PITTSBURGH — Socialist Workers Party vice presidential candidate Dennis Richter discussed the party’s campaign with Helen Huber, an operating room nurse at West Penn Hospital, above, at a Sept. 4 rally here called by the Service Employees International Union. Nurses at two Allegheny Health Network hospitals have voted overwhelmingly to go on strike for better pay and more hiring.
“Before we would keep no patients waiting in the ER,” Huber told Richter. “We would quickly put them in rooms. Now they’re pushed together in the ER waiting room. That is a health problem and a security problem.”
Richter described meeting nurses in New Orleans who voted to join the union last year and are now fighting for their first contract. “They‘re also demanding higher staffing levels,” Richter said.
He pledged to build support for the fight at West Penn. Workers need a party of labor, Richter said, to organize all working people into struggle — class against class — in the big cities, small towns and rural areas.