III. The Goodbye Columbia Campaign
With the advantages, ( much over-rated), of hindsight, it seems obvious today that the Columbia Corporation and its self-styled bucaneers of capitalism, were out of their depth right from the beginnings of the Goodbye Columbia campaign. If it is true that George P. Van saw no essential differences between elderly care and the lumber business, this may also have been his principal handicap. The role of maintaining good public relations in any enterprise bound up with human sentiment ( by which I mean everything ranging from compassion to concern to affection to the grossest sentimentality), seems to have totally escaped him. Not only did he fail to maintain his footing on Cape Cod, but less than two years after the victory of HWU #767, Van's chain of 40 nursing homes went into bankruptcy. Whatever levels of insensitivity may have existed in the directors of Columbia towards the aged inmates of their homes, it is probably true that they would still be in business today if they had done a better job of hiding this fact from the general public. ( On the other hand, 'bankruptcy, staggering debt, changes of ownership, worthless paper assets, etc., are so traditional in this industry as ways of manipulating capital and diffusing ownership, that it is impossible to know how best to interpret this development. )
They also did not have the least grasp of the status, capacities and magnitude of their adversary. Bill Pastreich's career over the past 25 years in the Boston area is so inextricably braided with social activism that in 1968 the Boston Globe Magazine , and in 1987 the Boston Herald, ran feature articles about him, both of them titled, simply "The Organizer" (There can be no higher praise!)
I've only met him a few times, so I can't give much of a description of him, but this may be taken as an approximation:
- Bearded; hawk-eyed, even hawk-beaked; altogether a vulture quality to his appearance; sweet tempered and aims for the jugular; obviously someone who just hangs in there, although quite unassuming - so much so that the entrepreneurs who tackle him just can't imagine what a thorough bastard he is ( from their point of view)-
The details of his career substantiates this admittedly subjective portrait:
-student of Saul Alinsky and Fred Ross.,1965 . Joined the Peace Corps, worked in Chile.,1965-67 .With Cesar Chavez United Farm Workers,1968, and again in 1974 . Organized the large, militant Mass. Welfare Rights Organization,1968-70 . Tenants Rights activist on Cape Cod in the 70's. From this entered into Cape Cod hospital workers movement. 20 years in the labor movement. (Fedosiuk & Pastreich, op. cit.)
In other words, George Van, who had been in the nursing home business for only 6 years, somehow imagined that he could readily prevail against a weather-beaten organizer who had been involved in important labor offensives since the 60's! Because of Columbia's shallow grasp of the contextual realities ,HWU #767 was sucessful in all 3 fronts of its campaign to throw Columbia out of the state of Massachusetts. These were:
(A) The regulatory agencies
(B) The media
(C) The local community, including the relatives of persons inside Whitehall Manor and Whitehall Pavilion, and Cape Cod's many organizations active in the rights of the elderly and disabled:*
* Service Employees International Union (SEIU) ;Hospital Workers Union ( HWU 767); Cape Organization for the Rights of the Disabled ( CORD); Cape United Elderly ( CUE); Elders and Workers Rights; Cape Cod Cares; Nursing Home Council; Cape Emergency; and others.
(A) The Regulatory Agencies.
In September,1985, the Massachusetts State Department of Public Health (DPH), gave the Columbia Corporation temporary operating licenses for the two Whitehall homes. There was essentially rubber stamps; there was no review procedure. With 40 homes across the country, Columbia's right to set up operations on Cape Cod raised as few objections as do the intentions of most other large obnoxious corporations in the domain of public health - like McDonald's , whose right to set up a restaurant anywhere in the world goes largely unchallenged.
However, Columbia still needed permanent licenses, awarded after a certain number of routine inspections. There is little doubt that Columbia would have gotten them, had it not been for the intervention of the HWU.
Bill Pastreich applied his 20 years of political activitism to a unique form of the Volpin "strategy of legality" , ( see Ferment VIII,# 6, January 18th,1994) . Modeled after a strategy invented during the Eastern Airlines strikes of the 1980 , ( the so-called "One Day Longer Than Lorenzo" campaign), and given the treacherously innocuous designation of the Patient Protection Program , it consists in enrolling a good percentage of the employees, ( not all necessarily union members), as a Fifth Column inside the corporation, eager to record and transmit every visible infraction of the regulatory codes, petty, outrageous, routine.
In the Eastern Airlines campaign, the Federal Aviation Administration and the megaton compactifiers of mental junkfood ( the media) "received constant reports of everything from faulty airframe maintenance to squashed insects on the windshields."
The Goodbye Columbia campaign organized both the workers and the paperwork in a relentless fault-finding operation that began in April, 1986 with the blowing of a few whistles, then moved on to flutes, oboes, bassoons and piccolos for the next year and a half , until finally, to the crash of French horns, trombones, tubas and trumpets, it precipitated the rout of Columbia from the Cape in September of 1987.
The workers themselves, largely nurses and nurses aides, were organized into small groups known as "truth squads" . ( In this case the labelling is , in my opinion, socially constructive, although it is not difficult to see how such a terminology, in other contexts, could have quite sinister connotations! ) After the day's work, these groups would come together, and simply check off all the violations they had seen against the entries in long standardized lists, named , in delicious bureaucratese, DISCRIMINATION COMPLAINT FORM (I,II,III,IV...). These forms were gathered up and taken to the headquarters of HWU#767, where they were sorted out and eventually sent along to the Department of Public Health.
Yet, before they were sent off to the DPH : " Bill Pastreich's first stop for about nine months was at Wendy Williams office at the Cape Cod Times." ( Fedosiuk & Pastreich, op[cit.)
( B) The Media
Bill Pastreich's connections with the massed media of eastern Massachussetts reach back over a period of 30 years. Recall the many ways in which he has been involved with political activism in the region: migrant farmers , welfare rights organizations, tenants rights organizations, service workers unions, elderly advocacy groups, hospital workers, and so on. The two dailies on the Cape , the Cape Cod Times and the Register , have a virtual monopoly on the manipulation of mass public opinion. They are always hungry for topical material in an otherwise rather boring part of the world, and whatever Bill Pastreich happens to be doing at any given time is always deemed newsworthy.
Extensive coverage of the Goodybe Columbia campaign was therefore guaranteed . Because of his many years of cultivation of the local media resources , it was also largely favorable. The Cape Cod dailies had very little good to say about the Columbia Corporation. When they did, it was generally a matter of 'damning with faint praise'. As in a human interest story about a young woman , a partly paralyzed stroke victim at the Whitehall Pavilion, in which she says ,more or less: " I don't think it's as awful for the old people living here as it is for me." Followed by a long list of personal complaints about sanitary conditions, (which clearly affected everybody living there) .
Mr. Pastreich, the kind of mischief-making and crude practical joker that , fortunately for us all, has chanelled his energy on the side of the working masses, is not free from that endemic fault of all such people : hubris. Because of this, he committed a number of blunders, one of which gave Goodbye Columbia some serious difficulties.
Crazed by the flux density of stories of neglect, filth, malnutrition, danger, sometimes horror, that were covering the pages of the local papers and coming over the Cape's single cable TV channel, the Columbia Corporation filed one charge after another against the union with the National Labor Relations Board. In August of 1986, when asked to speak about these on a live interview in the studios of the cable station, Bill Pastreich boasted that his goal was to "run Columbia out of business, not negociate a contract with them." This was picked up by newspapers all over the state. David Miller responded immediately by filing aggrevated conflict-of-interest charges with the NLRB against the union. How could it truly be concerned, he barked, with the jobs of its members , if it avows that it is out to bankrupt their employer?
There is something to be said for this - not that anybody who understood the campaign would take it seriously. The plan was that , ultimately, the two Whitehall facilities would be sold to the Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis. This has an excellent record of patient care and a good working relation to the union. Still, the best of plans can always be interrupted by some unstable catastrophe surface ( "gang aft a'gley" as they say) , and it was not inconceivable that Columbia might sell out to individuals or companies worse than they were.
The unorthodox goals and methods of Goodbye Columbia provoked other adverse reactions . With the swelling revelations of serious violations in the management of the Whitehall homes, there emerged a perception on the part of the public that it was the nursing staff themselves who were responsible for the ill treatment given to their charges. Paula Kenworthy, a nurse's aide at Whitehall Manor, put it this way: " It was like [we] were taking the brunt of what Columbia was doing to [us] .. when [the aides] saw something bad in the newspapers - like the garbage bags - [the y] would say,Well, what else am I supposed to do? That makes it look like we're not taking care of the people."
The NLRB did admonish Pastreich and other union spokespersons, who were obliged to tone down their language. By that time however, the campaign was in high gear and the Department of Public Health had run out of patience with the Columbia Corporation. A series of inspections had been held through the spring of 1986 . The findings were unfailingly negative, so much so that in July the DPH froze admissions, leaving 82 beds vacant. Then in August, the NLRB threw out Columbia's list of charges of unfair labor practices against the union. At the same time, HWU#767 was certified as the sole contractual representative of the Whitehall workers.
It was then that Columbia filed its conflict-of-interest charges. The NLRB met in September to consider these. Coincidentally, the Cape Cod Times came out with a 4 part series , summarizing the history of abuses in the Whitehall facilities since its purchase by Columbia Corporation exactly a year before. These will be considered in the next section.
(C) The Community
HWU #767 made direct contact with the families of the residents at both Whitehall facilities. They received mailings that included clippings, summaries of the negative press Columbia had been getting, and statements of union objectives and strategies. Because of these mailings, many families began withdrawing their relatives from the two Whitehall homes.
In addition to this, the union suggested to the families that they themselves ought to observe and report irregularities they saw during their visits to the homes.
The union went still further: HWU activists contacted the families of the residents of the other two Columbia facilities in Massachusetts, the Palm Manor in Chelmsford, and the Reservoir Home in Waltham. Exposes of these places, which were every bit as bad as the ones on the Cape, were serialized in the Middlesex News.
....Reservoir Home: Total kitchen work hours cut from 60 to 45 hours/week. Food ration cut to $2.35/day. Persons working 10 or more years summarily fired. Lunch consisting of a single thin cold-cut. Facility malodorous. Bedsores. 62 neglected incontinent patients..... ( Abridged from Cape Cod Times, September 28 , 1986)
Research through newspapers in different parts of the country very quickly turned up a similar pattern of neglect in Columbia facilities in Texas and California: dirty linen, dirty surroundings, underpaid staff. A fairly common Columbia procedure was to replace experienced nurse's aides with a decade or more of experience, by the high school dropouts who usually end up in behind the counters at the 7-11's or the Dunkin' Donuts . After being given a 3 day crash course in nursing , they were , at derisory wages, put in charge of wards with 40 or more patients. This incident occured at the Whitehall Pavilion , though it could have happened in any Columbia home:
Joan Kane of Yarmouthport went to visit her husband at the Pavilion. During her visit he fell on the floor and broke his arm. He was picked up and rough-handled by half a dozen 16-year old 'nurses aides' and carried to his bed. There he lay for 4 hours, screaming in pain, until taken to a hospital. ( Cape Cod Times, Sept. 28,1993)
Joining forces with Cape Organization for the Rights of the Disabled ( CORD), and Cape United Elderly ( C.U.E.) , two advocacy groups set up by Bill Pastreich and his associates , HWU also sent eyewitness reports of violations to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. As helpless wards of these homes, one could make a case that the elderly were being denied basic rights under existing civil rights legislations.