Heather Rust is a nursing student in New York and a member of Democratic Socialists of America.
Textbook companies are taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to make inroads into online course curricula — and they’re finding increasingly creative and controlling ways to extract full price for course materials from cash-strapped students.
Rather than materially address the underlying issues of the nursing shortage crisis, health care providers are exploiting it in order to further consolidate power at the top of industry hierarchies — and break the power of organized labor below.
Catholic Health has spent the pandemic buying real estate instead of fixing understaffing issues that overburden workers and put patients’ lives at risk. Mercy Hospital workers have walked off the job to demand new priorities.