In the Wake of Bourbon Street Attack, the Super Bowl Arrives in New Orleans--and so Does a Major Strike

[Omaha Steve]

https://inthesetimes.com/article/super-bowl-new-orleans-strike-nurses-union

Nurses at University Medical Center are walking off the job Wednesday and Thursday in a strike designed to maximize impact just ahead of the big game.

Sarah Jaffe February 4, 2025

On January 16, nurses from University Medical Center in New Orleans gathered to hold a vigil for those killed and injured on New Year’s in the city. Holding electric candles, the nurses spoke about working during what they call a ​“mass casualty event” — in this case, a man barreling down Bourbon Street in a rented truck, running down as many people as he could — and about the challenges of caring for patients in an atmosphere that prioritizes profits.

Terry Mogilles was one of those nurses. She’s worked at UMC for two years but has been a nurse for 46, and most of her work has been focused on serving the public; she’s done hospice care and operated an outpatient center for unhoused people. At the vigil, she told me later, she spoke about the two stories coming out of management: to the public, the hospital says, ​“We are here, we are a team. These are our heroes”; but in private, in bargaining for their union, ​“it’s their spin that we’re abandoning our patients.”

January 16 was a nationwide day of action for National Nurses United, which the UMC nurses voted to join in December 2023. But in New Orleans, it held special weight: while they joined the union’s calls for safe staffing levels and for protections against the rapid introduction of so-called artificial intelligence into hospitals, the UMC nurses announced their second strike vote and focused on the lack of support they felt while facing the New Year’s attack.

The nurses were not the only New Orleans workers feeling abandoned after a brief flurry of attention from local and national officials (even former President Joe Biden made a visit to the city in the last days of his presidency, reprising the role of mourner-in-chief, with which he briefly began his administration). In a city dominated by the tourism economy, service workers of all kinds had to return to work as though nothing had happened. It’s a grim kind of normal in this city, which is at once the least and the most representative U.S. city — it has a culture all its own, but it is also near the top in many of the signature pathologies of the United States, from gun violence to crumbling infrastructure. And in the wake of horror, the only thing any official seems able to promise the city is more cops.

FULL story at link above.