VA Nurses on the Front Lines

Andrew Moss

(6/25) June 6 was a significant day for protest. As protesters challenged ICE agents carrying out immigration raids in Los Angeles, demonstrators in Washington D.C. were protesting the Trump administration’s attacks on veterans’ jobs, benefits, and healthcare. Coming together in the "Unite for Veterans, Unite for America" rally on the National Mall, thousands of vets made their presence felt on what many said was a betrayal of promises made for service in wars ranging from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.

In retrospect, the protests in Los Angeles and in Washington may seem unrelated, separated by an entire continent and focused on seemingly different concerns. Yet the apparent differences melt away when one recognizes that these protests, like the many that preceded and followed them, represent distinct fronts in a single war. It’s a war to radically remake America, a war Donald Trump has been waging since the first day of his presidency.

Among the demonstrators and speakers in Washington were VA nurses who had come to speak out against Trump’s VA staffing cuts – as well as his termination of their collective bargaining rights. In February, Trump dismissed1000 newly hired VA employees, including doctors and nurses, and he still plans to cut an additional 80,000 VA workers. The next month, he signed an executive order terminating collective bargaining for over a million federal workers, including the VA nurses, effectively cancelling bargaining rights for one in 15 American workers represented by unions.

The VA nurses who spoke out against these actions well understood the magnitude of these initiatives and the havoc they’ll wreak. With collective bargaining, federal workers are empowered to negotiate for overtime, improved working conditions, and health and safety on the job. For VA nurses, these rights are critical in enabling them to speak up for their patients’ safety without fear of retaliation. In suppressing these rights, Trump undertook what has been described by one labor historian as "the largest action of union busting in American history."

While Trump was busting federal unions, he was also preparing to fire thousands of VA workers. The Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Doug Collins, has declared that no nurses or doctors will be laid off. But the cuts, if enacted, will still inflict massive harm on patient care. Without the receptionists, lab technicians, housekeepers, and other key employees needed in hospitals and clinics, the quality of care will be downgraded, wait times will be lengthened, and safety imperiled.

For Trump, though, it isn’t apparently an essential fact that VA nurses and other medical staff members have the unique knowledge and skills to treat the harms sustained in combat – the brain trauma injuries, spinal cord injuries, exposures to burn pits and Agent Orange, losses of limbs, and the post-traumatic stress that casts long shadows over veterans’ mental health.

One reason for the disregard is that by degrading care at the VA, the nation’s largest integrated health system, an administration can push vets into privatized care, which essentially means transferring costs and risks (including the risk of coverage denial) onto individual patients. Who, then, will benefit? The large health corporations that pick up the "business" of health care.

VA nurses are fighting, therefore, on two fronts for their patients’ safety and well-being: for a restoration of collective bargaining rights and for the needed funding that will keep the VA intact as a health provider. They’re carrying the fight into the courts, into Congress (on behalf of labor-friendly legislation), and onto the National Mall and media recognition.

How, then, does their struggle constitute a distinct front in the same war that anti-ICE protesters are fighting? The answer centers upon shared values: life, safety, and human dignity – and the networks of care needed to sustain them. Just as the nurses battle the budgetary and administrative weapons threatening their patients’ health, so too do anti-ICE protesters resist raids that violate immigrants’ basic rights and inflict harm on individuals, families, and communities. It doesn’t take much searching to find innumerable accounts of physical and emotional trauma inflicted by masked ICE agents bearing no identification.

For Donald Trump and his allies, all this has meant a full-scale war, a state of unceasing hostilities, as they attempt to install a coercive regime that reaches into every corner of people’s lives. It has meant threatening and sanctioning a wide spectrum of institutions and individuals: schools and colleges, law firms, judges, businesses, newspapers, public television and radio networks, labor unions, and non-profit organizations, to name a few.

And when threats of lawsuits or other civil sanctions don’t work, there’s always the resort to threats of violence – and to violence itself. It’s no surprise that Trump ordered National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles shortly after June 6 over the objections of city and state officials. It’s no surprise that many people in that city, and in other cities as well, now fear a trip to their children’s school, to their place of work, to the local store, to the doctor.

The "Hands-Off" and "No Kings" marches demonstrated to millions of people, including the marchers themselves, that the idea of inalienable rights is very difficult to expunge from people’s individual and collective identities. The history of struggle in this nation – for workers’ rights, for racial equality, for immigrants’ rights, for access to health care – is too long and too embedded to be erased by any single authoritarian.

But as the resistance evolves, it’s important also to name and lift up the actors, the nonviolent combatants, who’ve been fully engaged. To do so is to recognize the distinct fronts on which they’re fighting – and the distinct contributions they’ll continue to make to a shared national struggle.

Andrew Moss is an emeritus professor of English, Nonviolence Studies at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

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