UE in the News

Faizon Cutler works at the state-run Central Regional Hospital in Butner, North Carolina, north of Raleigh.

Central Regional has 1,437 employees, but 449 vacancies, which is nearly 25% vacancy rate. Cutler said the staffing shortages played a role in an attack on him and his coworkers in June.

“The patient started to call us names,” Cutler said. “I got hit in my chest and hit in my back twice.

“Anybody she saw in her way she put her hands on towards them and she did just that ... I got a contusion on my knee, I got cut in my lip ... Two of my co-workers got hurt, two nurses got attacked. One of them is still out.”

Cutler and other workers are represented by UE Local 150, a union that shines the light on problems at the hospital, including employee assaults and low pay. Workers also said contractors are used to fill vacancies. Contractors that make more money than full-time, long-time employees and in many cases, Cutler said those workers leave before their contracts run out.

Shy said these victories were won by the collective action of graduate workers, the spring semester strike and by the strike they plan for the fall. 

“The changes that the provost has implemented on campus directly come out of that collective action, and show us that collective action is the pathway towards getting collective bargaining on campus in the next year,” Shy said.

Alyssa Haradzin began working at Planned Parenthood’s Liberty Avenue clinic about four months before a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion warned of a seismic shift coming to the American abortion landscape.

She had previously worked as a healthcare assistant in a general hospital, and took a pay cut to move into reproductive care because she values the work. But she soon felt frustrated by perceived staffing shortages and inadequate training, and joined the organization’s new union chapter to fight for change. 

“When it became clear that we were not getting our jobs back, I remember thinking I did not want to deal with this again. That’s when UE organizers said to us “you know, you could just take the shop.” They shared with us what workers at Republic Windows were able to do in Chicago back in 2008, and after a week we decided we could do this. The shop was successful, we had really talented staff, and we wanted to keep doing what we love.

“A lot of us just had a cartoonish refusal to be defeated. Like what, we’re just going to let ourselves be defeated? Gotta keep fighting somehow.”

Members of the United Graduate Workers of UNM and community supporters held a picket Thursday morning to bring attention to the university’s resistance to include non-discriminatory protections in the graduate workers’ union contract.

Held in front of the same building where the negotiations were set to take place, the group gathered carrying signs and repeated chants aimed at the unfair working conditions they experienced while at UNM.

“Right now, the situation would have been far worse without the union,” says Jocelyn, a representative of UE Local 696. “We've already stepped up and tried to alleviate the current staffing crisis, post [Roe’s overturn] by coordinating coverage, working extra shifts and overtime, and covering multiple positions throughout the workday where there's shortages.”