Infinity residents, families call for end to strike
‘Pay the people,’ says one resident, as another seeks return to ‘some sense of normalcy’
Striking SEIU Healthcare Illinois workers walk a picket line outside the Lakeview Rehabilitation & Nursing Center in Chicago. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
Residents and family members of residents at Infinity Health Care nursing homes joined in a union-sponsored online news conference Thursday seeking an end to the ongoing strike now in its 11th day.
“Pay the people!” David Puschmann said. “Pay them what they’re asking for. They deserve a whole lot more.”
To a person, the residents defended the striking workers as “family” and called for Infinity to come to an agreement to end the strike, as almost 700 SEIU Healthcare Illinois workers remain out at 11 Infinity facilities offering long-term care across northern Illinois. They’re demanding hazard pay and personal protective equipment in the pandemic, as well as adequate staffing and a $15-an-hour wage.
“The staff members are our family,” said Doris Moore, a resident at the Ambassador Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Chicago for almost three years since suffering a stroke in 2018. She circulated a petition titled “We Are Family” signed by 25 residents backing the strikers.
“It’s hurting us,” said George Willis, a resident at the Niles Nursing & Rehabilitation Center. “We need them back inside here.” He added that residents seek to return to “some sense of normalcy.”
Several residents charged that normal schedules were running well behind, that patients are being left untended in their beds, that trash is going uncollected, that workers are wearing the same coronavirus masks for a week or two, while residents are wearing “cheap paper masks,” and that part-time replacement workers aren’t showing the same level of care.
“They don’t give a rat’s butt about what’s going on here,” said Puschmann, another Ambassador resident. “They don’t know our needs. … They’re incompetent. … They may think they know what they’re doing, but they don’t.
“It’s horrendous, to be honest with you,” he added. Puschmann said he’s even obtained a strike sign to show his support.
David Puschmann displays his SEIU strike sign at the Ambassador nursing home. (Zoom)
“People are walking around like chickens with their heads cut off,” said Jennifer Neisler, a resident at Lakeview Rehabilitation & Nursing Center in Chicago. She called conditions “appalling,” and said she’d faced repercussions and threats for telling her story earlier to a TV news crew.
“I will not give up,” Neisler said. “I will not be silenced.”
Heather Tvrz, whose brother is a resident at the Parker Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Streator, said in some ways it’s even worse for families — already unable to visit loved ones in long-term-care facilities in the pandemic, and now deprived of the workers they trusted to care for them.
“We depend on the workers who know him, who have done a good job,” she said. “We could trust the workers that he had, that know him. … At least we knew that he was cared for properly.” The replacement workers, Tvrz added, “don’t understand his needs.”
“We want our brothers and sisters back,” Puschmann said. He called them “straight-up family, and we dearly miss them.”
Moore said residents feel the walkout is “about us, making it better for us,” adding, “Please give them their wages. … Please give them their money. They deserve that and more.”
SEIU Healthcare Illinois chief strike negotiator Shaba Andrich echoed statements he made Wednesday at a demonstration outside the Lakeview home that “our people made significant moves” in talks earlier this week, granting concessions on pay. But he said they can’t grant concessions on personal protective equipment in a pandemic, adding that conditions “have been bad, and now they’re getting worse.” He said another round of talks was set for Thursday night, but “we are still very far apart.”
Andrich charged that the for-profit Infinity Health Care Management was out to “milk as much money as possible” from both workers and residents. “They’re going to choose profiteering over the right thing,” he added, citing that “there’s no accountability” for how $12.7 million in COVID-19 relief funding was even spent by Infinity.
Andrich pointed out the hygiene issues involving resident care threatened to cause more health problems than the ongoing pandemic, but that one of the main issues is just to return conditions to that “sense of normalcy” residents and workers previously enjoyed. “You don’t have a home,” he said, “when our members who care for you are out on the street.”