Midwest hospital workers to join fight for $15 hourly wage
Sector overtakes manufacturing’s dominance
Last year, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump pulled off an upset victory by targeting laid-off and disgruntled factory workers in the traditionally Democratic Midwest.
Now, the nation’s largest service-worker union is mobilizing Midwest hospital employees — who have largely replaced the region’s factory workers as its predominant labor force — in a bid to shape 2018 midterm elections.
Midwest hospital workers will join fast-food workers in nationwide protests Monday, Labor Day, as they demand a minimum wage of $15 an hour and the right to join a union.
The event — which will involve strikes by many fast-food workers but not hospital employees — will be the latest in a series of demonstrations orchestrated by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the worker group it spawned, Fight for $15, over the past five years. In many Midwest cities, the marches are expected to end at local hospitals.
The Labor Day protests will launch a year-long drive to prod voters, particularly in Midwest battleground states, to support the mostly Democratic candidates who back a $15 minimum wage and union rights. While hospital workers can theoretically try to organize, they often are punished for doing so with undesirable shifts or other measures, worker advocates say.
“Hospitals are the largest employers in most cities in the United States,” including the Midwest, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry said. “Pittsburgh used to be dominated by U.S. Steel. Now it’s the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.”
Few Midwest hospital workers are unionized, while in coastal cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Seattle, at least half belong to unions, Henry said. Unions give workers the right to collectively bargain and seek better pay, benefits and conditions. That has led to stark pay disparities across the country, with certain health care support occupations paying more than $20 an hour in New York, more than double the rate in Midwest cities such as Detroit and Chicago, Henry said.
From 2001 to 2016, manufacturing lost 1.4 million jobs in the Midwest, while health care gained 1.3 million jobs, a shift that provides health care a regional workforce of about 5.3 million, compared with 4.5million for manufacturing, according to a study by the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group. Hospitals represent the largest sector in health care, NELP says.
The mirror-image fortunes of the two industries are expected to persist. With Baby Boomers aging, health care is the fastestgrowing U.S. industry, and its payrolls are projected to increase 21% from 2014 to 2024, while manufacturing employment is seen falling 7%, according to the NELP study and Labor Department forecasts.
Yet while manufacturing workers for decades benefited from solid middle-class paychecks and heavily unionized work forces, about 70% of hospital workers earn less than $15 an hour, the NELP report says. By comparison, 42% of all workers make less than $15 hourly, the group says.
To be sure, doctors and registered nurses sometimes enjoy healthy salaries, but many more hospital workers are on the lower rungs of the pay scale, including nurses’ assistants, patient transporters and others doing critical work, NELP says.
“Many people doing work on the front lines of hospitals are paid so little they live in poverty,” Henry said.
“Many people doing work on the front lines of hospitals are paid so little they live in poverty.” Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry