News of the Month — August 2022
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In These Times featured NUHW member Elizabeth White, a Kaiser Permanente therapist, in a story about the long-lasting effect of “moral injury” or “moral distress” on frontline healthcare workers, a debilitating combination of anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, anger and betrayal that results when workers are thrust into life-or-death situations without the resources and support to carry out the mission they’ve committed to. “You’re basically always playing a game of Twister, twisting things to try to make it work for people,” White said. “We want to do the right thing for our patients, and the employers take our good intentions and exploit that. That’s the moral injustice.”
Dancers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in North Hollywood filed a petition with the NLRB to hold an election to be represented by the Actors’ Equity Association. Deadline reports that if the dancers win their election and the results are certified by the NLRB, they would become the only union-represented exotic dancers in the United States.
The Eureka Times Standard featured NUHW members Meredyth Diehlmann and Patricia Flippen, a lab assistant and a surgical technician at Redwood Memorial Hospital, in a story about NUHW’s press conference decrying Providence hospitals’ payroll errors for the past few weeks that have impacted healthcare workers. The story also included NUHW member Sean Taylor, a surgery inventory technician at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Lost Coast Output and Redheaded Blackbelt also published similar stories.
A bill that would allow farmworkers to vote to unionize in secret awaits Gov. Newsom’s signature after being approved by the legislature, KCRA reported. Farmworkers walked 335 miles from Delano to Sacramento in support of AB 2183 and remain at the capitol awaiting the Governor’s decision.
NUHW member Michele Steinberg, an emergency room patient access representative at Queen of the Valley Medical Center, was quoted in a story by Becker’s Hospital Review about the payroll issues affecting workers at Providence hospitals in Northern California.
Some 50 knights, queens, squires, horsemen and stablehands who work for Medieval Times, a themed dinner theater in Buena Park, submitted a petition for a union election to the NLRB to join the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA), reported Los Angeles Magazine. The move comes on the heels of a union victory at the Medieval Times location in Lyndhurst, N.J., where the workers’ voted 26-11 to secure AGVA membership.