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V. Recent Activities

7 years after the Goodbye Columbia campaign, it appears that Pastreich and company are still campaigning actively. Like many another resort region in the European world, like Sussex in England, the Riviera, Florida or the Hudson Valley, Cape Cod is a geriatric coast, seeded with warehousings, public and private, ( or for the enrichment of private individuals through public funds) , for the convalescent, the elderly, the retarded, the insane, in general those who have been afflicted with a few more handicaps than the rest of us from the catastrophe of our birth.

Since April of 1993, HWU 767 has been mounting a campaign against no less than 7 homes on the Cape*,

* Freedom Crest; Falmouth Nursing Home; Greenery at Lewis Bay/Hyannis; JML Care Center; Liberty Commons; Mayflower Place; Royal Megansett.

using a diverse assortment of innovative tactics unique in the history of the labor movement . Their aims in this offensive do not seem to include bankrupting the corporations , ( though in the case of the Greenery, a new facility in Hyannis, things appear to be moving in that direction), but simply to improve patient care and to allow the union to organize their workers.

Here is a sampling of their operations in the 5 month period from April to August, 1993:

• On April 1, HWU#767 and CUE held a press conference outside the grounds of Mayflower Place. The occasion was the release of a 32-page document from the Department of Health and Human Resources. This report listed violations in the usual categories: understaffed, untrained staff, unsanitary conditions, high medication error rate, lack of basic supplies and equipment, patients lying untended in their beds for hours, etc..

  Much of this information had been supplied by HWU truth squads.

• On April 29th, the Greenery, a facility for elderly and brain-damaged persons, bought by another out-of-state conglomerate in 1992, evicted representatives of CUE who were responding to complaints from a paraplegic. CUE then contacted the Department of Elderly Affairs, which obliged the Greenery to open its doors.

• On July 9th, HWU picketed Freedom Crest. This was shortly after the NLRB had issued a formal complaint against the nursing home, There have been reported incidents of violence at Freedom Crest against the patients by the attendants, some of them derelicts with little or no training shipped up from the deep South.

• On Wednesday, July 30th, at 4:15 PM , the union held the first of its work-ins at the Falmouth Nursing Home. 3 nurses and 2 E.K.G. attendants , all union members, came into the home, took the elevator to the 2nd floor, and told the floor nurse that they were showing up for work. She was delighted at first, thinking them to be volunteers, but when she learned that they wanted to be paid, she became upset and sent them down to the administration. There they were met by a Mr. Hedderson who gave them applications. The applications were rejected . Their spokesperson, Phoebe Potts, said that it was common knowledge that the Falmouth Nursing Home was flagrantly understaffed, and they wanted to start work immediately at the union rate.

  Hedderson is said to have yelled: "That's our process. If you don't like it, just get out!" Then he called the cops.

  After the work-in there was the inevitable press conference. Phoebe Potts announced that the union would continue to target non-union homes with work-ins and similar tactics: singled out for immediate action were several Falmouth homes: the Royal Megansett, the JML Care Center and repeat performances at the Falmouth Nursing Home.

  When interviewed, Hedderson had decided opinions about the ejected job applicants.

  "I would never hire people with such an unprofessional attitude. The work - in upset the staff. It was disruptive. The staff were in an uproar! Why, even the patients in the dining-room became curious and wanted to know what was going on out there!"

• On August 13th, there was another work-in at the Greenery-Lewis Bay facility in Hyannis. Since the fall of 1992, when the home was bought by the SLF Corporation, ( a subsidiary of Greenery Rehabilitation Group, Inc.), there has been a virtual repetition of the Columbia Corporation's pattern of patient neglect and union harassment.

On this occasion, 6 nurses aides entered the building. 3 of them walked up to the 3rd floor, where they were threatened with arrest by a Greenery administrator, Walter Collins.

Later Collins told the newspapers that the Greenery was 'appropriately and fully staffed to provide adequate care for all our patients.' He was then shown the staffing figures that had been compiled by the union's truth squads since they began infiltrating the institution earlier in the year. Collins asserted that these figures were wrong; however he would not divulge any official figures, citing ''proprietary information". Later however he stated that the staff/patient ratio was in the area of 1:8. The union claims that it is 1:15

• The Greenery then filed a restraining order against the union on August 20th. Any of its representatives could now be arrested if they were found "trespassing" on Greenery property.

• On August 21st a worker from the C ape Cod Hospice, Diane King was turned away from the Greenery when she entered the building at the request of a patient. Collins gave no reason for this other than to say that she had "violated facility policy". Diane King is no longer a member of HWU, but had been quite active in the past. She believes that she was refused entrance because it was feared that she might gather information for the union.

My interest in the activities of the Hospital Workers Union had been kindled by my attendance at the day-long convention of Cape Cod Cares. It was held in Fellowship Hall, the auditorium of the Federation Church in Hyannis on Thursday, August 28th.

I more or less dropped into it . I vacationed on the Cape for most of the summer. The only reason for being in Hyannis was the presence of the youth hostel. I'd found it to be a town full of tourists obnoxious beyond belief, otherwise a rather boring place, with a charming public library, a good but inconvenient youth hostel, valuable primarily for roads leading out towards Woods Hole and Martha's Vineyards. On the days on which I could not escape, I wandered morose, keeping diaries on the terraces of the bagel shops, trying to sell books and cards to the illiterate caravanserie , collecting food from the Salvation Army and other pantries, and doing whatever I could to use my time constructively until the hostel opened at 5 o'clock in the evening.

It was in this way that I ended up at the entrance to Fellowship Hall, situated less than a block away from the Hyannis bus station. As editor of Ferment, I am always ready to assume my role of journalist on the look-out for a good story, nor was I disappointed on this occasion. On entering I explained that I was interested in doing an article about the convention. I rarely abuse this privilege: most of the time, as now, an article of some sort does get written, and when I promise yet fail to deliver, it is generally because the slender vehicle of Ferment is overwhelmed with material. My claim was taken on good faith, I was handed a press kit, a Cape Cod Cares button, and a lunch bag.

Fellowship Hall is laid out on a gymnasium floor with a high stage at the back. This was not used; instead the speakers spoke through a mike at the ground level to a room holding about a dozen long tables with representatives from over a dozen organizations.Cape Cod Cares is yet another umbrella organization for advocacy and activist groups in the area of nursing care on the Cape. It includes: CORD, CUE, Elders and Workers Rights, staff representatives from the Falmouth Nursing Home, Tobey Hospital, Brenner Manor, and Bourne Manor; the lab technicians of the Marine Biological Laboratories , the Service Employees International Union, the Nursing Home Council, Cape Emergency and probably other groups that I did not notice there.

Coming in as I did around 10:30, I missed the first hour or so of presentations. The person who was speaking when I came in was a member of CORD. He spoke about his personal experience with Liberty Commons. In the mid 80's, he had placed his 80-year old senile mother there, following a visit in which he had been captivated by its attractive interiors and the charm of its surroundings.

In February 1988 a drunk attendant punched her in the eye. In the course of time the eye ruptured and was lost. The children were not informed of the incident while the attendant was surreptitiously packed back to Arkansas. The photograph of his mother's face that was passed around during his talk was as horrible as the imagination could paint it, combined with the reinforcing chill of scientific veracity- notably the heaped and blackened scar tissue, fabriced with branching veins and discolorations, that formed over the wound and blotted out her vision .

Brief testimonies from two nurses, one from the Nursing Home Council, the other from CUE , were followed by a concert given by a Socialist folksinging group known as "On The Line" : I know that they did Solidarity Forever, and Sixteen Tons ; I don't remember their other songs.They were rather good I thought, and certainly effective as morale boosters.

Around 11:00 Bill Pastreich , The Pastreich. addressed the convention for around 20 minutes. I did not at that time know of his activities and achievements, though it was clear to me immediately that he was the REAL THING : A lifelong ,dedicated social activist, of which there were quite a number in the 60's. Imagine a Tom Hayden who had never discovered the comforts of Southern California but had remained in Newark to fight the landlords; or a Abby Hoffmann with less of the showman in him but more fighter. Or a Cesar Chavez; less grandiose, less religious, (perhaps none at all), without ethnic orientation and just as much inventiveness. These things were clear to me immediately; only the details have been coming in bit by bit since then. I had the same sensation when I first met A.J. Muste in New York in the 60's; Dorothy Day is another. However I found it easier to identify with Bill Pastreich probably because I see the same rebellious college kid in him that I imagine in myself I suppose what I mean is that Pasterich, like all the others, is an energetic and intelligent social activist, but that, unlike Dorothy Day, Abbie Hoffman, and some of the others, he doesn't see himself as such a big deal, ( The 'unassuming aspect' that has been the death-knell of many an arrogant entrepreneur ).

Pastreich spoke about the origins of Cape Cod Cares in the Goodbye Columbia campaign. He was followed by Tom Lynch, a former member of the Rate Setting Commission. Lynch's ideas were rather novel. He is a statistician who has involved himself in power politics. As a consequence of this his language was both highly precise, ( like a statistician's), yet at the same time quite vague, ( like a politician's). What I heard coming from him was typical political waffle talk, as if something very important was being handed down , although in fact he was saying very little. His most telling metaphor was something about "money coming down through the system like the balls in a pinball machine." I refer him to any good book about Chaos Theory , which usually has a discussion of the pinball machine as the paradigm of dynamical chaos. He left us with the assurance that he was still searching for the "development of models which give solutions centering around the numbers."

He was followed by Steve Berda of the Service Employees International Union. In a rambling delivery, Berda sketched for us the last 30 years of American history, a familiar story, predictable in all in features many years ago by those who have chosen to distance themselves from the system: the gradual, calculated, systematic takeover of the whole country by the rich and the super-rich, with the consent of the governed at every stage of the way.

Berda left us with a nice little fable, ( he claims it's Yiddish ) : A frog is lying in a bucket of cold water set on a stove. The water is heated, slowly enough so that he doesn't realize that he's being boiled alive . Had he been thrown directly into hot water, he would have jumped out instantly.

That frog is us, he concluded, making sure that we did not miss the point. There are many of us who have known this since the mid-60's. And enough of us that do not, to make the fable continually relevant.

After the meeting there was a march to the Greenery followed by a rally. I turned out to be of some use during the march. It was fun to teach the nurses a thing or two about stirring slogan chanting. In fact many people thought I was one of the organizers.

This sort of thing happens frequently : Just yesterday I visited the observatory of the Harvard Science Center to witness the eclipse of the sun. Merely because I was wearing a bow-tie, almost all of the visitors believed that I had to be a Harvard astronomy professor. Nor did I disappoint them: I dare say my explanations of things were just as good, sometimes better, than those of the two astronomy students assigned to the event. It is unseemly to boast of course: we all have our specialties. It is just that it is beginning to appear to me that I "belong" nowhere precisely because in some sense I belong everywhere.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(1) The GOODBYE COLUMBIA Campaign: by Donald Fedosiuk and Manny Pastreich; 1990; copies available from HWU#767, 94 Main Street, Hyannis, Ma. 02601

(2) " Columbia Grows, Patients Lose" 4 Articles by Wendy Williams, in the Cape Cod Times, Sept. 28 - Oct. 1, 1993

(3) TENDER LOVING GREED; Mary Adelaide Mendelson, Alfred Knopf, 1974

(4) THE LABOR RELATIONS PRIMER, Wesley M. Wilson, Dow Jones-Irwin,1973

POSTCRIPT:

After a phone call last night to HWU#767 headquarters , I am able to bring my account of its present campaign up to date.

• As I had suspected, the actions against the Greenery were part of another corporate campaign. But, as Bill Pastreich told me, if you can't "drive them out of the state", you can at least do everything to guarantee that the patients under their control are treated decently. The state did eventually grant temporary licenses to the owners of the Greenery. However, these have been accompanied with severe probationary conditions that are unprecedented in the industry:

  (a) The Greenery will be inspected regularly every 6 months ;

  (b) It is obliged to hire 2 full time nurses whose only job is to monitor the daily operations of the facility;

  (c) The Greenery is required to put up $500,000 for a special fund to be used exclusively for patient care emergencies;

  (d) It also had to donate $50,000 to the Alzheimer's Disease Foundation.

Bill Pastreich chuckled as he told me about another inventive idea that seems to have paid off. The union got the idea of sending copies of truth squad reports, the findings of DPH inspections, and the conditions of probation to Greenery's stockholders. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, ( whose exact date he didn't recall), it was reported that this had caused Greenery's stock to fall by 2 points, a loss estimated at 34 million $'s .

• Freedom Crest was brought to trial by the NLRB. In four days of testimony it was charged with union busting activities and fined.

• Mayflower Place was ordered to give $7,000 in back pay to an employee who was fired because of his union activities.

• The former supervisor of the Falmouth Nursing House, Pat Young, has been subpoened to testify before a court of law about the extent of anti-union activities during her tenure there.

• Just last week, 8 persons were arrested at a work-in at one of the homes. Bill Pastreich explained the idea of the work-in to me in these terms: :" It is a kind of "reverse strike".

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