BROOKLYN — Medical care for working people, and the jobs of the workers who provide it are under attack in Brooklyn, as elsewhere. The good news is that workers are fighting back against layoffs, cutbacks and hospital closings.
At Downstate Medical Center, part of the State University of New York, workers are now suffering layoffs in every department, even as the state spends tens of millions on an outside consultant, PITT Management, hired to orchestrate the layoffs. Despite the construction of two big new buildings, the administration claims there’s no money!
No money for workers’ health, that is. In an area that’s heavily populated by Black and Latin working-class families, where racist cops have killed young Black workers including Shantel Davis and Kiki Gray, and where more, not less, health care is needed, Governor Andrew Cuomo has cut funds for this safety-net hospital. Long Island College Hospital has been closed. Interfaith and Brookdale workers are fighting to stop closings.
Inside the remaining hospitals, conditions are deteriorating due to the layoffs. The cleaning department is so depleted that workers are exhausting themselves with mandated overtime. Other workers have also been loaded with more work, including nurses. Large areas of maintenance have been contracted out. And yet, despite having three unions, the only advice these bosses give workers is to keep their heads down and hope that lawyers can get them reinstated! The unions hide the number of layoffs and collaborate openly with the bosses to keep us pacified.
But workers and neighborhood residents are far from pacified. In the past, we organized protests outside of the hospital with many community members joining hospital workers against layoffs and the closing of the hospital. That’s the spirit of struggle that we need to re-awaken now to stop the racist layoffs. The bosses use us as pawns for profit; only a communist system can take us out of the chaos of the capitalist system. And only the working class, united and led by its communist party, PLP, can win that future for our class.