We will also hear from Darrell Whitman who was an investigator lawyer at the Whistleblower Protection Program who has been prevented from investigating the retaliation of health and safety whistleblowers.
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