From Carolyn Kube MT (ASCP), Vice President for Professionals, United University Professions (UUP) at SUNY, HELU Steering Committee Member and Outreach Committee Vice Chair
Just as faculty and staff say, “Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions,” healthcare workers say, “Our working conditions are our patients living or dying conditions.”
Higher Education Labor United (HELU) is a national organization that builds union solidarity in higher education coast-to-coast and wall-to-wall. Many colleges and universities include healthcare workers in their hospitals, medical schools, and medical centers on their campuses. Examples are Stony Brook Medicine, Tufts, Emory University, and the University of Pittsburgh – all of which have academic medical centers. If you are a healthcare professional, a nurse, doctor, radiology tech, respiratory therapist, patient access professional or medical technologist like me in a higher education union, come join us in HELU!
As the current administration continues its attack on higher education, it will also focus its attack on healthcare. Since the pandemic, our healthcare systems have been short-staffed and, in most cases, administrations have done little to correct what the pandemic illustrated about how inequitably healthcare is administered in the U.S.
Profiteers have taken over our hospitals and put patients’ lives on the line. They are forcing the closure of hospitals that do not make a profit. Insurance companies tell us how and when to treat our patients. The corporatization of both academia and healthcare are ruining the quality of education and health respectively for many of our students and patients. Just as faculty and staff say, “Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions,” healthcare workers say, “Our working conditions are our patients living or dying conditions.”
The other day, President Trump signed one of his first executive orders that will affect healthcare in this country by exiting the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO is a global organization that directs how the flow of data for infectious diseases is maintained and accessed around the world. The consequences of this action will impact our ability to predict and fight the next pandemic as well as who may take over NIH and CDC. Funding cuts will have dire consequences for all the citizens of our country.
Thankfully our unions protect working conditions and safety in our respective hospitals and academic medical centers. Our state laws may protect us for a time based on laws passed in Congress. We will need to stand together against cuts to NIH grants that are vital to making scientific breakthroughs for diseases like Alzheimer’s, ALS, and cancer. Attacks on Affordable Care and Medicaid funding will inhibit or prevent access to healthcare for millions of people. Hanging federal funding on contingencies (such as no diversity and inclusion policies) will divide us further. Changes in the Medicaid formulas will starve our medical centers of funding, causing closures of safety net hospitals that care for the uninsured and underinsured. We will have a full-on public health crisis that our healthcare system is already teetering on at this moment.
We cannot individually fight hospital closings, cuts to research, staffing freezes, and decreasing access to healthcare. None of us has those resources alone. Joining together in a community with a unified voice along with our national and international affiliates and communities will double down our political power! We are going to need to stand in solidarity together like never before.
I know many of you all are fighting against some of these harms already. When we fight, we win. We stand shoulder to shoulder together in a way we have never done before. Imagine the positive change we can make happen!