The Side of the Angels (7 page)

Alan Weingould had grown up in the labor movement. His father, Jacob, had been an early leader of the garment workers, a man remembered both for his courage in facing down the sweatshop bosses and his early and generous assistance to Jews fleeing Hitler. Jacob Weingould had the heart of a lion. His son had the heart of a St. Bernard on acid, always bounding forward into snowdrifts too high for him. Thanks to his chaotic and devoted efforts, the Toilers had become one of the fastest-growing unions in the AFL-CIO. Driven and demanding he certainly could be, but in a town full of shills and operators, he was a refreshingly true believer.

“Now, what are you here for?” he asked Ron, shifting some of the piles on his desk and putting on his reading glasses.

“The St. Francis strike,” Ron said.

“St. Francis,” said Weingould blankly, as if conjuring up visions of Assisi's lover of wolves and sparrows and wondering what it had to do with us.

“In Winsack,” Ron said. He was accustomed to these preliminaries. “Rhode Island.”

“Yeah. Yeah. That's right. The nurses.”

The Toilers had only recently started organizing nurses in a big way. Most of their members worked in some form of civil or public service, from garbage collectors in Trenton to professors at city colleges in Philly and Queens. Jerry Goreman, the bureaucratic little man who'd succeeded the legendary Frank De Rosa as the Toilers' president, had no fire in his belly for winning new members. Goreman's goals were simple: he wanted to spend his years as president watching the current membership dues pile up in the Toilers' treasury, thus funding his junkets to international labor conferences in Madrid and Tokyo.

But Goreman had made a lot of enemies during the three years he'd played a watchful Stalin to De Rosa's Lenin, and his political base was far from strong. Weingould wrested money from the union's executive board by assuring them that health care was the new gold rush territory. Under the HMOs, even the American Medical Association was talking about getting doctors organized. If M.D.s were that desperate, Weingould reasoned, the time was ripe to prospect for nurses.

And he was right. The Toilers' nurse membership, which had once consisted of a few straggling locals in state mental hospitals, had grown to twenty thousand in the last three years. Nowhere near the size of the heavyweights, but still very respectable. Weingould had been vindicated, but he was unprepared for how tough these organizing drives were. In the public sector, workers' rights were protected by better laws and long precedent. But in the largely unpoliced Wild West of the private sector, the hospitals had proven themselves nasty adversaries—dragging out contract negotiations for years, hiring union-busting lawyers to come up with perfectly legal schemes for intimidating employees, and delaying elections until ordered to hold them by the courts, by which time all the union's original supporters had been fired or pressured out of their jobs.

What Weingould really needed were seasoned experts with a track record in private-sector organizing. What he could afford, thanks to Goreman's budget pinching, was Ron and me, flying by the seat of our pants.

*      *      *

Without even looking, Weingould put his hand on the one manila folder he needed in the stack of thirty on his desk. As he did so, pink message slips and penciled reminders from his secretary fluttered to the floor and were rolled to shreds under the wheels of his desk chair.

Ron pulled out his engraved Mont Blanc pen and the leather-bound notebook with his initials stamped on the cover. He brought them to every client meeting. Ron loved obvious executive accessories. Like any actor, he needed a few props. I dug out a steno pad and a Bic.

“We have a situation here,” said Weingould in his verbal shorthand. “Our local at St. Francis is a fair-size local, maybe one hundred, one-fifty nurses. Catholic hospital in a small blue-collar mill town.
Used
to be a mill town, anyway, like all those towns up there, depressing as hell. Hospital's been operating since 1910, was run at one time by the Little Sisters of St. Francis with lay nurses added over the years. We won our first election in 1979, actually bargained pretty decent contracts since then. Clare Murray is the local president there. Done well for the past eight years. Well respected, not just at the hospital but at the state level.”

Ron inscribed, “Murray—well respected” in his notebook. His handwriting is large and sprawling. You can tell he never went to parochial school.

“Murray grew up right there in Winsack. Always had a good, productive relationship with the administration. Two years ago the hospital was acquired by a big for-profit chain, Coventry Inc., and things are going to hell in a handbasket. Take a look at this.”

“This” was a petition from the St. Francis nurses on the medical-surgical floor. A med-surg floor, I could gather from the wording, was a regular hospital floor, rather than an intensive care or cardiac unit. The nurses were asking the hospital to remedy certain dangerous conditions in their unit. The problems listed made me hope I never needed my tonsils out.

I read the petition text over Ron's shoulder.

“We are alarmed by a nurse-patient ratio that has gone from one to three, to one to eight in the past year,”
the nurses had written.

“One nurse to eight patients?” I asked Weingould.

“That's the first step these for-profits take. Cutting labor costs, and nurses are expensive labor.”

We read on.
“Incident reports include: a sixty-year-old male who waited more than an hour for a herapin drip due to equipment shortages … some patients going ten hours without vital signs taken because the two night nurses were occupied with higher acuity cases … inadequate nurse training on infusion pumps which could result in fatal dosage errors, including one incident in which an exhausted nurse in the fourteenth hour of her shift keyed in 82 milligrams of morphine instead of 8.2 milligrams before realizing her mistake … a patient assigned a bed in the supply room because all other rooms were overcrowded already.”

What surprised me most was that the petition, according to Weingould, had been signed by every single nurse in the med-surg unit. You almost never saw that. Hospitals did not look kindly on nurses who were “troublemakers.” Conditions must be really lousy at St. Francis.

“Negotiations were a disaster from day one,” Weingould said, loosening his tie. Ron loosened his too. I had nothing to loosen, so I crossed my legs.

“The nurses were focusing on staffing and safety issues,” Weingould went on. “No big-money demands. We knew we were in trouble when the hospital waited two months past the official start of bargaining to submit its bargaining proposals. When they did, we weren't even close. Management offered no staffing relief, no patient-safety concessions. Nothing on forced overtime or floating. Needless to say, no raise. The hospital's crying poverty, which is a load of crap.”

“Financial statements?” Ron asked, leaning forward. He loved money talk.

“I'm getting a specialist to take a look. At a glance it seems like the hospital had a stellar past five years, which is probably one reason Coventry snapped it up in the first place. But there's a few weird things going on with wholly-owned subsidiaries that I'm curious about.”

“Excuse me,” I said, breaking up their little tête-à-tête. “But how come these nurses are so ready to walk out? They're looking at a strike that could go into Christmas.”

“The hospital's sent every signal that they're not going to budge, and the nurses know it. They're practically being locked out as it is.”

“Any allies on the board of directors?”

“One or two. We have a source on the board who should come through for us in a day or two on that.”

You had to hand it to Weingould, he never threw you into a situation without thoroughly prepping you. Mary Bridget might have to program reminders of his wife's birthday into his computer for him, but he knew the details of what was happening in every single one of the forty campaigns he had going nationwide.

“What's our time line?” said Ron.

“The local took a strike vote that goes into effect at the will of the bargaining team, which could be soon if there continues to be no movement. The vote was at ninety-three percent. Can you have Nicky up there pronto?”

“By this weekend. Who's the MFWIC again?” Ron asked. (MFWIC, pronounced “miffwick,” was an old campaign acronym which meant “mother-fucker-what's-in-charge.”) “Tony something?”

“Tony Boltanski,” said Weingould in clipped, flat tones, as if he were some sort of FBI agent filling another agent in on Tony's sordid past.

“What's his story?”

“We got him from SEIU. He ran that Connecticut election that won the whole Fairhaven system. A month into that campaign the hospital had him roughed up by some security guards. He told them he'd take it out of their sorry asses, and he stayed there, getting in their faces for two years, until they won that thing. He's a good guy.”

Tony Boltanski was a good guy, all right. The best. The American worker had no better friend than Tony Boltanski, veteran of the Smithson Mine strike, the Superlink Telephone lockout, and the Hedgerow Farms blueberry pickers' famous 1989 boycott. The tougher a fight looked to be, the faster Tony was there.

Tony Boltanski was a real pro, and the Toilers had been smart to hire him. He was also a self-centered, pugnacious, uncompromising emotional deaf-mute whom I had no wish to see again, let alone be cooped up with for the duration of what promised to be a bitter and
prolonged strike that the public would regard with little initial sympathy. Nurses leaving their patients was right up there with police officers or firefighters walking off the job.

“And Murray?” said Ron. “Anything to watch out for there?”

“Just take a look at her,” Weingould said, grabbing a videocassette from a shoe box, which he then kicked under his desk. “This is from the Nurses' March on Washington last January,” he said. “The ANA was there, SEIU, AFSCME, everyone who's into nurses. Murray was one of the leadoff speakers. You'll see she knows how to handle herself. Damn it, what happened to the volume? Wait.”

He fiddled with a few push buttons, turning off the videocassette player by accident. Noisy static filled the screen.

“Mary Bridget!” Weingould bellowed. She was already at the door. They had a sixth sense, Weingould's secretaries, like that of a mother who can hear her baby stir in its sleep from three rooms away.

Properly started by Mary Bridget, the tape revealed nurses marching down New Jersey Avenue and East Capitol Street with signs that read, “Every patient deserves a nurse,” and “Patient care first, profits last.” It was a very cold day, you could tell that from the flat, bright blue sky and the wind that whipped at the signs and blew the banners. Most of them were wearing sensible coats or down jackets over their uniforms. Contrary to
Playboy
fantasies, nurses in general are far from glamorous.

“The rally was pushing for a whole series of measures on patients' rights, most of which never made it out of committee,” Weingould said. “But a lot of politicians turned out, since health care is everyone's favorite issue these days. Okay, here she is.”

The camera cut to a woman in a navy blue coat standing at a podium with the Capitol rising behind her. Her dark hair was confined in a low, ladylike ponytail. She wore a small union pin on her lapel, and her hands were gloveless and chapped-looking.

Not many people appear to advantage at a podium. They hang over it, or back gingerly away from the microphone, or mumble into their chests. Clare Murray didn't look half bad. She was tall and sturdy, with wide shoulders held straight back and a rather straight-up-and-down torso that would probably be prone to solid stoutness in
later life. My brother Joey called a certain Celtic cast of feature “potato-faced Irish,” and Clare was one of those, with her square forehead and chin and slightly fleshy cheeks. Her eyes were her greatest beauty, wide-set and straightforward.

Clare's speech was about the need for a national whistle-blower act to protect nurses who spoke out against hospital cost-cutting practices that endanger patients.

“It's not about our being heroes,” she said. “It's not about us against management. It's about our patients. Nowadays, some hospitals are even calling patients ‘care consumer units,' as if by taking the humanity of patients away, it will be easier to forget them, to forget that they're the reason hospitals are there, not the other way around. Well, we're here to say we won't let the patient be forgotten. Not by our hospitals, not by the insurance industry, and not by this Congress.”

The crowd broke out in enthusiastic applause. Clare Murray nodded once and stepped away while the clapping and cheering were still going on.

“She's good, she's very good,” said Ron absently. He was eyeing the next speaker on the tape, a popular blond actress justly respected for her devotion to liberal causes. He was probably picturing her naked. Sometimes I wondered if Ron was strictly faithful to Dana. Some men had a roving eye. Ron's entire persona roved, searching new worlds to charm and seduce. His romantic bravado in the days of his singleness had made Rudolf Valentino look self-effacing in comparison, and it was hard to believe that marriage, even a prospering marriage, had changed him entirely.

“Yeah, but Clare Murray may not be able to hold this thing together,” said Weingould. “This thing's a war of attrition. Basically, can our nurses stay out on strike long enough and cause the hospital enough grief so that it's less trouble for them to deal with us than to fight us? That's the question.”

Without glancing in my direction, he handed me the St. Francis file, then two five-pound binders of background material for light reading.

“How fast did you say you can get her up there again?” he asked Ron.