SEP Vice President Candidate Sends Message to Michigan Medicine Workers: “Healthcare Workers Must Fight to Take Profits Out of Medicine”

More than 7,100 Michigan Medicine hospital workers are locked in a contract battle to win substantial pay increases and benefits, safe staffing levels and other improvements in working conditions. The workers include physician assistants, medical technicians, respiratory therapists, phlebotomists and patient services staff at the Ann Arbor-based health system, which reported $226.5 million in operating profit for its latest fiscal year ended June 30.

Like other health care institutions, Michigan Medicine received hundreds of millions in federal COVID-19 relief funds and has used them not to improve patient care and the conditions of its employees, but to expand its for-profit business. After securing $256 million in federal funds, Michigan Medicine and its subsidiary University of Michigan Health have been “gobbling up market share” in the state, including acquiring six-hospital Sparrow Health in Lansing, building a new $920 million health care pavilion in Ann Arbor and expanding into the Grand Rapids area.

The University of Michigan Board of Regents has resisted employee demands and, according to a statement from United Michigan Medicine Allied Professionals (UMMAP), has begun a “nine-month filibuster” over a new contract. Despite this, UMMAP and the other unions, United Physician Assistants of Michigan Medicine (UPAMM) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU), have not held a strike vote and have instead organized a powerless “Fair Compensation Request” letter-writing campaign to the UM Board of Regents and a two-hour informational picket on July 29 with employees who were not scheduled to work.

Jerry White, the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for U.S. vice president, issued the following statement to Michigan Medicine employees:

I want to stand in solidarity with Michigan Medicine workers, who, like healthcare workers across the U.S. and around the world, are fighting for wage increases to protect their living standards from the ravages of inflation, safe staffing levels, and decent working conditions. While Michigan Medicine and other healthcare monopolies make billions in profits, workers face prohibitively high housing, education, and healthcare costs, and survive only by increasing their credit card debt.

Hospital leaders hypocritically called healthcare workers “heroes” when they forced workers into COVID-infected hospitals, leading to the deaths and debilitation of so many of your brothers and sisters from Long COVID. After pocketing billions in federal COVID relief money, they have embarked on a wave of mergers and acquisitions, outsourced entire departments to private equity investors, and waged a relentless campaign to cut jobs and cut costs, endangering the health and lives of both workers and patients, even as the pandemic rages on.

Health care workers have been at the forefront of the resurgence of class struggle in recent years, including nearly half of the 33 largest strikes in the United States in 2023. But this year, only three health care strikes involving 1,000 or more workers have been declared. That’s not because the crisis has abated. It’s because the union bureaucracy is determined to prevent strikes from disrupting the overall campaign to elect Kamala Harris and the Democrats.

But Democrats, like Trump and Republicans, are defending the for-profit healthcare system that is responsible for the miserable conditions you and other healthcare workers face today. This includes Obamacare, which was created by insurance companies and healthcare monopolies and incentivizes hospitals to cut costs and lay off staff. This has led to burnout among healthcare workers, increased infections and preventable deaths in hospitals, and the scapegoating of workers like Vanderbilt nurse Radonda Vaught for the inevitable medical errors that occur.

Safe staffing and other improvements will not come from appeals to the UM Board of Regents, a gang of business leaders and politicians who oversaw the brutal suppression of campus protests against the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza. Nor will they come from the creation of more joint labor and management staff committees, subservient to corporate profits.

It will only be won by mobilizing the strength of all Michigan Medicine workers in a united strike action and by appealing to broader sections of the working class. This means building grassroots committees to transfer power from the union apparatus to the workers on the hospital floor. Special warning should be given to the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and former UAW President Bob King, now executive director of UMMAP. Both have long served the interests of big business and the Democratic Party, and rank-and-file workers cannot trust them.

Staffing problems are not an accident. They are a deliberate policy. Hospitals are being run as frugally as possible to maximize profits. At the same time, the Biden administration has overseen the dismantling of all COVID-19 public health measures, even as the death toll surpasses 420 per day and more than 1.4 million Americans have died from the virus. Democrats and Republicans also claim there is no money for decent living standards and health care, even as they spend $1 trillion on war and the health care giants rake in hundreds of billions.

Therefore, profits must be taken out of medicine. The Socialist Equality Party calls for the creation of a socialist health care system to ensure free, high-quality health care for all. This can only be achieved through the development of a powerful and politically independent working class movement.