To make strides toward justice, here are 5 things the Ill. hospitals coalition needs to do
Crain’s Chicago Business recently reported on a coalition of 30 hospitals and the Illinois Health & Hospital Association new program to “help health care organizations across the state reduce systemic racism and health disparities.” The main commitments the coalition made are to submit non-public “racial equity progress reports” to Illinois Health & Hospital Association that “eventually will be used to create a plan to improve pay equity and charity care.”
While the effort sounds good in theory, I’m left feeling frustrated at how this announcement falls so short of what Chicagoans and people across our state need.
After years of disinvestment from the Black community resulting in a 30-year difference in life expectancy between Streeterville and Englewood, hospitals must do more than make a vague commitment to “reduce systemic racism and health disparities” to get any credit.
For starters, they should treat the hospital workers — who largely come from Chicago’s Black and Brown communities — with the respect, dignity, and compensation they deserve. That means paying service and care staff living wages and investing in the local community.
This coalition may very well be serious about their commitment to working toward racial justice, but corporate statements don’t help put food on the table or put a stop to the system injustices our workers face.
Here’s our message to the coalition of hospital executives. If you want to make a “meaningful stride toward social justice,” as you say, you must:
1. Support workers who come together to demand better working conditions, wages and benefits — as well as improvements to the communities where they live and work — by meeting their demands.
2. Invest directly in communities that have seen resources syphoned off to go to other programs or wealthier areas.
3. Maintain safety net hospitals with high quality services that are both affordable and accessible to the communities most in need, eliminating hospital deserts where Chicagoans can’t access the care they need.
4. Make the reports you plan to develop publicly available — don’t hide them from your consumers and taxpayers.
5. Involve frontline workers, who have risked their lives over the last year+, in the process by holding public forums with SEIU Healthcare Illinois workers that are open to media and community stakeholders.
Against the backdrop of this launch, many of the same organizations are grossly underpaying their support staff, who primarily come from Chicago’s Black and Brown communities, and paying workers in Black and Brown communities less than those in white communities.
Take University of Chicago’s Ingalls Hospital, for example. Ingalls is located in Harvey, where almost 80% of the population is Black. University of Chicago pays its frontline workers, who put their life on the line to treat COVID patients during the pandemic, as little as $12.50 an hour, which comes out to about $26,000 per year. That’s below the poverty line. In the words of SEIU member and Ingalls employee, Latanga Williams Gavin, “No one should be working in healthcare in a pandemic making less than $15 an hour…How are people supposed to survive?”
Meanwhile, at the university’s Hyde Park location, where only about 27% of the population is Black and almost 50% is white, the University of Chicago pays its frontline workers $8.34 more than their Ingalls counterparts for doing the exact same work with the same risk.
When Ingalls workers came together to demand a living wage, and an end to the “Harvey discount,” University of Chicago offered employees a 3% raise. For someone making $12.50 per hour, this comes out to about 35 cents per hour. It’s a slap in the face. Ingalls workers should be getting equal pay for equal work for the same institution.
This weekend, Chicago will celebrate its first officially recognized Juneteenth, the day that enslaved workers in Texas were actually freed more than two years after the emancipation proclamation. As a nation and in our state, we are still grappling with the legacy of slavery and systemic racism. Formally commemorating Juneteenth is a baby step forward. But it’s clear that we still have a long way to go in our fight for racial and economic justice.
So today, to honor Juneteenth and the fight for justice, I’m calling on Chicago hospitals and the Illinois Health & Hospital Association to take the above concrete, transparent steps to not just talk the talk, but walk the walk.
