The Side of the Angels

by Christina Bartolomeo

  While I would never have Ron’s flashy way of pitching a story, I grew to know a reliable handful of reporters at key dailies and magazines who’d return my calls because I tried not to waste their time, and who could be counted on to give our side a fair shake in their coverage. Once in a while I hit lucky with TV coverage. Ron was our star media relations guy, but he’d taught me enough that I could back him up when his plate got too full. The whole setup worked far better than I’d hoped.

  “Because we’re small, we do it all” was the motto Ron wanted to put on our stationery, until I convinced him it made us sound like a rental car company.

  Trade union clients like the Toilers were a fairly recent development for Advocacy, Inc. Back when big labor really was big labor, the unions didn’t need much help from spin doctors. Now, with union membership down to 18 percent of the workforce and with some politicians putting unions on their hit list right up there with single mothers and evolutionists, a few of the more forward-thinking honchos in the AFL had begun to realize that something was needed.

  We’d come to Weingould’s attention a few years ago when we helped win a first contract for the janitors and maintenance workers union at Windsor Real Estate, the owner of luxury high-rises across Pittsburgh. Ron came up with a “Custodians with a Conscience” campaign, in which lovable members of Local 802, dressed in caps and denim overalls, picked up litter in city parks. This feel-good gag so won the public’s sympathy and the media’s praise (“Big Labor Cleans Up Its Act,” ran the approving editorial in the Steel City Clarion) that the janitors wound up with a 6 percent raise and family health insurance benefits. Weingould was impressed with our performance, and one meeting with Ron convinced him that together they could turn the Toilers into the little union that could.

  “Can Wendy handle your other assignments for the next two weeks or more?” Ron asked, as Phyllis phoned up to the Big Guy to announce our arrival.

  “I guess so. She’d work twenty hours a day if we let her.”

  “Pack heavy. It’s cold and it’s damp,” Ron said.

  “I’ll charge my new longjohns to the office account.”

  “You seem less than enthusiastic, Nicky. It’s not like you.”

  “It’s just that this strike couldn’t have come at a worse time,” I said. “We’ve got the Campsters thing, and the Joseph’s Kitchen canned food drive, and the Reading Ready adult literacy fund-raiser. I don’t know what we’re going to do for that.”

  “Wendy suggested a book-themed house tour. Get six or seven of the board of directors who have fancy homes in Georgetown or Dupont to lend them out and deck each mansion out in a theme from some famous book, like netting and harpoons for Moby-Dick or fake Spanish moss for Gone With the Wind.”

  “I don’t think that Tara had Spanish moss, Ron. And I have trouble believing Wendy’s ever read Moby-Dick. Or Gone With the Wind, for that matter. I’m not sure she has the mental staying power even to sit through the movie.”

  “Give the kid a break,” said Ron.

  “You give her a break. It’s your ass her uncle is saving from being dragged through an audit.”

  “What do you think of her idea, though?”

  “They’ll like it. Who doesn’t get a kick out of looking at rich people’s homes? No facility rental costs, either. Our Wendy comes through in the clutch again.”

  “I realize that she gets on your nerves, but you know you’re lousy at the adorable stuff, Nicky, and she always nails it.”

  “You’re right. Wendy’s great. She’s great. She really is.”

  There, I had done my good deed for the day. So what if Wendy would just as soon throw herself into planning a book-burning bash, if that had been what the client wanted? So what if her enthusiasm was undiscriminating and her mind a shallow turquoise pool with goldfish darting and pennies winking? She gave her all, and she was, in her own way, irreplaceable.

  “Ron,” I said, “I’ve worked three strikes with you, but I’ve never worked a strike on my own before. I’d say I have the potential to really screw up.”

  “You can do it. It’s your sort of thing. Storming the barricades. Fighting the good fight.”

  “Going down with the ship.”

  “They can’t be much worse off than they are already, so nothing you do can hurt them any,” said Ron.

  “Gee, thanks. I feel better now.”

  The elevator, bouncing on its frayed cables, carried us up to Wein-gould’s office. Its inspection notice was three years out of date. Wasn’t there someone in the city government in charge of these things? Who was I kidding? In this city, it had been cause for prolonged celebration when the murder rate finally dropped below New York’s.

  As Ron adjusted his pocket square and assumed the entirely misleading air of competence and alertness with which he greeted clients, I had a feeling of impending doom that, as it turned out, was entirely accurate.

  4

  WEINGOULD was on the phone when we walked in, but he motioned us to the couch and waved an ink-stained hand to indicate that he’d be with us in a minute. Unlike many of our clients, Wein-gould tried to keep his appointments on schedule. Unfortunately, he agonized over the simplest decision, and it slowed him down. Like a doctor, he was always lagging behind by midafternoon.

  The couch, as usual, was stacked with folders, contracts, and the yellow legal pads he scrawled ideas on and then forgot about. We cleared space enough to sit, Ron barely refraining from dusting the crumbly leather before it made contact with the seat of his pants.

  Weingould’s long-suffering secretary, Mary Bridget, handed us “Proud to Be Union” mugs of acrid coffee and a paper cup full of packets of lightener mixed in with a few venerable sugar cubes. What seemed from its aroma to be soy sauce stained the bottom of this cup, which was clearly the receptacle for condiments of all kinds. I decided to take my coffee black for a change.

  Weingould was wrapping things up.

  “Okay, Bill, let me make sure I’ve got this. You’re saying they can’t get the phone list ready until the twentieth. We’re paying them twenty goddamn thousand dollars for a quickie poll and they can’t do better than that? They can’t make it the eighteenth? We wait much longer, the Teamsters’ll be in there handing out free windbreakers and then we’re really screwed…. Okay, okay. Tell them if they can manage the eighteenth, we’d appreciate it…. Okay, just do your best. I’ve got a meeting now, but you tell them from me the eighteenth would make all the difference. God Almighty, I’m sending this guy’s kids to college with what I pay him, he could move his butt for a change…. Okay. Okay…. Yeah, I know it’s a long shot…. Okay, I’ll speak to you when I speak to you.”

  This was a typical scene. Weingould, a victim of the age of office technology, lacked focus, and I had never entered his office for an appointment without sitting through the tail end of his frantic, pacing phone calls. He loved to shout into his speakerphone while scrolling down the ninety-two e-mails he got every hour, ripping open overnight-mail packages, and dictating memos to one of the three secretaries who indulged him and ran his life. Rumor had it that Wein-gould had remained on the telephone throughout his brief honeymoon, consummating his marriage only with the help of one of those headband receivers long-distance operators wear.

  Weingould was heavily built but not overweight like so many of his cohorts—the reason being that he could not eat and talk at the same time. His ties were always crooked and his shirttail was always out, but his clothes were beautiful, tailored to a perfection Ron only aspired to. His wife picked them out, for Weingould never left the office until after all the stores closed.

  Alan Weingould had grown up in the labor movement. His father, Jacob, had been an early leader of the garment workers, a man remembered both for his courage in facing down the sweatshop bosses and his early and generous assistance to Jews fleeing Hitler. Jacob Weingould had the heart of a lion. His son had the heart of a St. Bernard on acid, always bounding forward into snowdrifts too high for him.
Thanks to his chaotic and devoted efforts, the Toilers had become one of the fastest-growing unions in the AFL-CIO. Driven and demanding he certainly could be, but in a town full of shills and operators, he was a refreshingly true believer.

  “Now, what are you here for?” he asked Ron, shifting some of the piles on his desk and putting on his reading glasses.

  “The St. Francis strike,” Ron said.

  “St. Francis,” said Weingould blankly, as if conjuring up visions of Assisi’s lover of wolves and sparrows and wondering what it had to do with us.

  “In Winsack,” Ron said. He was accustomed to these preliminaries. “Rhode Island.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. The nurses.”

  The Toilers had only recently started organizing nurses in a big way. Most of their members worked in some form of civil or public service, from garbage collectors in Trenton to professors at city colleges in Philly and Queens. Jerry Goreman, the bureaucratic little man who’d succeeded the legendary Frank De Rosa as the Toilers’ president, had no fire in his belly for winning new members. Goreman’s goals were simple: he wanted to spend his years as president watching the current membership dues pile up in the Toilers’ treasury, thus funding his junkets to international labor conferences in Madrid and Tokyo.

  But Goreman had made a lot of enemies during the three years he’d played a watchful Stalin to De Rosa’s Lenin, and his political base was far from strong. Weingould wrested money from the union’s executive board by assuring them that health care was the new gold rush territory. Under the HMOs, even the American Medical Association was talking about getting doctors organized. If M.D.s were that desperate, Weingould reasoned, the time was ripe to prospect for nurses.

  And he was right. The Toilers’ nurse membership, which had once consisted of a few straggling locals in state mental hospitals, had grown to twenty thousand in the last three years. Nowhere near the size of the heavyweights, but still very respectable. Weingould had been vindicated, but he was unprepared for how tough these organizing drives were. In the public sector, workers’ rights were protected by better laws and long precedent. But in the largely unpoliced Wild West of the private sector, the hospitals had proven themselves nasty adversaries—dragging out contract negotiations for years, hiring union-busting lawyers to come up with perfectly legal schemes for intimidating employees, and delaying elections until ordered to hold them by the courts, by which time all the union’s original supporters had been fired or pressured out of their jobs.

  What Weingould really needed were seasoned experts with a track record in private-sector organizing. What he could afford, thanks to Goreman’s budget pinching, was Ron and me, flying by the seat of our pants.

  * * *

  Without even looking, Weingould put his hand on the one manila folder he needed in the stack of thirty on his desk. As he did so, pink message slips and penciled reminders from his secretary fluttered to the floor and were rolled to shreds under the wheels of his desk chair.

  Ron pulled out his engraved Mont Blanc pen and the leather-bound notebook with his initials stamped on the cover. He brought them to every client meeting. Ron loved obvious executive accessories. Like any actor, he needed a few props. I dug out a steno pad and a Bic.

  “We have a situation here,” said Weingould in his verbal shorthand. “Our local at St. Francis is a fair-size local, maybe one hundred, one-fifty nurses. Catholic hospital in a small blue-collar mill town. Used to be a mill town, anyway, like all those towns up there, depressing as hell. Hospital’s been operating since 1910, was run at one time by the Little Sisters of St. Francis with lay nurses added over the years. We won our first election in 1979, actually bargained pretty decent contracts since then. Clare Murray is the local president there. Done well for the past eight years. Well respected, not just at the hospital but at the state level.”

  Ron inscribed, “Murray—well respected” in his notebook. His handwriting is large and sprawling. You can tell he never went to parochial school.

  “Murray grew up right there in Winsack. Always had a good, productive relationship with the administration. Two years ago the hospital was acquired by a big for-profit chain, Coventry Inc., and things are going to hell in a handbasket. Take a look at this.”

  “This” was a petition from the St. Francis nurses on the medical-surgical floor. A med-surg floor, I could gather from the wording, was a regular hospital floor, rather than an intensive care or cardiac unit. The nurses were asking the hospital to remedy certain dangerous conditions in their unit. The problems listed made me hope I never needed my tonsils out.

  I read the petition text over Ron’s shoulder.

  “We are alarmed by a nurse-patient ratio that has gone from one to three, to one to eight in the past year,” the nurses had written.

  “One nurse to eight patients?” I asked Weingould.

  “That’s the first step these for-profits take. Cutting labor costs, and nurses are expensive labor.”

  We read on. “Incident reports include: a sixty-year-old male who waited more than an hour for a herapin drip due to equipment shortages … some patients going ten hours without vital signs taken because the two night nurses were occupied with higher acuity cases … inadequate nurse training on infusion pumps which could result in fatal dosage errors, including one incident in which an exhausted nurse in the fourteenth hour of her shift keyed in 82 milligrams of morphine instead of 8.2 milligrams before realizing her mistake … a patient assigned a bed in the supply room because all other rooms were overcrowded already.”

  What surprised me most was that the petition, according to Weingould, had been signed by every single nurse in the med-surg unit. You almost never saw that. Hospitals did not look kindly on nurses who were “troublemakers.” Conditions must be really lousy at St. Francis.

  “Negotiations were a disaster from day one,” Weingould said, loosening his tie. Ron loosened his too. I had nothing to loosen, so I crossed my legs.

  “The nurses were focusing on staffing and safety issues,” Weingould went on. “No big-money demands. We knew we were in trouble when the hospital waited two months past the official start of bargaining to submit its bargaining proposals. When they did, we weren’t even close. Management offered no staffing relief, no patient-safety concessions. Nothing on forced overtime or floating. Needless to say, no raise. The hospital’s crying poverty, which is a load of crap.”

  “Financial statements?” Ron asked, leaning forward. He loved money talk.

  “I’m getting a specialist to take a look. At a glance it seems like the hospital had a stellar past five years, which is probably one reason Coventry snapped it up in the first place. But there’s a few weird things going on with wholly-owned subsidiaries that I’m curious about.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, breaking up their little tête-à-tête. “But how come these nurses are so ready to walk out? They’re looking at a strike that could go into Christmas.”

  “The hospital’s sent every signal that they’re not going to budge, and the nurses know it. They’re practically being locked out as it is.”

  “Any allies on the board of directors?”

  “One or two. We have a source on the board who should come through for us in a day or two on that.”

  You had to hand it to Weingould, he never threw you into a situation without thoroughly prepping you. Mary Bridget might have to program reminders of his wife’s birthday into his computer for him, but he knew the details of what was happening in every single one of the forty campaigns he had going nationwide.

  “What’s our time line?” said Ron.

  “The local took a strike vote that goes into effect at the will of the bargaining team, which could be soon if there continues to be no movement. The vote was at ninety-three percent. Can you have Nicky up there pronto?”

  “By this weekend. Who’s the MFWIC again?” Ron asked. (MFWIC, pronounced “miffwick,” was an old campaign acronym which meant “mother-fucker-what’s-in-charge.�
�) “Tony something?”

  “Tony Boltanski,” said Weingould in clipped, flat tones, as if he were some sort of FBI agent filling another agent in on Tony’s sordid past.

  “What’s his story?”

  “We got him from SEIU. He ran that Connecticut election that won the whole Fairhaven system. A month into that campaign the hospital had him roughed up by some security guards. He told them he’d take it out of their sorry asses, and he stayed there, getting in their faces for two years, until they won that thing. He’s a good guy.”

  Tony Boltanski was a good guy, all right. The best. The American worker had no better friend than Tony Boltanski, veteran of the Smithson Mine strike, the Superlink Telephone lockout, and the Hedgerow Farms blueberry pickers’ famous 1989 boycott. The tougher a fight looked to be, the faster Tony was there.

  Tony Boltanski was a real pro, and the Toilers had been smart to hire him. He was also a self-centered, pugnacious, uncompromising emotional deaf-mute whom I had no wish to see again, let alone be cooped up with for the duration of what promised to be a bitter and prolonged strike that the public would regard with little initial sympathy. Nurses leaving their patients was right up there with police officers or firefighters walking off the job.

  “And Murray?” said Ron. “Anything to watch out for there?”