February, 09 2015, 02:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Michelle Mahon, RN, 234-207-6706 or Charles Idelson, 510-273-2246
Hospital Giant Community Health Systems Ordered to Pay $2 Million For RN Fired, Defamed for Patient, Union Advocacy
‘Court Win Shows Workers Can Beat Koch Brothers-Style Attacks’
WASHINGTON
A civil jury has ordered an Ohio hospital, part of one of the most notorious anti-union hospital chains in the U.S., to pay over $2 million in damages for its actions against Ann Wayt, an Ohio registered nurse it fired, illegally sought to have her nursing license revoked, and then defamed in retaliation for her outspoken patient advocacy and support for her union.
NNOC/NNU Co-President Malinda Markowitz, RN praised Wayt for "standing up for herself, her family, and her colleagues against the harassment and attacks by a multi-billion corporation on their right to form a union."
"This verdict is a clear signal that working people can resist, fight back and win against even the most heavily funded attacks by those like the Koch Brothers and other far right groups and their agenda to eliminate unions, laws that protect workers, and public advocates for public safety and economic and workplace justice," Markowitz said.
In a unanimous verdict, the Stark County, Ohio jury Friday ordered Affinity Medical Center of Massillon, Oh., operated by Tennessee-based Community Health Systems chain, to pay Wayt $800,000 for defamation of her character and another $750,000 in punitive damages. Affinity was also ordered to pay her attorney fees.
Wayt said she decided to take on the challenge "for Affinity nurses and nurses everywhere who are fighting for their right to stand up for patients. Now they see that nurses are strong and we stick together. We aren't going to accept their bullying. I am so very thankful for all of the support of my colleagues through this very trying time. We stuck together and we prevailed!"
"CHS and all hospitals across the nation should be reminded that nurses will not be silent when you trample on their rights and try to silence their voice -- and that our union will be with you," Markowitz added.
The decision came over two years after Wayt was fired, and a year after a U.S. District Court Judge delivered a sweeping cease and desist injunction ordering Affinity to reinstate Wayt and end a broad array of lawless behavior in illegal discipline and harassment of its RNs as well as refusing to bargain with its RNs and their union, National Nurses Organizing Committee-Ohio. NNOC Ohio is the state affiliate of National Nurses United, the largest U.S. organization of RNs.
Affinity nurses reacted with joy to the jury decision. "Ann has shown that one nurse can hold a healthcare system accountable for its lies and deceptions," said Affinity RN Debbie McKinney. "This should empower all nurses to stick together for what is best for our patients ourselves and our profession."
"I am thrilled for Ann and that the Jury cleared her name and reputation. I am also thrilled that the verdict sends a message to Affinity Med. Center that they can not treat their nurses with such contempt," said Wayt's attorney Brian Zimmerman.
"It is inspiring to witness the solidarity and commitment of nurses who are always focused on winning the very best protections for their patients," said NNOC-Ohio's Michelle Mahon, RN, who testified for Wayt at the trial. "Through their unanimous verdict the jury has sent a message to CHS that this community will not tolerate their law breaking behavior."
Nurses at Affinity voted in August 2012 to join NNOC-Ohio. Instead of respecting the democratic voice of the nurses and offering to work with them to improve patient care and nurse standards, CHS, which has gained infamy as one of the most anti-union and anti-worker chains in the hospital industry, immediately embarked on a campaign of harassment and retaliation.
Wayt, a prominent union supporter in the hospital's orthopedics unit, where union support was "particularly strong," as a National Labor Relations Board Judge Arthur Amchan later noted, was directly targeted, as symbolized by the decision of the hospital to begin an investigation against her on the very day of the election. NNOC-Ohio initiated the case by filing charges with the NLRB.
Affinity management then trumped up charges of patient care misconduct that Amchan termed in July 2013, "a pretext to retaliate against her for her union activity" despite a long "spotless" record as an RN. Affinity not only fired Wayt, it then went to the Ohio Board of Nursing attempting to pressure it to revoke Wayt's nursing license.
Noting the clear violation of federal labor law rights, Amchan concluded "it is hard to imagine a more effective coercive message to the union supporters... than the termination of a long-term employee with no (or no known) prior disciplinary record." Wayt has worked at Affinity for 24 years and in 2008 Affinity provided clear recognition of her achievements by presenting her the Nurse Excellence Award.
On the basis of that finding, U.S. District Court Judge John Adams in January, 2014, issued a stinging injunction against Affinity for illegal behavior, including the order to reinstate Wayt. Judge Adams found Affinity's actions to be "inconsistent with disciplinary actions taken against other persons with similar alleged violations and disproportionate to the offense level."
Though Affinity was forced to offer Wayt a return to the hospital bedside, it has failed to refrain from defamatory activity against her. Wayt responded with the civil suit that led to the verdict today. Affinity is also stalling in court-ordered bargaining with the nurses' union.
National Nurses United, with close to 185,000 members in every state, is the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in US history.
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'War Criminals': IDF Strikes Rafah After Hamas Agrees to Cease-Fire
"Why?" asked Israeli lawmaker Ofer Cassif. "Because killing Palestinians is more important for the Israeli government than saving Israelis."
May 06, 2024
Israel on Monday launched long-awaited strikes on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip despite Hamas publicly confirming it agreed to a cease-fire and hostage release proposal from Egyptian and Qatari mediators.
The Israel Defense Forces said on social media that "the IDF is currently conducting targeted strikes against Hamas terror targets in eastern Rafah," the city to which over a million Palestinians have fled since October 7, when Israel launched a retaliatory war that has already killed at least 34,735 people in Gaza and wounded another 78,108.
Earlier Monday, the IDF had dropped leaflets directing residents and refugees in that part of Rafah to relocate to a strip along Gaza's coast, ignoring warnings from the international community and humanitarian groups that a full-scale Israeli attack on the crowded city would further endanger civilians and relief efforts.
"It is obvious Netanyahu wants this genocidal war to continue indefinitely so that he can remain in power."
In addition to sparking outrage around the world, the Israeli government's Rafah attack and rejection of the Hamas-backed proposal was met with criticism from people across Israel. The Associated Pressreported that "thousands of Israelis rallied around the country Monday night calling for an immediate deal to release the hostages still held in the Gaza Strip."
Ofer Cassif, a member of the Knesset who was almost expelled by fellow Israeli lawmakers earlier this year for backing South Africa's ongoing genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), again called out his own government.
"Israeli tanks and infantry enter east Rafah while planes bomb from above, just hours after Hamas' decision to accept the hostages/prisoners exchange deal," Cassif said Monday. "Why? Because killing Palestinians is more important for the Israeli government than saving Israelis. War criminals!"
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that "the War Cabinet unanimously decided this evening Israel will continue its operation in Rafah, in order to apply military pressure on Hamas so as to advance the release of our hostages and achieve the other objectives of the war."
Along with the prime minister, Israel's War Cabinet includes Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Benny Gantz, former IDF chief of the general staff, along with three observers.
Netanyahu added that "while the Hamas proposal is far from meeting Israel's core demands, Israel will dispatch a ranking delegation to Egypt in an effort to maximize the possibility of reaching an agreement on terms acceptable to Israel."
Reutersreported that "an Israeli official said the deal was not acceptable to Israel because terms had been 'softened.'"
According to the news outlet, the first part of a three-phase plan that Hamas—which has controlled Gaza for nearly two decades—agreed to includes a 42-day pause in fighting, the release of 33 hostages held by the group and some Palestinians in Israeli jails, a partial IDF withdrawal, and free movement in the besieged enclave.
Phase two would be "another 42-day period that features an agreement to restore a 'sustainable calm' to Gaza, language that an official briefed on the talks said Hamas and Israel had agreed in order to take discussion of a 'permanent cease-fire' off the table," Reuters detailed. This phase also includes withdrawing most Israeli troops and Hamas releasing some soldiers and reservists.
The third phase would involve the exchange of bodies; reconstruction of Gaza overseen by Egypt, Qatar, and the United Nations; and ending the complete blockade on the strip, the outlet added.
Shortly before Israel's Monday night strikes on Rafah began, Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, said that the U.N. chief "reiterates his pressing call to both the government of Israel and the leadership of Hamas to go the extra mile needed to make an agreement come true and stop the present suffering."
Expressing concern about the then-imminent Israeli operation in Rafah, the spokesperson said that "we are already seeing movements of people—many of these people are in desperate humanitarian condition and have been repeatedly displaced. They search safety that has been so many times denied. The secretary-general reminds the parties that the protection of civilians is paramount in international humanitarian law."
Other U.N. officials have been warning of what an assault on Rafah will mean for the over 1.4 million Palestinians there, among them 600,000 children. So have humanitarian and political leaders, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who on Monday urged President Joe Biden to stand by his earlier position that attacking the city was a "red line" and "end all offensive military aid to Israel."
Council on American-Islamic Relations national executive director Nihad Awad issued a similar call Monday evening, warning that "the Israeli government is hellbent on using American financial, military, and diplomatic support to ethnically cleanse what remains of Gaza and commit another massacre."
"President Biden must stand up to Benjamin Netanyahu and take concrete action to end the genocide now," Awad continued, nodding to the Israeli leader's legal trouble. The prime minister faces not only potential consequences on a global scale for what the ICJ has deemed a "plausibly" genocidal war on Gaza but also a corruption trial in his own country.
"It is obvious Netanyahu wants this genocidal war to continue indefinitely so that he can remain in power, avoid jail, and fulfill his racist, far-right Cabinet's demands for the complete destruction of Gaza and the massacre of its people," Awad said. "It is long past time for President Biden to end our nation's complicity in this 21st-century genocide."
Biden spoke with Netanyahu by phone ahead of the IDF strikes on Monday and "reiterated his clear position on Rafah," according to a White House readout. They also discussed the hostage negotiations, humanitarian aid, the Holocaust, and antisemitism.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, also suggested that the Israeli prime minister wants the bloodshed in Gaza to continue for personal reasons.
"Netanyahu does not want an end to the war because the moment the war ends, his political career ends as well. And his prison sentence will commence," said Parsi. "Yet, Biden has for seven months deferred to Netanyahu."
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Pulitzer Snubs Palestinian Journalists' Gaza Coverage
The Pulitzer Prize Board avoided "naming the brave Palestinian journalists who did the reporting and filming and died in record numbers," said one journalist.
May 06, 2024
In recent years, the Pulitzer Prize Board has given special recognition to the journalists of Ukraine and Afghanistan for reporting from war zones, honoring their "courage, endurance, and commitment to truthful reporting" and their ability to tell their communities' stories under "profoundly tragic and complicated circumstances."
On Monday, no such recognition was given to Palestinian reporters in Gaza, at least 92 of whom have been among more than 34,000 Palestinians killed in the enclave since Israel began its bombardment in October.
The annual journalism and literature awards included a special citation for "journalists and media workers covering the war in Gaza"—but didn't differentiate between those around the world who have spent the last seven months telling the story of Israel's escalation from the safety of far-off countries, and those struggling to report on the destruction of their own home under the constant threat of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attacks.
"The missing word is—is always—Palestinian," said Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG). "Palestinian journalists and media workers deserve, if nothing else, this recognition; and half of them are dead."
Public health writer Abdullah Shihipar noted that in 2022, the board awarded the special citation to the "journalists of Ukraine." In 2021, it recognized "women and men of Afghanistan," saying that from "staff and freelance correspondents to interpreters to drivers to hosts, courageous Afghan residents helped produce Pulitzer-winning and Pulitzer-worthy images and stories."
This year, said Intercept journalist Jeremy Scahill, giving a special citation to "'media workers covering the war in Gaza' is a way to avoid naming the brave Palestinian journalists who did the reporting and filming and died in record numbers."
Many of those killed, Scahill added, might not have been had it not been for U.S.-made weapons sold to Israel.
The Pulitzer Prize for international reporting was awarded to The New York Times "for its wide-ranging and revelatory coverage of Hamas' lethal attack in southern Israel on October 7, Israel's intelligence failures, and the Israeli military's sweeping, deadly response in Gaza."
One of the Times' most explosive articles about Israel and Gaza, "Screams Without Words," about the alleged sexual assaults of Israeli victims of the October 7 attack, was not among those submitted for consideration. The article has come under scrutiny because of the anti-Palestinian bias expressed by one of the freelance reporters who worked on it, and questions about its veracity.
WAWOG, which has started a website titledThe New York War Crimes, posted on social media that the Times should have instead been awarded the Pulitzer for "manufacturing consent."
By honoring the Times for its international reporting this year, said City University of New York sociology professor Heba Gowayed, the Pulitzer Prize "lost any credibility it ever had."
The prize is administered by Columbia University, where students have been protesting for weeks against U.S. support for the IDF and against the school's investment in companies that contract with Israel.
Last week, the university called on the New York Police Department to forcibly remove student protesters from a school building; police told student journalists they would be arrested if they left Pulitzer Hall to report on the incident. Student journalists are reportedly still being barred from campus.
Columbia, said Jack Mirkinson of The Nation, announced the Pulitzers "at the exact same time it is clamping down on the press freedom of its own students. You couldn't make it up."
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Sanders Says US Must 'End All Offensive Military Aid' as Israel Targets Rafah
The Vermont independent condemned the United States' support of Israel in a speech announcing his Senate reelection campaign.
May 06, 2024
As Israel rejected a cease-fire deal that Hamas had accepted Monday, dashing the hopes of civilianstrapped in the southern Gaza city of Rafah that an invasion could be averted, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders called on the Biden administration to stop the looming attack that humanitarian and rights organizations have been warning against for months.
The Vermont independent senator said President Joe Biden must follow through on his call for Israel to protect civilian lives by forgoing a ground invasion of Rafah. In March Biden said the attack would be a "red line" unless Israel developed a credible plan to evacuate civilians, who include an estimated 600,000 children in the city.
To stop Israel from killing potentially hundreds of thousands of people in the city, where 1.4 million people are sheltering following Israel's obliteration of cities across Gaza, the U.S. must "end all offensive military aid" to the country, Sanders said Monday.
"Now an assault is imminent," said Sanders. "It will kill countless civilians. President Biden must back his words with action."
The senator made his latest demand for an end to Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza hours after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initiated a forced evacuation of about 100,000 people in eastern Rafah, dropping leaflets that ordered displaced families to move to a strip of land along Gaza's coast. An estimated 600,000 children are among the city's current population.
Israel has killed scores of people in Rafah in recent weeks with airstrikes on residential areas. Last week, dozens of U.S. House Democrats called on Biden to ensure a full-scale ground assault would not go forward, days before Israeli officials briefed the U.S.—the world's largest funder of the IDF—about its plan to forcibly expel people from the city.
Late last month Biden signed a foreign aid package that included $17 billion for Israel's military—legislation that Sanders voted against.
Sanders reiterated his demand for Biden to end his support for the IDF as he announced his 2024 reelection campaign.
Along with the climate crisis, healthcare and prescription drug costs, and protecting U.S. democracy, said Sanders, Israel's assault on Gaza is "very much on the minds of Vermonters," whom he has represented in the Senate since 2007.
While Israel had the right to defend itself against Hamas for its October 7 attack, said Sanders, "it did not and does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people, which is exactly what it is doing."
"Thirty-four thousand Palestinians have already been killed and 77,000 have been wounded—70% of whom are women and children," he added. "According to humanitarian organizations, famine and starvation are now imminent. In my view, U.S. tax dollars should not be going to the extremist Netanyahu government to continue its devastating war against the Palestinian people."
Top Israeli officials including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have pushed back against a potential cease-fire deal in recent days, with Smotrich saying last week that Israel must see to the "total annihilation" of cities in Gaza, including Rafah.
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