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8,000 Nurses and Caregivers Prepare to Strike for Fair Wages in Seattle While CEO Gets 157% Pay Increase

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File this one under: absolutely not okay.

Nurses and caregivers have announced that they are moving closer toward an imminent strike at Swedish Medical Center, the largest healthcare provider in the Seattle area, saying that Providence needs to put patient safety before CEO pay.

Nurses and caregivers are raising alarms that patient care problems and severe understaffing have worsened since Swedish was taken over by the corporate giant Providence, Washington’s largest healthcare corporation which now controls over 1,000 facilities in seven states. Meanwhile, compensation for Providence’s CEO skyrocketed 157 percent to over $10.5 million in 2017. Providence raked in $24 billion in revenue in 2018, and $970 million in profits in just the first three quarters of 2019.

Supermajorities of caregivers have authorized strikes at each of the seven Swedish locations – First Hill, Cherry Hill, Ballard, Edmonds, Issaquah and ambulatory care centers in Redmond and Mill Creek – but management refused to make meaningful progress at the last contract negotiations on December 9.

If the strike occurs, members of SEIU Healthcare 1199NW at Swedish would be part of more than 13,000 total strikers at 13 Providence locations throughout the state, including members of UFCW 21 and the Washington State Nurses Association. This would be the largest healthcare strike in recent history.

Since April, Swedish-Providence nurses, nursing assistants, techs, lab workers, dietary workers, environmental service workers, clerks, social workers, and others have been proposing urgent solutions to Swedish-Providence executives. Contract proposals include: safe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios, affordable health benefits, expanded training opportunities, safeguards against racial discrimination on the job, and fair wages that recruit and retain qualified staff.

Executives have rejected almost all proposals, instead threatening steep cuts to caregivers’ sick time and repeatedly breaking federal labor law by violating caregivers’ rights.

“Being an emergency room nurse is very stressful, but I do this work because I love my patients and feel like I make a real difference in their lives,” said Whittney Powers, who works the 1 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift at Swedish Edmonds. “I’ve been alarmed to see a steep decline is staffing levels throughout our hospital and nurses are overextended. The safe staffing standard in emergency rooms is one nurse for every four patients, which should be followed at all times. But we are often required to care for five or six patients at a time, many of whom can be in severe distress.”

Powers added, “We often hear complaints from patients that they have to wait a long time for care or can’t get their pain medication in a timely manner. Because they’re also understaffed on the hospital floors, some patients have to stay for days in the emergency room hallways. One of the reasons we’re understaffed is that there’s been a mass exodus of employees because our wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living. I pay $1,750 for a studio apartment in Seattle and struggle to make the rent. It’s frustrating that Swedish-Providence has the funds to improve patient safety and staffing, but instead they’re being misappropriated to huge executive pay packages. That makes us feel like patients and staff aren’t valued at Swedish.”

Multiple studies have proven that unsafe staffing levels in hospitals can lead to lower quality care and patient harm, including falls, medication errors and increased deaths. Recently, the Washington State Office of Administrative Hearings found that, in the Swedish First Hill Organ Transplant department, “The employer’s failure to respond to the severe staffing shortages and manager hostility and retaliation, all of which jeopardized patient health and staff health, shows a complete disregard for patient care and safety as well as a complete lack of regard for their own employees.”

In one example of worsening understaffing, 11,416 babies were born at Swedish in 2018, 2,000 more than in 2015. Yet, there are only three additional registered nurses in the labor and delivery department. In another example, Swedish had 1,571 patient beds in 2018, 145 more than in 2015. Despite this, Swedish only has one additional environmental service worker to clean and disinfect patient rooms.

“Sometimes environmental service techs can have 26 rooms to clean in an eight-hour shift, and this kind of pressure can lead to dirty rooms and the danger of infection being spread to patients,” said Angel Sherbourne, a certified healthcare environmental service technician who has worked at Swedish First Hill for over five years. “If we don’t have enough staffing, patient rooms can’t be cleaned and sanitized correctly, and workers get burned out, sick and injured. On top of that, we can’t afford to live in the communities where we work. My husband and I have been renting a small room for $850 a month, and struggling to buy a decent house that isn’t falling apart.”

In 2017, the neurosurgery department at Swedish Cherry Hill had a patient safety scandal severe enough to warrant concurrent FBI, U.S. Attorney General, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Washington state Department of Health investigations. Despite Swedish-Providence’s public declaration to solve the crisis, management has since cut staff, including the system-wide elimination of the IV nurse team. It appears that the fundamental cause of the scandal, a focus on increasing profits instead of patient safety, is still infecting the corporate culture at Swedish-Providence.

Approximately 1,000 healthcare workers a year leave Swedish-Providence and there are currently about 900 vacant staff positions. 600 of those positions are registered nurses, and 50 percent of open positions have gone unfilled for 60 days or longer. One of the reasons that Swedish-Providence has difficulty with recruitment and retention is that wages for frontline workers are not keeping up with the soaring cost of living.

Swedish-Providence pays almost 40 percent of its employees below the salary necessary to afford the average one-bedroom apartment in the Seattle area.

Providence management has also broken federal labor law multiple times with unfair labor practices including: retaliating against and terminating employees for union activity; unlawfully surveilling employees; intimidating workers to stop them from speaking out; refusing to provide information necessary to bargain a fair contract; and refusing to bargain in good faith.

The next contract bargaining session with Swedish-Providence management is scheduled for December 30, and if executives do not make significant progress toward improving patient safety and staffing, caregivers say they will set the exact date of their strike shortly thereafter.

“I’ve been a Swedish nurse for 31 years, and I’ve stayed here this long because I’m deeply committed to fulfilling our stated mission of providing excellent patient care,” said Terry Thompson, who works in Swedish Ballard’s perioperative department. “But it’s close to impossible to offer the care our vulnerable patients need because we’re always rushing. Many new nurses go home crying because they feel they could have done better if they had a more manageable patient load. Decisions are being made by executives in corporate offices miles away, who rarely step foot in our hospital. Nurses and healthcare workers are here at the bedside and we must have a voice in setting safe staffing levels. These millionaire Providence executives need to look within and ask themselves if they’re going to do what’s right to protect patient care.”

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Buttigieg: Republicans Are Targeting LGBTQ People Because They ‘Don’t Want to Talk About’ Their Own ‘Radical Positions’

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June 6, 2023

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U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg blasted Republicans attacking the LGBTQ community on Tuesday, saying the reason right-wing lawmakers have decided to target them is they don’t want to talk about their “radical positions,” including opposing President Joe Biden’s massive infrastructure law and other accomplishments, like $35 insulin.

Appearing on MSNBC, Secretary Buttigieg was asked to weigh in on the Human Rights Campaign’s declaration earlier in the day, of a national emergency in the U.S. for LGBTQ people.

“We have officially declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States for the first time following an unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year,” the organizations says on its website. “More than 75 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been signed into law this year alone, more than doubling last year’s number, which was previously the worst year on record.”

HRC also published a detailed chart by state on various issues, including bans on gender-affirming care, sports participation, drag, or support for forced student outing.

And while HRC points to the more than 75 bills that have been signed into law this year, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says it’s currently tracking 491 anti-LGBTQ bills across the country.

READ MORE: Bill Barr Slams Trump: DOJ Not ‘Conducting a Witch Hunt’ – ‘He Jerked Them Around’ – ‘No Excuse for What He Did’

“Our country is at a very real risk of backsliding on freedom and equality but that is exactly why we continue to push. There has been extraordinary work that’s been done just in this presidency,” Buttigieg said, responding to HRC’s national emergency declaration. He specifically pointed to “the President being able to sign the Respect for Marriage Act.”

“And if you zoom out to the progress that’s been made in the last 10 or 15 years, including the ability of somebody like me to be standing here doing this job, it’s extraordinary, and yet, now you see the attacks on the LGBTQ community, especially on the trans community and what they’re going through,” Buttigieg, who is the first out gay U.S. Cabinet Secretary, told MSNBC’s Chris Jansing.

“And I think it’s being done out of the perception that it is politically convenient to target vulnerable groups. And honestly, I think where it largely comes from is folks who don’t want to talk about why they were against the infrastructure loans, building roads and bridges. They don’t want to talk about why they were against $35 insulin that the President delivered for Medicare recipients. They don’t want to explain why they were for these radical positions that speak to what those people are worried about their everyday lives.”

RELATED: ‘Can’t Take a Joke’: Mike Pence Doubles Down on His Homophobic Attack Against Pete Buttigieg (Video)

“So they’re focused on targeting some of the people who already do not have a very easy time going about everyday life,” he said.

“Think about how hard it is to be a teenager to begin with. But think about how hard it is to be a teenager when you realize that you are different when you’re coming to terms with your gender identity or you’re coming to terms with realizing that you’re gay or lesbian.”

“The last thing you need in your life are politicians trying to score political points by making things worse for you. We’re gonna stand together, whether it’s pride or just on any given day and say no, we’re going to expand, not withdraw, the freedoms and equalities we won in this country, and we’re going to build on them.”

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Bill Barr Slams Trump: DOJ Not ‘Conducting a Witch Hunt’ – ‘He Jerked Them Around’ – ‘No Excuse for What He Did’

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June 6, 2023

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Bill Barr, once Donald Trump‘s favorite attorney general and the one who was seen as his “faithful protector and personal henchman” for his “willingness to enable Trump’s darkest impulses,” came out swinging against his former boss Tuesday, refuting his “witch hunt” claims, and saying the ex-president “jerked” DOJ around over hundreds of classified and top secret documents he refused to return.

“I think if based on the facts, as the facts come out, I think over time, people will say that this is not a case of the Department of Justice, you know, conducting a ‘witch hunt,'” Barr told CBS News Tuesday, ahead of what many believe is an impending indictment on what experts say could include charges of obstruction of justice and charges under the Espionage Act.

“In fact,” Barr continued, praising his former agency, “they approached this very delicately, with deference to the President, and this would have gotten nowhere had the President just returned the documents.”

Instead, Barr said, Trump “jerked them around for a year and a half. And the question is, did he deceive them? And if there’s evidence of that, I think people will start to see that this says more about Trump than it does the Department of Justice.”

The ex-president who is once again running to retake the Oval Office, Barr says, is “so egotistical that he has this penchant for conducting risky, reckless acts to show that he can sort of get away with it.”

READ MORE: Will Santos Choose Jail? Judge Rules Names of Persons Who Provided His Half-Million Dollar Bond Must Be Made Public

“It’s part of asserting his his, his ego, and he’s done this repeatedly at the expense of all the people who depend on him to conduct the public’s business in an honorable way. And, you know, we saw that with both impeachments, and there’s no excuse for what he did here.”

Referring to what many believe is an impending indictment over the classified documents he removed from the White House and refused to return, Barr added, “I’ve said for a while that I think this is the most dangerous legal risk facing the former president. And if I had to bet I would bet that it’s near.”

He said DOJ would not try to indict “if there’s not enough evidence, but from what I’ve seen, there’s substantial evidence there.”

But true to form, Barr also defended his former boss.

Whether what Trump’s done is “a crime or not remains to be seen,” he said, while refusing to weigh in on whether or not he thinks Trump “deceived” DOJ.

Later in the interview, Barr went full-force on supporting Trump’s claims that the Russia investigation was a hoax.

“I went into the administration halfway through, and I did it at a time where I felt he was being treated unfairly on the Russia gate thing. I thought that was, you know, turned out to be I think a big lie,” Barr said.

“And I felt that he was the duly elected president and he deserved a chance to conduct his administration. And I went in because I thought I could help stabilize things and also have the administration conducted in an appropriate way. And as I felt the idea that the election was stolen was a big lie.”

READ MORE: ‘Isn’t There a Beach in Mexico Waiting for You?’: Cruz Mocked for Claiming Garland Will Indict Trump Over SCOTUS Seat Loss

And despite it all, despite everything that has come out about Trump’s actions and alleged actions, despite the looming indictment – on top of a current indictment – Barr says if Trump is the Republican party’s nominee for president he will still support him.

“I don’t see myself not supporting the Republican candidate,” Barr said.

Taking a swing at President Joe Biden, Barr said neither the current nor the former president are “fit for the office.”

“But if I’m confronted with that choice, I have to go with policy, who’s closest to me on policy,” regardless of who might be convicted of breaking the law, including on our national secrets.

Watch a clip from the interview below or at this link.

 

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‘Isn’t There a Beach in Mexico Waiting for You?’: Cruz Mocked for Claiming Garland Will Indict Trump Over SCOTUS Seat Loss

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June 6, 2023

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U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is being roundly mocked after claiming Attorney General Merrick Garland will indict Donald Trump because he “hates” the ex-president and because he is angry his early 2016 nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was blocked.

“They hypocrisy is massive,” Sen. Cruz declared on Fox News Monday night. “And mark my words: I believe Merrick Garland will indict Donald Trump. He wants to indict Donald Trump because he hates Donald Trump. He hates him – he’s angry – Merrick Garland is angry that he wasn’t confirmed to the Supreme Court. he wants to indict him.”

Cruz, who has a law degree from Harvard, is wrong on the basic facts, and he’s being widely mocked for it.

As many are pointing out, first, Attorney General Garland appointed Jack Smith as Special Prosecutor. Smith, who was appointed as Acting U.S. Attorney by Donald Trump in 2017, will make the decision on whether or not to present charges to a grand jury. The grand jury, not Garland and not Smith, will make the decision on whether or not to indict Trump.

Also, whether or not Garland has any anger about not being confirmed by the U.S. Senate, that anger would rightly be pointed to then Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who took the unprecedented step of refusing to even allow a committee hearing to consider his nomination.

READ MORE: Jim Jordan Demands Merrick Garland Hand Over Documents Authorizing Special Counsel’s Trump Investigation

McConnell did that in early 2016, even before Trump was the GOP’s presidential nominee. Trump had nothing to do with blocking Garland’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This is dangerous,” warned foreign policy and intelligence expert John Sipher, who spent nearly three decades in the Central Intelligence Agency’s National Clandestine Service. “He knows what he’s doing and he’s risking violence.”

After Cruz’s Fox News appearance, he posted video of his own remarks and baselessly tweeted, “Merrick Garland is the most partisan Attorney General in American history. He has corrupted the DOJ, the FBI, and the machinery of government. And now, out of nothing but a sense of hatred and political retribution, Garland is trying to indict Trump.”

Later, on Tuesday he added, “Merrick Garland has corrupted the Department of Justice and effectively turned it into an arm of the Democratic National Committee. The FBI and DOJ want to protect and insulate Joe Biden and the Biden family’s corruption.”

None of his allegations have any basis in publicly-known fact.

Cruz came under fire in 2021 after advising Trump’s legal team during the ex-president’s second impeachment, even though he would also be a juror – and supposedly impartial – in Trump’s Senate trial. In December of 2020 Cruz told Trump he would “be happy” to argue a proposed Supreme Court lawsuit designed to keep Trump in power despite having lost the election one month earlier.

Author Cliff Schecter labeled Cruz’s claims on Fox News, “Complete horses*t, which is Ted’s brand.”

READ MORE: ‘This Is It, Make No Mistake’: ‘Nihilistic Moron’ Trump Heading for Another Indictment Says George Conway

“But, if true, Garland would be doing more re his SCOTUS rejection than @tedcruz did when Trump called his wife ugly,” he added. “Ted doesn’t get why Garland wouldn’t just make hostage video phone calls for Trump’s campaign.”

Historian and author Kevin M. Kruse: “The line that ‘they’re only indicting Trump for the crimes Trump clearly did because they hate Trump’ is pathetic when it comes from Trump himself, but Jesus Christ, it is twelve kinds of sad when it comes from one of his lickspittles.”

Reporter and award-winning columnist David Lazarus noted, “Republicans keep insisting Trump is being investigated and prosecuted because people in power hate him. That’s one theory. Or Trump is being investigated and prosecuted because he kept breaking the law.”

Lincoln Project co-founder Jennifer Horn, a former New Hampshire Republican State Committee chair, blasted Cruz.

“I’m sure it has nothing to do with classified documents or inciting an insurrection,” she said, referring to the two major portions of Smith’s investigation. And referring to Cruz’s infamous exit during a state-wide crisis when he hightailed out to Cancun, she asked: “Isn’t there a beach in Mexico waiting for you?”

Watch video of Cruz above or at this link.

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