The basic issues in labor disputes don’t change much. Here in 2023, as in years past, they hit familiar notes: fair pay, respect in the workplace, pushback against corporations determined to wring droplets of extra profit and hike stock prices by supersizing the jobs workers are asked to do.
Those principles have been the foundation of protests by nurses and health care workers over just the past couple of years, as COVID exposed hospitals’ woeful lack of staffing and equipment. They describe the ongoing struggle by California’s service industry workers — restaurant, hotel, convention center — for livable wages and safe working conditions.
