On Tuesday, nearly 2,200 nurses at MemorialCare Long Beach Medical Center protested the inhumane conditions that have become the norm in hospitals across the United States. Holding an informational picket, these healthcare workers sought to expose the hospital administration’s callous refusal to address the ongoing crisis of understaffing, workplace violence and burnout.
Their modest demands—adequate staffing and safe working conditions—are a fight for the survival of healthcare itself. Yet, they face not only an intransigent hospital administration but a union leadership and political establishment determined to suppress any genuine struggle.
This struggle unfolds amid growing fascistic attacks against immigrants and democratic rights by the Trump administration. Workers face escalating crackdowns on labor rights, free speech and protests as well as the dismantlement of education. Trump’s second term signals an urgent need for all workers to organize independently against an incipient dictatorship that is resorting to police repression and legal intimidation to silence dissent.
The crisis at Long Beach Medical Center is part of a broader assault on science and healthcare workers, deepened under the Trump administration’s operatives, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz. Trump’s agenda is full-scale privatization, slashing public healthcare funding and gutting worker protections. Kennedy and Oz serve as frontmen, disguising the drive for deregulation under fraudulent appeals to “health freedom.” The result is hospitals run like for-profit slaughterhouses, where profit margins dictate care, patients’ lives are placed at risk and workers are pushed to exhaustion.
Nurses at Long Beach Medical Center experience this firsthand. They work grueling hours under extreme stress, with dangerously low staffing ratios that endanger both them and their patients. They face increasing workplace violence, yet management refuses to implement serious protections. They are overworked, underpaid and treated as expendable by a system that prioritizes corporate profits over human lives.
The California Nurses Association, under National Nurses United (CNA/NNU), has a history of sabotaging workers’ struggles. In 2022, nurses at Long Beach Medical Center waged a powerful strike against unsafe conditions, yet the CNA swiftly shut it down by calling for a vote on a sellout agreement, demobilizing nurses just as they were gaining momentum. Rather than organizing a fight to win nurses’ demands, the CNA leadership ensured the strike would end before it could threaten the hospital’s profits. Three years later, as workers’ conditions have only further deteriorated, the union offers only another toothless “informational picket,” refusing to mobilize the full strength of healthcare workers.
The CNA/NNU has collaborated with management, particularly at Kaiser Permanente, where it receives corporate funding through the “Labor-Management Partnership.” Union agreements have justified workforce restructuring, replacing registered nurses with lower-paid, less-trained staff via telehealth and “command center” models, creating a “generic workforce.” This increased RN’s workloads as they supervised less-experienced staff while managing patient care remotely.
Tied to the Democratic Party, CNA has failed to oppose policies that weakened healthcare. California’s Democratic government neglects safe staffing laws, benefiting hospital profits, while Democratic administrations have prioritized corporate bailouts over worker protections, leaving healthcare staff struggling for better conditions.
The WSWS spoke to several nurses who expressed concerns about safety. Jessica, a nurse with many years of experience in the rehab department said, “People come in from buses or trains in the middle of the night and come into our unit. Security guards don’t stop them, it’s scary. Sometimes we have to send them up to ICU. There’s staffing ratio [issues], things are severe. The social crisis has become worse.”
She focused on the social crisis and working conditions: “There’s a lot of homeless[ness] and mental illness, people yelling, cursing, coming in. We haven’t had any of us physically assaulted, not yet, thank God, but it’s stuff like that.”
Our reporter raised the issue of medical care becoming increasingly financialized. She replied, “Exactly! You know, when I started out in nursing, it was all about patient care. And now it’s all about numbers and documentation. There’s no direct patient care it seems like anymore.” When the reporter asked the nurse her thoughts on the Trump administration, she said, “Don’t get me going!”
Another nurse, James, said, “We are fighting for better staffing. When we’re understaffed, it’s very hard to provide good patient care. At the same time, they’re cutting some of our benefits. They removed the time-and-a-half pay for working the night shift and for the graveyard shift. We used to get it for the past five to six years.
“Everybody’s getting overworked. Honestly, it’s overwhelming. It’s really hard to work like that, full of stress. Sometimes, when I go home, it’s so draining. And then you have to come back the next day and do it all over again. Draining.”
Shelley, a nurse, also stressed the safety issue: “We need more assurances that the nurses and all the other employees are safe in the workplace. If there’s more of a chance for workplace violence, that affects the safety of all the patients, and it also depends on the nurse-to-patient ratios.”
She reflected on Trump’s fascistic policies: “There’s Ukraine and its special minerals and natural resources. And then the way he talked with the Canadians, kind of like ‘Well, you don’t even have much of a military. Don’t just think we’re going to protect you just because we’re friends.’ It was like a veiled threat.”
She emphasized the volatility of the international situation: “I’m thinking, do we have a World War III coming on right now? That’s where my head’s at. He’s talking all about tariffs. No, I feel like he’s just getting ready because we’re about to go off to war, for World War III.”
Like most workers, Shelley is becoming increasingly politicized: “America’s stuck in this two-party system, and it’s difficult. I don’t know. I’m waiting and watching, trying not to have anxiety about it, just show up to work, do the right thing and love people. It does seem that the nurses here are waking up to the fact that they have rights, you know, that they can speak up.”
When asked what she thought of the Trump administration’s gutting of federal workers’ jobs and the deportations, she replied: “Trump is firing thousands of federal workers under the narration of ‘waste and fraud.’ So you can’t just do that and not show proof. They say they’re going to show it, but are they going to show it?”
About immigrant raids, Shelley offered: “They show ICE picking up the criminals, the rapists and human traffickers, and then there’s someone who says, ‘Yeah, but they went after me, and I’m not any of those things.’… They could also be picking up a mom with her sick kids.”
