During the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, nursing home workers faced an unbelievable burden as their work put them face-to-face with death — and the constant threat of it — every day, even as they struggled with heavy workloads.
A new book by an Amherst writer wants to shed light on their struggles and eventual victories, focusing on a union organizer who brings a powerful drive and righteous anger to his union’s David-and-Goliath fight.
Author and freelance journalist Oliver Broudy’s book “Warrior: Learning to Fight Back from the Angriest Man in the Labor Movement” was released in January. This is his fourth book; his writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Mother Jones, Men’s Health, Salon and other publications.
“Warrior” profiles Jesse Martin, then-vice president of organizing for the labor union SEIU District 1199 New England, which represents thousands of healthcare workers in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and his work organizing nursing home workers for better pay, respect from higher-ups and other improvements to their working conditions.
In his book, Broudy makes it clear from the beginning that Martin — a large white guy with a belly that “imbu[ed] his entire frame with a kind of defiant majesty” and a beard that gives him “the air of a rustic priest” — is demographically different from most of the people he represents, who are primarily women of color. Martin is, of course, aware of it, too; as quoted in the book, he says that, as a cisgender white man, “I have the unique ability of pushing people to a place where they are most uncomfortable. And I’m most uncomfortable. If I push myself to start talking about these things openly, maybe the members and organizers will follow.”
The book spotlights an organizing effort that took place between January and May 2021, which means that much of the reporting comes from 65 calls via Zoom that Broudy sat in on. He noted that he was not a looming journalistic presence but, rather, “just a little dark square among many.” Although Broudy saw Zoom as somewhat of an equalizer — “everyone … got the same-sized box, regardless of their socioeconomic status,” he said — he notes in the book that class differences still shone through.
“You could usually tell the nursing home reps from the workers by the color of their skin,” Broudy writes. “But there were other ways of telling.” Zoom backgrounds often offered glimpses into these disparate lives: Broudy notes the baby grand pianos and polished hardwood floors of executive offices contrasted against the workers’ dim kitchens, popcorn-ceilinged bedrooms and cars with frayed interiors.
Martin and the workers had a number of goals in their fight. Among them were fair wages; the designation of Juneteenth as a paid holiday; a prohibition against nursing home administrators calling the police on staff unless required by law, including measures to ensure worker safety during such encounters; and a requirement for nursing homes to produce quarterly reports detailing disciplinary actions by race and gender to account for significant disparities.
Though Martin is ostensibly the focus of the book, Broudy gives plenty of space to the workers themselves. In Chapter 10, a nursing home worker named Miriam asks her company’s chief legal officer at a union negotiation Zoom meeting why her company isn’t providing staff with access to a human resources professional more than one day a week. After a brief silence, he gives a mild reply — “I’m listening. I understand your point” — but Miriam continues to press him.
“Yes[,] we’re strong. But we need our support. HR should be involved. This is a problem. Especially because of everything that we done been through. What the hell is going on? You don’t care about us? Because it seems like you don’t care,” Miriam is quoted as saying.
“It was a riveting moment — the beginning of a reckoning,” Broudy wrote. “Glued to the screen, the workers watched as, impossibly, the authority began to shift from the pale, hunched man in the collared shirt to the woman — not even visible, her square black except for her name — behind the voice.
“From wherever she was she reached out and grabbed [him] by the ear, and in her grip he became a little boy. Then you began to understand the danger of the woman’s voice, and why [the company] took measures to keep it silent.
“And you understood, too, the importance of the meeting for the union, and the workers. Because moral accounting could not be conducted in the abstract. There was a somatic element. Bodies were necessary. Actual people. Open negotiations brought them back.”
Ironically, Broudy started to write this book because he had a bias against labor unions. In 2017, at the start of the first Trump administration, “I, along with everyone else, was realizing that something had gone seriously wrong, and I was wondering what I could do about it,” he said.
In the course of that reckoning, Broudy spoke to a man who belonged to a union, and he realized he had a latent sense of discomfort around unions, possibly due to a sense of implicit class bias: “I didn’t feel like labor unions were for me; they were for someone else — and, at the same time, I also realized that it made absolutely no sense that I should be dismissing, in what I realized was kind of a prejudicial way, this major source of structural power completely out of hand,” he said.
As he started talking to more people who were involved with organized labor, he met Martin — “this really striking character, an avatar of anger” — and realized he wanted to both understand what labor unions do and work against his own prejudice.
“I really can’t understate how disturbing it was to find that I had carried this bias against labor unions, because I kind of feel that the politics on the left, in some ways, haven’t really served us very well in the last couple of decades,” he said. “There’s been a big focus on identity politics, and that focus was necessary to secure the emancipation of different groups of people, but at the same time, I think that it encouraged, also, a certain kind of self-interest or self-absorption that turned us away from class issues, and that, combined with a certain kind of cultural elitism on the left, led to this class division, and capitalism is really only too happy to make the most of that division.”
After all of the union’s negotiations, marches, and the threat of a strike, the book ends with a victory: the workers get raises, a Juneteenth holiday, restrictions about having police called on them, and improvements to their healthcare and pensions.
Still, the fight for labor equity is ongoing — as noted in the book, some workers were disappointed after the results. One called it “a half-ass compromise”; another said that workers had “let [executives] off the hook.” One brought up their lack of hazard pay; another wrote, “We Are Owed.”
Broudy, too, wants readers to envision better futures: “I think that we contribute to our own impoverishment and to our own disempowerment by not daring to imagine how things might be otherwise, so asking that question, ‘How might things be otherwise?’ ‘What can we ask for?’ ‘What can we demand?’ ‘What kind of power do we need? And how do we get it?’”
“I think power makes liberals feel a little bit uncomfortable, because it entails a degree of domination,” he said, “but, sadly, the fact is that you either take that power or someone will take that power from you.”
“Warrior” is available on Kindle for $4.99.