St. Francis Hospital brought babies into this world for decades and decades. Cruelly, however, Ascension chose to close the only labor and delivery unit on the southside of Milwaukee when it abruptly closed the service at St. Francis Hospital only days before Christmas. St. Francis is also the only unionized private sector hospital in the city.
After three years of unprecedented challenges, healthcare workers are exhausted and their facilities dangerously understaffed. A groundbreaking new report by our national union, the American Federation of Teachers, brings together data and testimony from frontline workers. It details crippling staff shortages across the healthcare industry, revealing dangerous conditions for patients and healthcare professionals alike, made worse by profit-driven corporate leadership. According to the report, and as our union and members know all too well, healthcare workers are exhausted, burnt out, anxious and leaving the profession in droves. Since the pandemic, nearly 1 in 5 healthcare workers have quit their jobs. Learn more about the report, which lays out the issues in detail and offers potential solutions.
The Coalition to Save Saint Francis is gathering to demand that the City Council take action to maintain labor and delivery services on the South Side of Milwaukee!
Join us for a press conference and rally on Wednesday, January 25, 2023 at 6PM in front of Milwaukee City Hall, 200 E. Wells St., Milwaukee, WI.
Ascension announced that they are closing all labor and delivery services at St. Francis Hospital, the only labor and delivery services on the southside of Milwaukee, effective just days before Christmas. This will cause all southside patients to have to travel out of their neighborhood and will eliminate dozens of union jobs. We must fight back to preserve these vital services for our community.
As the landscape of student debt shifts, and more and more opportunities allow borrowers to have their debt relieved, the AFT is using every avenue to ensure that the word is out. In affiliate meetings, telephone town halls, media coverage and social media, the union is spreading the news, and at a student debt clinic at AFT headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 31, AFT President Randi Weingarten vowed to reach as many people as possible with information that could save them tens—and sometimes hundreds—of thousands of dollars.
August 20, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a largely unmitigated disaster. More than half a million Americans have died as a result of the virus. Through it all, nurses, nursing assistants, respiratory therapists, other healthcare professionals, and the various staff that keep our hospitals running have been worked to the bone. Without the efforts of these workers, including the workers who we represent across the state of Wisconsin, many more would have tragically lost their lives. As if healthcare workers weren’t a vital part of society before, the debt they are owed after what they’ve struggled through over the past year and a half is vast.
Despite the service of these workers to the communities in which they live and beyond, the healthcare corporations that they are employed by have not done enough to reciprocate these efforts. At several junctures over the course of the pandemic, employers have refused to offer bonuses for essential workers, failed to provide ample Personal Protective Equipment, failed to provide proper medical equipment, failed to provide proper staffing, and failed to produce appropriately safe working conditions. To sum it up, corporate healthcare employers have failed their workers and the people to whom they provide care. While the frontlines were starved for support, it was the bottom lines that received the reinforcements. This behavior isn’t new on the part of these corporations, but the stark differences between their words and their actions has never been more clear than now.