#1.
FERMENT
May 10 , 1994Roy Lisker Author/Editor
Volume VIII, #10 197 Franklin Street Cambridge, Ma. 02139
I. Introduction
In the history of the modern labor movement, the strategies of confrontation with management have generally entailed some form of hindrance to production : the strike; the slow-down; boycotts; occupations; even sabotage. Many of these strategies have ceased to be effective. Encouraged by a series of right-wing administrations, coporate lawyers have developed a wide range of methods for winning out over traditional union strategies
" ..Union busting has taken a new and more sophisticated form, replacing confrontation with litigation and procrastination; organizing drives are worn down by endless hearings, petitions and postponements; contracts grind on through rounds of charges, counter-charges and appeals...... It's an approach that's capable of disarming even labor's ultimate weapon, the strike. To many management teams, a formerly unionized factory or office restaffed overnight with low-wage , unrepresented 'replacement workers' is the best of all possible corporate worlds....." [ The Goodbye ColumbiaCampaign , Fedosiuk and Pastreich. See Bibliography )
Imaginative union activists, seasoned by the struggles of the 60’s, have been coming up with a number of original ideas for meeting the challenges posed by the enhanced capabilities of their corporate adversaries. Using the recent activities of the Hospital Workers Union, Local 767, on Cape Cod as its paradigm , this article will be about the theory and practice of these new strategies .
One of the heartening success stories coming out of this new context is that of the Goodbye Columbia campaign of 1986. Mounted by Cape Cod's HWU#767 in Hyannis, against the nursing home conglomerate, Columbia Corporation, it let to the withdrawal of Columbia's interests on the Cape, then in the state of Massachusetts, and eventually to its bankruptcy a year later. Columbia's lawyers had assured the union that negociation was impossible , and Bill Pastreich, HWU's staff director, agreed with them. The union therefore decided that it made more sense to drive Columbia out of business. Such actions are known as “corporate campaigns”.
The article will be in 3 parts. In the first I will outline the essential features of the Goodbye Columbia campaign, 1986-87. In the second I will give a brief sketch of the current campaign, begun in April of 1993 , against 7 Cape nursing homes. Lastly I will depict the meeting/ rally of Cape Cod Cares, a broad coalition of labor, advocacy and activist groups in the area of hospital service employees , held in the auditorium of the Federation Church in Hyannis on August 28th of last year.
The deeper purpose in my writing this article is that I’ve never done anything like this before.
II. Prelude to the Corporate Campaign
" Few of these newcomers have any experience in nursing homes or in any other aspect of the health field. All they know is how to make money.."..M.A. Mendelson
The Hospital Workers Union (HWU) Local 767 in located at 94 Main Street, Hyannis, MA. 02601,Tel 508- 771 -1416 . It is a division of the Service Employees International Union
( SEIU), which is itself a member of the AFL-CIO ). It is almost exactly 8 years ago, in April 1986, that its activists concluded that neither negotiation nor traditional methods of direct action could prevail against the managers of 2 large nursing homes for the elderly in Hyannis: Whitehall Pavilion and Whitehall Manor. These were: The Columbia East Corporation, president George Hargrave, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Columbia Corporation, founded in 1984 by George P. Van and headquatered in Nashville ,Tennessee, the self-styled 'hub' of the corporate warehousing racket of the nursing home chains, the new class of self-made "miners of grey gold."
A photograph on the front page of the Cape Cod Times of September 29th, 1986, shows George Van standing behind a desk, beside and before which are seated his two associates ,Joyce Y. Finkenstein and Alfred W. Taylor III. It looks like a scene right out of the TV series , "Dallas". There is nothing monstrous in the appearance of any of them, certainly not of George Van, who looks rather like a recent graduate of the Harvard Business School who has just come back from the barbers with a new haircut. There is nothing in the appearance, manner nor, I am sure , in the shallow rather than dark, hearts of these people to conjure up the mythic features of classic nursing home bogeypersons such as the immortal Eugene Woods of Cleveland ,Ohio ( "Tender Loving Greed", by Mary Adelaide Mendelson. See Bibliography ) . The rather cozy group is quite a distance from the legendary vampires of the past. They are typical in fact, of the dominant trend in the domain of elderly care, the transfer of the property, power and profit latent in the one and one-half million beds of the age-old old-age industry, from small families , (with motivations ranging from remarkable compassion to revolting greed), to an army of faceless real-estate profiteers determined to squeeze the utmost revenue from the bottom line.
In the 18 years between the opening of these homes by the Alan White family in 1967, and their sale to the rapidly expanding conglomerate, Columbia Corporation of Nashville, Tennessee in 1984 , these homes had, relative to the standards of the industry, earned a good reputation for elderly care. Indeed, in the final year of White’s tenure, Whitehall Manor was cited as “the best run nursing home in Massachusetts." There are about 2 dozen large nursing homes on the Cape. All of these were originally family concerns. By the end of the 80's, most of them had been sold to the large nursing home chains.
The Canadian George P. Van was considered by his admirers in the real estate business as something of a boy wonder . He was not entirely unexperienced in the management of nursing homes, 'management' being taken as a synonym for real-estate speculation. In 1980, he founded a corporation called "Health Group, Inc.", a chain of hospitals, psychiatric clinics and nursing homes. Four years later it was sold for 9 million $'s .
He then began buying up nursing homes ; within 20 months, Columbia Corporation owned 39 homes around the country. Its two subsidiaries, Columbia East, directed by George Hargrave, and Columbia West, directed by David Kremser had, as is standard practice, been 'bought' by a trust company invented by Van and his associates, for 10 times their value, thereby increasing the Medicaid, Medicare and the payment scales of all other governmental programs in the same proportion, as well as Columbia's profile on the stock market.
What happened in the two Whitehall facilities after their purchase by Columbia in September, 1985, is typical of contemporary trends throughout the industry:
"The chains make their acquisitions and then bleed the facilities .There are enormous profits to be made here." (Cathy Hawes, Research Triple Institute, Chapel Hill, North Carolina).
The quality of patient care deteriorated precipitously. This was consistent with its record in other states such as Texas and California. Cuts were made in all the areas affecting patient care, notably food, medical services, staff/patient densities, salaries. Senior staff were muscled out of their jobs , vacations reduced, workloads increased beyond the job description.
Taking examples from one area, the number of persons working in the kitchen at meal times was cut from an average of 8 to no more than 2, sometimes 1. Renee Alderson, formerly the dietary supervisor, was instructed to spend no more than $2.40 a day per inmate ( Under the Whites, the daily ration was $3.37). She also quickly found herself fulfilling 3 job descriptions: dietician, food service supervisor and cook! When she complained about this, she was tersely informed by Joyce Finkenstein, who seems to have been in charge of communicating the ugly news to the Whitehall homes, that the total investment in kitchen labor could not exceed "34 man hours per week ." Alderson was encouraged to quit, which she did, along with many other staff persons who had been with the Whitehall homes for 10 years or more.
George Hogue, the Whitehall Manor housekeeping supervisor, quit his job in the spring of the following year. In an open letter addressed to Whitehall personnel, he revealed that he had been ordered to fire all the best paid employees in his department. His staff, he said, had been cut back to nothing. The facilities were being maintained in a state of appalling filth and were only cleaned just prior to government inspections.
A woman who asked not to be identified, said that she was called in to help with an emergency clean-up before a state inspection. "We stripped every floor in the place. They were quite dirty. The couches and lounges were filthy. The bathrooms looked like pigpens. We had to do each room. ....I've never seen anything so bad..." (Cape Cod Times, Sept 28,93)
This pattern was consistent with what was known about Columbia's other facilities in the Boston area: Reservoir Home in Waltham, and Palm Manor in Chelmsford. A former manager of one of these homes put it this way:
" They're in the nursing home business. They might as well be in the lumber business."
It is certain that they were not in the business of public relations. Any curious visitor, such as the relatives of the elderly patients in the 2 Manors, could immediately tell the difference:
" There was just one maintenance man for the whole building. The place was filthy. The residents toilets were so dirty you just didn't want to go in there." (Betty Russ, nurse )
More flagrant still were the cutbacks on essential supplies.
" A very large shortage of supplies started almost immediately after they took over. The first thing we had nothing of was disposable diapers for the incontinent patients. We had no cloth diapers, no diapers at all. We were using Chucks, pampers with a green plastic lining on the outside that we used to line the beds. We were putting them on the residents' legs to keep them from wetting all over themselves and their clothing.
Before Columbia came , we could go home at night and unwind. But now we were haunted by patients who were being given small portions of food or who were incontinent and had no diapers or who could not be washed properly because there was no soap. " (Carol Stearn, nurses aide)
Those green plastic bedliners, plastic garbage bags basically , were to achieve hallowed eminence in the media onslaught orchestrated by corporate campaign. " The green plastic bedliners attained a certain mythic infamy as symbols of Columbia's managerial corner-cutting. " ( Fedosiuk and Pastreich , op. cit.)
By December the majority of the hospital workers at the Whitehall Manor had decided to join the Hospital Workers Union. Columbia responded immediately, calling in the police to arrest union organizers on the grounds, confiscating literature, firing nurses and nurses aides who were union activists. But their principal strategy lay in acting through the National Labor Relations Board.
The NLRB is an independent federal agency set up to administer the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959. All of these deal with the modes and means of the relationship between labor unions and management. I know almost nothing about it, but I do know that it is not known for its friendliness to the working class. Through its agency, Columbia succeeding in removing all 13 of its charge nurses from the bargaining unit. It then persuaded the NLRB that union elections would have to include both Whitehall Manor and Whitehall Pavilion; it appears that Columbia had more freedom to intimidate the personnel at the Pavilion. Owing to these and other delaying tactics, the union elections could not be held until the second week of April.
The result was 62 -36 in favor of the union. HWU #767 had its foot in the door, and Columbia , beginning with 6 charges of unfair labor practices registered with the NLRB against the union, was determined that it should go no further. The following example is typical of the character of these charges: Columbia's lawyers argued that the supervisory nurses had exerted undue influence on their subordinates by wearing union buttons to work.
It was at about this time, that Bill Pastreich was told by Columbia attorney David W. Miller: " I have beaten other union attempts to organize other nursing homes, and I never expect to sit down at the table and negociate with you."
Pastreich goes on to say: " The decision was made the night of the vote count, actually..I called a friend, Wade Rathke, a fabulous union organizer who'd worked with me many years before on welfare rights. He described having dealt with this same lawyer and having lost four nursing homes and having had many workers fired. That was when we decided to go after'em ,right then and there."
Jane Hewitt's comment: " We never even considered a strike."
*********************************************************************
III. The Goodbye Columbia Campaign
With the advantages, ( much over-rated), of hindsight, it seems obvious today that the Columbia Corporation and its self-styled bucaneers of capitalism, were out of their depth right from the beginnings of the Goodbye Columbia campaign. If it is true that George P. Van saw no essential differences between elderly care and the lumber business, this may also have been his principal handicap. The role of maintaining good public relations in any enterprise bound up with human sentiment ( by which I mean everything ranging from compassion to concern to affection to the grossest sentimentality), seems to have totally escaped him. Not only did he fail to maintain his footing on Cape Cod, but less than two years after the victory of HWU #767, Van's chain of 40 nursing homes went into bankruptcy. Whatever levels of insensitivity may have existed in the directors of Columbia towards the aged inmates of their homes, it is probably true that they would still be in business today if they had done a better job of hiding this fact from the general public. ( On the other hand, 'bankruptcy, staggering debt, changes of ownership, worthless paper assets, etc., are so traditional in this industry as ways of manipulating capital and diffusing ownership, that it is impossible to know how best to interpret this development. )
They also did not have the least grasp of the status, capacities and magnitude of their adversary. Bill Pastreich's career over the past 25 years in the Boston area is so inextricably braided with social activism that in 1968 the Boston Globe Magazine , and in 1987 the Boston Herald, ran feature articles about him, both of them titled, simply "The Organizer" (There can be no higher praise!)
I've only met him a few times, so I can't give much of a description of him, but this may be taken as an approximation:
- Bearded; hawk-eyed, even hawk-beaked; altogether a vulture quality to his appearance; sweet tempered and aims for the jugular; obviously someone who just hangs in there, although quite unassuming- so much so that the entrepreneurs who tackle him just can't imagine what a thorough bastard he is ( from their point of view)-
The details of his career substantiates this admittedly subjective portrait:
-student of Saul Alinsky and Fred Ross.,1965 . Joined the Peace Corps, worked in Chile.,1965-67 .With Cesar Chavez United Farm Workers,1968, and again in 1974 . Organized the large, militant Mass. Welfare Rights Organization,1968-70 . Tenants Rights activist on Cape Cod in the 70's. From this entered into Cape Cod hospital workers movement. 20 years in the labor movement. (Fedosiuk & Pastreich, op. cit.)
In other words, George Van, who had been in the ghoulish business of cannibalizing the elderly for only 6 years, somehow imagined that he could readily prevail against a weather-beaten organizer who had been involved in important labor offensives since the 60's! Because of Columbia's shallow grasp of the contextual realities ,HWU #767 was sucessful in all 3 fronts of its campaign to throw Columbia out of the state of Massachusetts. These were:
(A) The regulatory agencies
(B) The media
(C) The local community, including the relatives of persons inside Whitehall Manor and Whitehall Pavilion, and Cape Cod's many organizations
active in the rights of the elderly and disabled:*
------
* Service Employees International Union (SEIU) ;Hospital Workers Union
( HWU 767); Cape Organization for the Rights of the Disabled ( CORD); Cape United Elderly ( CUE); Elders and Workers Rights; Cape Cod Cares; Nursing Home Council; Cape Emergency; and others.
------
(A) The Regulatory Agencies.
In September,1985, the Massachusetts State Department of Public Health (DPH), gave the Columbia Corporation temporary operating licenses for the two Whitehall homes. There was essentially rubber stamps; there was no review procedure. With 40 homes across the country, Columbia's right to set up operations on Cape Cod raised as few objections as do the intentions of most other large obnoxious corporations in the domain of public health - like McDonald's , whose right to set up a restaurant anywhere in the world goes largely unchallenged.