The Super Bowl Is in New Orleans This Week—So Is a Major Strike
Nurses at University Medical Center are walking off the job Wednesday and Thursday in a strike designed to maximize impact just ahead of the big game.
Sarah Jaffe
On January 16, nurses from University Medical Center in New Orleans gathered to hold a vigil for those killed and injured on New Year’s in the city. Holding electric candles, the nurses spoke about working during what they call a “mass casualty event” — in this case, a man barreling down Bourbon Street in a rented truck, running down as many people as he could — and about the challenges of caring for patients in an atmosphere that prioritizes profits.
Terry Mogilles was one of those nurses. She’s worked at UMC for two years but has been a nurse for 46, and most of her work has been focused on serving the public; she’s done hospice care and operated an outpatient center for unhoused people. At the vigil, she told me later, she spoke about the two stories coming out of management: to the public, the hospital says, “We are here, we are a team. These are our heroes”; but in private, in bargaining for their union, “it’s their spin that we’re abandoning our patients.”
January 16 was a nationwide day of action for National Nurses United, which the UMC nurses voted to join in December 2023. But in New Orleans, it held special weight: while they joined the union’s calls for safe staffing levels and for protections against the rapid introduction of so-called artificial intelligence into hospitals, the UMC nurses announced their second strike vote and focused on the lack of support they felt while facing the New Year’s attack.
The nurses were not the only New Orleans workers feeling abandoned after a brief flurry of attention from local and national officials (even former President Joe Biden made a visit to the city in the last days of his presidency, reprising the role of mourner-in-chief, with which he briefly began his administration). In a city dominated by the tourism economy, service workers of all kinds had to return to work as though nothing had happened. It’s a grim kind of normal in this city, which is at once the least and the most representative U.S. city — it has a culture all its own, but it is also near the top in many of the signature pathologies of the United States, from gun violence to crumbling infrastructure. And in the wake of horror, the only thing any official seems able to promise the city is more cops.
So the nurses came together to support one another. It was an important moment of solidarity for Heidi Tujague, an emergency department nurse and a member of the union bargaining team who came in early that day to help with the injuries, to be able to “be there and support each other and acknowledge the trauma that everyone experienced.” Tujague, an 18-year veteran nurse who’s been at UMC for four years, had woken up New Year’s Day to her phone buzzing with the call to come in early. But the notifications, she said, didn’t go out to everyone. Some nurses walked in for their day shift unaware of what had happened; some float pool nurses who called in were told they weren’t needed. Others, she said, just came in anyway, knowing they’d be needed.
After the fact, the hospital sent around a survey asking nurses if they had received a call and wondering what could be done better. But for months, at the bargaining table and inside the hospital, the nurses said they’ve been trying to offer suggestions and have been ignored. “We have proposed numerous times to create an emergency response team and have policies and procedures that will address situations like that,” Mogilles said. “We know when a mass casualty happens, it’s all hands on deck.”
She continued: “This is the time when you want the people who are providing the care to be at the table, not someone whose background is business.”
Even if the nurses managed to provide excellent care that morning, Tujague said, they were stretched to their limit — one nurse said she had no time even for a gulp of water. A few extra hands could have allowed nurses to take a break or “have time to decompress and maybe process some of what’s going on while it’s happening, instead of bottling it up until the end of the shift or maybe the next day or two or three days later, depending upon your schedule.” Nurses, she noted, can’t take care of other people unless they too are cared for.
And so the UMC nurses are frustrated for themselves and for their patients. The demands they have made would improve the care they provide, yet the hospital seems opposed on principle. “Why are you opposed to us wanting to do our best?” Mogilles asked.
It was in a way a flashback to the height of the pandemic, when healthcare workers gave their all and risked their lives. When the wave of Covid cases finally receded, though, it seemed to many nurses I’ve spoken with that hospitals, rather than rewarding their “heroes,” decided that they could just keep working on the brink.
And so the UMC nurses, like many around the country, voted to strike. They’ll walk out February 5 and 6, just before the Super Bowl arrives in New Orleans.
To Mogilles, it’s a necessary step because, while the immediate emergency is over, she’s still watching patients struggle to heal. She works in an orthopedic clinic at the hospital, so she’s seen many of the New Year’s victims on their return visits. “It’s been — how I can put it — inconceivable, some of the stories, but yet so believable.” Some, she said, are struggling to get their medications. A couple are unhoused, and with Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s recent move to literally warehouse the homeless across town, she worried they weren’t offered transportation to their appointments.
When they do make it to the hospital, doctors are overscheduled, so it’s common, she said, for a clinic visit to take three or four hours. “People miss work and are stretched financially,” she said. “As a nurse, the best thing I can do is give people time to tell their story they want. That’s cathartic. It’s healing for them. But Monday, for instance, we have 230 people scheduled in one clinic. I won’t have time to listen to anyone.” The hospital does have a psych unit for trauma patients, but that, Mogilles noted, is “another clinic appointment, another visit, another wait.” She’s proposed to have counseling right there in her clinic, but yet again, has been rebuffed. “I was told that wasn’t necessary.”
Around the city, whether directly affected or not, New Orleanians are struggling with the aftermath of disaster, feeling as though they’ve been forgotten in the push back to normal.
Natalie Blaustone-Dye, a longtime New Orleans service worker and Ph.D. researcher in urban studies at Tulane University, knows from personal experience and from her academic work just how hard this has impacted the city’s service workers. She attended a vigil on Bourbon Street days after the attack and witnessed the workers caring for one another the same way the nurses did: “We couldn’t walk down the street without people just giving each other hugs and saying, ‘I’m glad you’re okay.’ There was a sense of care and concern and reassurance that came from that. It’s quite beautiful but also speaks to what that work community feels like.”
The French Quarter itself, she noted, becomes the broader workplace for so many people. Restaurant and hotel gigs can be short-lived, and many people in the city bounce from place to place, so they have friends and colleagues all over. I have tended to shorthand New Orleans as “a city where people move to avoid getting a real job,” and Blaustone-Dye has confirmed that half-joking conclusion with actual research. “A lot of people do hodgepodge a living together through an assemblage of hospitality jobs, informal side hustles or main hustles,” she said. Their main priority might be in the arts or music, and then they do some sort of on-the-books work part-time and supplement it with anything from housecleaning to sex work to busking on the street. Some people work in film or TV production — productions in the city recently include rebooted Anne Rice franchises Interview with the Vampire and Lives of the Mayfair Witches—and others in what Blaustone-Dye called the “preservation economy,” anything from repairing antiques to historic home renovations, maintaining New Orleans’ cultural heritage. And of course there is transportation: Uber drivers (I’ve met three who were New Orleans teachers) and food delivery drivers, and of course the ubiquitous pedicabs. Blaustone-Dye herself bartends at Vaughan’s, a Ninth Ward stalwart dive bar and music venue, and has been a pedicabber as well.
While much of this work happens far from Bourbon Street, when big tourist events happen, the Quarter and Bourbon in particular are the hub. “When there is big money in the city, it happens there and it doesn’t always trickle out.” Out-of-town workers will come in for big events, bringing their own pedicab, perhaps, or picking up shifts at Bourbon’s strip clubs. And when shifts are over, many service workers linger on the street, getting a to-go drink, perhaps, and wandering along to visit friends as they wind down from work. When the truck veered down Bourbon Street, at 3 a.m., it would have been the time many of those workers were getting off the clock.
It’s also, Blaustone-Dye noted, a common place for teenagers to hang out before they’re old enough to legally drink. Some of those killed on New Year’s were just eighteen. Some of the street performers in the neighborhood, too, are quite young. At the Bourbon Street vigil, she said, her friend turned to her and said, “Thank God those babies” — the young kids who drum on buckets on the corners for spare change — “weren’t out at that moment.”
In keeping with broader trends in the city and the country, Blaustone-Dye envisioned the New Year’s attack becoming a pretext for authorities to crack down on street performers and unauthorized workers, rather than to protect them.
But what would real protection and care look like? Once again, the workers have been doing it themselves. Bouncers on the front doors of the clubs, Blaustone-Dye noted, serve as a kind of informal first responder in the neighborhood. Blaustone-Dye knows three pedicabbers that were at the scene of the attack: “One, her customer walked off out the cab and got hit by the car. She watched the customer die.” The pedicabbers organized a GoFundMe so that they could take time off work to recover and address the trauma, but again, “That was the workers doing that for their friends themselves.”
As I wrote recently, the city has passed a workers’ bill of rights, but that has yet to be implemented, and even if it is, it’s still an opt-in system and many service workplaces will have to be pressured to comply. Few workers in the service industry now get any sort of paid sick time and many of them are still paid in cash, off the books. And how do you calculate paid sick time when it means missing a tipped shift on a major holiday or a major sporting event, when you might make a chunk of cash you need to carry you through leaner months? When so many people in the city labor in a semi-informal economy, how do we institutionalize care? How do we move beyond “back to normal”?
Because back to normal can be powerfully appealing. “Workers can be needing to breathe, needing support, needing to mourn, to go through this trauma and still need to make money and still want to not live in fear,” Blaustone-Dye said. “All of those things are true and the workers are feeling those things, but the tone deafness of people in power that obviously don’t have their best interest in mind forcing that is not.”
The big money season in New Orleans is upon us: the Sugar Bowl was played a day late after the Bourbon Street attack, but the Super Bowl is on and Mardi Gras season kicked off as usual with the Joan of Arc parade through the lower Quarter. Workers compete for those holiday and event shifts, Blaustone-Dye said, and plan their seasons around them. But this year has now brought fear and added stress to those shifts, along with urgency to the question of building a real safety net, let alone a real welfare state, for those workers.
Any sort of program of care, Blaustone-Dye said, would have to respect the agency of the workers who have often chosen this way of working, even if it is the best of a series of bad choices. They prefer their autonomy and control, even if it means hustling constantly, to being dependent on one employer that they can’t trust, and they’ve learned the hard way that they also can’t trust the state to show up for them.
The informal solidarity economy that operates throughout the city — where workers look out for each other, offer up spaces to charge a phone or rest or use a bathroom, share painkillers or tips on where the good money is — helps people make a living in ordinary times and come together when one or two friends have a crisis. But in a more widespread crisis, it is often insufficient.
Heidi Tujague came to University Medical Center because she wanted to practice “where patient care was the focus, not profits.” While New Orleans’ original Charity Hospital was shut down after Hurricane Katrina, UMC was built to serve the functions of Charity and the old University Hospital. It’s publicly owned but privately run (sort of like the city’s schools), and it’s open access, meaning that they treat everyone and anyone. And that’s how the nurses there like it.
“We work at an open access hospital by choice,” Mogilles said. “Our population has a myriad of things going against them, social determinants that are going to affect their health.”
For a while, though, Tujague said, UMC downplayed the history of Charity — until, that is, “we’ve unionized and we talked about being patient-first.” Now, they hear about the “spirit of charity” from the higher-ups. But the union drive began because nurses were frustrated in their ability to provide care, and they remain frustrated in their attempts to bargain a first contract. “We’ve had situations where staff didn’t have enough equipment, enough supplies,” Mogilles said. “Certainly staffing was a major issue because the focus was not put on retaining or recruiting the best, the brightest, the most qualified, or keeping the most qualified nurses at the bedside. It was not a safe environment.”
A new CEO and a new chief nursing officer had come in and begun making changes, some of which seemed arbitrary and punitive. “Our annual reviews came out that year, and for some reason, no one received scores they used to get,” Tujague said, and those scores were in turn used to determine “merit” raises. Hospital security, too, was being cut back, and they were seeing weapons and fights in the halls.
Meanwhile, at the bargaining table, Mogilles said, the narrative has been that the union are “outsiders coming in, carpetbaggers from California.” The hospital has insinuated that the nurses aren’t making their own choices, to which Tujague replied, “We are the union. We have been the union. This is our hospital. We showed up and we took care of those patients.”
They’ve been bargaining for seven months, and, she pointed out, “It doesn’t need to take this long.” The money the hospital is pouring into high-priced lawyers could be paying for “more wheelchairs, more IV poles, better supplies, more nurses, more patient care techs, even more security personnel, more people that are there to take care of the patient, not the other way around.”
The nurses see the strike as part of that fight for their patients, for a New Orleans that cares for everyone. To them, their choice to work at UMC, their demands for change after the Bourbon Street attack, and even their choices of high-profile dates for their strikes — the Super Bowl and, in October 2024, Taylor Swift’s concert — are all ways of ensuring that New Orleanians and visitors alike are cared for regardless of whether they are rich or famous. Charity Hospital was that rare public institution in a heavily privatized city, and UMC could be that kind of anchor institution, in immediate crises and beyond.
To Mogilles, fighting for the union has been “like an exclamation point on my career because I know I’m doing this for people coming behind me.” It has brought together the people in the hospital, “nurses from across units, gender, race, political background, for one common goal. I walk down the halls and nurses that I would’ve never talked to or known wave.”
It’s a vision of not just a hospital, but a city that actually gets its needs met. “We now have a real community,” Mogilles said.
Sarah Jaffe is a writer and reporter living in New Orleans and on the road. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and her latest book is From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, all from Bold Type Books. Her journalism covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets, and her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist at The Progressive and In These Times. She also co-hosts the Belabored podcast, with Michelle Chen, covering today’s labor movement, and Heart Reacts, with Craig Gent, an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism. Sarah has been a waitress, a bicycle mechanic, and a social media consultant, cleaned up trash and scooped ice cream and explained Soviet communism to middle schoolers. Journalism pays better than some of these. You can follow her on Twitter @sarahljaffe.
