I had the great pleasure of being with President Susan King of the Oregon Nurses Association and President Steve Rooney of the National Federation of Nurses when I spoke to the Convention of the Oregon Nurses Association last week in Eugene, Oregon.
What a great three days! What a wonderful union! What a great group of people!
An organizing union, the Oregon Nurses Association keeps organizing all over the state, constantly helping nurses form their own union at their workplaces.
The theme of the convention was The Role of Nurses in a Changing Healthcare Environment, reflecting the work healthcare unions are doing now to prepare for the changes Obamacare will produce.
These big battles and stand-offs happening in Washington DC affect almost every aspect of our lives and millions of workers are impacted: nurses, nurse aides, climate scientists, VA workers who busted their butts to work through the backlog, forest service and rangers who protect our national forests, historical places, museums, and monuments.
The decisions also affect those at the EPA who’ve done so much in the last 30 years to clean up our air, streams, rivers, and lakes, NASA workers, and right in my neighborhood the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who follow the weather — especially important now in hurricane season.
Then of course there are those who keep FEMA ready for the nest national emergency, and the parents of troops killed in the line of duty who can’t get the death benefits after the deaths of their young sons and daughters.
There are also the rangers at Harpers Ferry who tell the story of John Brown’s raid, which lead inexorably to the Civil War and Storer College in Harpers Ferry, the first African-American college in America. The NAACP was founded at that same college by the great Black intellectual and organizer W.E.B. DuBois who was later deported by the US government.
There are the folks at the USDA who inspect our meat — there’s gonna be some ugly consequences here. Plus there’s all the federal contractors and their staffs who are in many cases small business people. They could lose their businesses and lay off their workers if the shutdown continues.
And what is the response of the radical right-wing? Stuart Varney recently said on Fox, “I don’t think [these workers] should get their back pay, frankly, I really don’t. I’m sick and tired of a massive, bloated federal bureaucracy living on our backs, and taking money out of us, a lot more money than most of us earn in the private sector, then getting a furlough, and then getting their money back at the end of it. Sorry, I’m not for that. I want to punish these people.”
As usual workers are simply forgotten collateral damage as the minions of the plutocrats in the Congress pander to America’s worst instincts and the wishes of the Koch boys, Heritage Action, and others trying to run a quiet civilian coup of OUR COUNTRY.
Nurse this anger. Nurse their contempt in your soul, nurse their hatred of us, stoke the fires in your hearts, screw your courage to the sticking place. We either beat them or they destroy our country and severely damage the world.
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