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Trump cuts leave VA hospital nurses and veteran patients in a crisis

Detroit, Michigan, The John D, Dingell VA Medical Center. Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Already burdened by years of funding cuts and understaffing, registered nurses who work at Veterans Health Administration (VA) facilities across the country are facing a crisis as the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce take effect. In this episode of Working People, Maximillian Alvarez speaks with VA nurses and union representatives for National Nurses United about how these cuts, coupled with Trump’s attempt to strip over one million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights, are hurting VA workers, the quality of care they’ve been trained to provide, and the veterans they serve.

Guests:

  • Irma Westmoreland, a registered VA nurse in Augusta, Georgia, who currently serves as secretary-treasurer of National Nurses United and chair of the National Nurses United Organizing Committee/NNU-VA
  • Sharda Fornnarino, a navy veteran who has worked as a VA nurse for 25 years, and who currently serves as the National Nurses United director of the Denver VA.

Additional links/info:

Featured Music:

  • Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Credits:

  • Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are continuing our on the ground reporting on the Trump administration’s attacks on the federal workforce and the people who depend on their services. The Department of Veterans Affairs is the second largest department in the United States government. Second only to the Department of Defense as Eric Umansky and Vernal Coleman report at ProPublica, the VA has cut just a few thousand staffers this year, but the administration has said it plans to eliminate at least 70,000 through layoffs and voluntary buyouts within the coming months.

The agency, which is the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States currently has nearly 500,000 employees, most of whom work in one of the VA’s 170 hospitals and nearly 1200 clinics. Documents obtained by ProPublica show Doge officials working at the VA in March prepared an outline to transform the agency that focused on ways to consolidate operations and introduce artificial intelligence tools to handle benefit claims. One Doge document proposed closing 17 hospitals and perhaps a dozen more. Now, VA workers and veterans advocates have been sounding the alarm that these cuts and proposed restructurings could upend services that have already been burdened by years of underfunding and understaffing. And it’s not just the cuts. Workers employed by the VA have joined other unions ensuing the Trump administration over President Trump’s attempts to override the law through executive order and strip more than 1 million federal government employees of their collective bargaining rights.

In an April press release from National Nurses United NNU President Nancy Hagens said the VA nurses rely on collective bargaining to advocate for patient safety and ensure the best care for our veterans, most of whom are over 45 years old and many of whom have a disability. Without these bargaining rights, we risk retaliation for speaking up and holding our employers accountable. Our veterans deserve nurses who can fight for their care without fear. This latest move by the administration is a clear attempt to intimidate us for standing up against its efforts to dismantle and privatize the va, which studies have shown is a better place for veterans to receive care compared to the private sector, we will not be silenced by this bully behavior. And I just want to give a disclaimer up top here that our guests here are speaking as healthcare workers and member officers of National Nurses United.

They are not speaking on behalf of the VA or the federal government. I want to make that very clear. Now, Irma, Sharda, thank you both so much for joining us today on the show, especially amid all the chaos going on right now. I know this is a really hectic time, but our listeners are desperate to hear from y’all about what’s going on in the va. So I’m really, really grateful to y’all for making time for this and I want to kind of dig right in. And before we get to everything that’s been happening under the new administration, I wanted to ask if we could start by having y’all introduce yourselves, tell us more about you and the work that you do at the va, how you got into that work, and let’s give listeners a sense of what it’s been like working as a VA healthcare professional before 2025.

Irma Westmoreland:

Okay, well, I’ll go first. My name is Irma Westmoreland. I’m a registered nurse at the Charlie Norwood va and I’ve been here for 34 years. I started working at the VA because I wanted to work where I could give back to veterans. My mother was a volunteer at the VA for 50 years and one of my earliest memories was being taken into the VA to do bingo parties for our veterans or dance parties for the veterans. And we had to drag all of our friends with us because we needed ’em and it was a great time, but also because my husband is a veteran, many members of my family are veterans or were married to veterans or part of our family and we wanted to give back and support the va. I’ve been doing this, like I said, for 34 years and I wouldn’t do anything else.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Irma, could you just say a little more about what the on the ground work has been like for you? I know it’s a big question to cover 34 years, but just give us a little sense of the day-to-day work and how that work has changed over the time that you’ve been at the va.

Irma Westmoreland:

I’ve been working at the VA, like I said, for 34 years. My first job was an ICU nurse and I’ve been a manager for a while, IV team manager, med surg manager. And then my latest job and last job at the VA has been as an informatics nurse, which means I’ve been working with physicians and nurses and helping them to learn how to document with our computerized charting system, developing charting tools and assisting them in that way.

Sharda Fornnarino:

So I’ve been a nurse for about 25 years at the Denver va. I started off as an ICU nurse or say a med surg nurse and then eventually evolved into the ICU and it was truly amazing. I worked with some amazing, amazing nurses and then eventually I got injured on the job and then I had to transition from inpatient care to outpatient. And since then I’ve been doing what’s called a float coordinator. I’ve worked in different medical specialties. What that means is I go where there’s people needed. I worked in neurology assisting doctors with procedures. I’ve worked in neurosurgery and I’m currently working in dermatology, assisting with procedures and help running their clinics day to day and connecting the patients with the providers. I would tell you that before all the stuff that’s happening now, the VA was a great place. It’s still a great place to work and the amazing people that I work with, a lot of us are veterans.

That’s really one of the reasons why I started to work at the va. When I got out of nursing school, I was looking at trying to get a job like everybody else, but I really wanted to give back. I served in the military for active duty for four years and I served in the reserves for about eight years and I really connected with the veteran patient. We were always able to joke around, we’re always able to talk about our past service and it’s always heartwarming to, they always enjoy talking about the old times, I should say, where they serve. They enjoy that comradery. There’s something about being in the military, you connect with all these people in just a different level. So that’s one of the reasons that had me join the Veterans Administration and just to know that I work with some really wonderful people and half of them are veterans too. We joke around, we just have this unique bond.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Was there anything about your service that sort of led you to feel like healthcare was where you wanted to give back or was that kind of more of an accident?

Sharda Fornnarino:

Well, I was a Navy corpsman, which is basically like an LPN on the outside. And so I provided a lot of nursing care while I was in the military and I worked in the psychiatric unit where mental health overseas was definitely needed and the nurses I worked with there basically said to Meda, you should really go into nursing. You would do benefit, it’ll benefit you greatly benefit your patients. You really have a knack for connecting with the patients and so you should go into nursing. And so they were really influential. One of my captains was very influential in leading me toward nursing, so I felt that it was eventually a good fit.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Sharda Irma, I wanted to ask if we could just go a little bit deeper and reveal a bit more about the VA healthcare system itself. Because a lot of folks listening to this, especially if they’re not veterans or they don’t have veterans in their family, they don’t know a lot about what goes on in there or how the VA itself is different from the healthcare that say they get. So I wanted to just ask if we could help listeners understand a bit more what the VA healthcare system is, how it works across the country and who it serves.

Irma Westmoreland:

VA care is very special. The care that our veterans need is mostly care for injuries that they served while in combat or while in service. So when a person signs up for the military, we tell them, Hey, if you get hurt, we’re going to take care of you. But what I have found, my husband was in the military for 23 years, he’s retired from the Army, and it’s changed just dramatically over the years about the benefits that our veterans get. So we have shrunk those benefits. Unfortunately, we tell them, Hey, you get hurt. We’re going to take care of you forever. But some of those things have changed, but we do better in the VA more than anywhere else is that we do PTSD, which is mental health care, spinal cord injury care, military, sexual trauma care, care for rehab, rehabilitation people with prosthetics. We do that better than anybody, our care, the nurses and the doctors in the va.

We train every single year. We have to take a course in what kinds of injuries in the different kinds of theaters of war or actions would we expect our veteran to have. So patients from World War I or different from patients from World War II or different from patients that were the Korean War and the Vietnam War and in the skirmishes that follow. And so each year we do that. We train on what kinds of things are we going to look for, what kind of injuries your care in the VA has been researched because the kinds of injuries that our veterans get has changed over time based on the technologies. So now we get a lot more traumatic brain injury, what we call TBI injury. So we need a lot more different and people lose limbs more than and come back more from injuries because of the advances in healthcare.

So we have a lot of rehab care and that care has been researched and studied and it’s also been researched and studied and how we get that care in the va, provide that care in the va and then how it’s provided on the outside. It’s light years better in the VA because our veteran comes to a place where they are around fellow veterans and there is some support from that. But there’s also, we provide care for people who are homeless. We provide care for people who again are spinal cord injury or people who need supportive care versus nursing home care versus acute care. All throughout the va, we have around the clock veterans care for your whole life. So we call it holistic care.

Sharda Fornnarino:

I would tell you what’s unique about the VA Max is really just to reiterate what Ermo is saying, it does encompass from mental health to any kind of physical injury. So where you would have to go on the outside and go to different areas and go to different hospitals, I feel like it’s a little fragmented in that way. The VA does provide it all encompassing. It’s all usually in the same place. Like my particular va, we have a spinal cord injury center. We have A-P-T-S-D Ascend program, which is an inpatient intensive program, and we have everything. We take care of everything between heart surgeries to minor hernias. So you can see it runs the whole gamut of everything. And we also were affiliated with some nursing home, so the VA has some nursing homes with us. So everything that we’re doing is all together. It’s all in one. The system is completely connected, which is different from the outside. I don’t want to say it’s better or worse, it’s just different. Everything is all there. And so when you see a VA provider, they can see all those things and look in your records and everything is all there where they in one spot where they don’t have to research to find different things or

Irma Westmoreland:

Go to different providers and such. You see a primary care physician right on the outside. So if you see your primary care physician, if you need to see a specialist, you have to farm you out right to somebody else. And then you have to get those records sent back to you. If you go to a facility, if you’re a primary care physician. Now a lot of them are only outpatient. So at a hospital you have to go to a hospital and see a hospital. Intensivist. In our facility, in our facilities in the va, we are 100%, like she said, integrated in that your primary care facility also is your hospital facility also is your other outpatient and specialty facilities. And all of that’s together. Like at the Charlie Norwood VA where I work, we have the same things like she’s talking about, we have inpatient mental health units, we have outpatient mental health care, and we have nursing home care, we have blind rehab centers, spinal cord injury, and all of the acute care and in between.

So all in one place. And we of course we both, we are both in big cities and so we have metro facilities, but we also have clinics that are attached to our facility that are in the rural areas of Georgia. And we even have one into South Carolina from our facility. The same thing that’s going on in Denver. So it’s an integrated thing. And you also have one medical record, which is really key in that everything is integrated no matter where you see. So if my patient was seen in Denver last week and is on vacation in Augusta, Georgia and gets ill, we have the same medical record so we can look at everything that was related to him, anything that happened to him, if he left his medications at home, we can go in and give him a prescription, which we have a pharmacy that gives it out to them right there.

And so our ER doctor, if they come in, ill can see everything that’s happened to them. One of the biggest big things that you said earlier that I want people to really see is it’s the biggest largest integrated healthcare system in the country, and integrated is the key. We are integrated one medical record, one system of how do we do things? One set of care standards for spinal cord injury, one set of care standards for our primary care clinics. And so that’s what makes us so great. We are all doing the same thing. People will tell you, oh, it’s one VA is one va, but that’s not true. We are integrated 100% and that makes us even better than anywhere else. I wish we all had the same thing that the VA offers.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I wanted to ask, in the spirit of walking us up to the current attacks, one of the things that folks in the civilian population have heard over the years about the VA is that it’s underfunded, that there are long wait times, like the typical fodder that you get when someone’s trying to privatize a government agency. Because I’ve been hearing the same stuff in industries across the country, and I’ve been interviewing workers in those industries dealing with chronic funding cuts over years, like education. How many public school teachers have I interviewed over the years who have said, yeah, we have class sizes that are too big and we can’t retain teachers because our funding keeps getting cut and they keep piling more work onto fewer teachers and the same thing’s going on in the railroads, the same things going on in retail. Right? I So I wanted to ask before we take a quick break here, you guys could just, if you had anything you wanted to respond to folks out there who are maybe just thinking about those stories. They don’t know the VA themselves, but they’ve heard that the VA is yet another government run agency isn’t adequate that it’s something wrong with the agency itself. Can you give us an on the ground view of what folks are not seeing when they’re hearing those kinds of stories?

Sharda Fornnarino:

I was just going to say yes, just like teachers. My husband is a teacher, and so we have the continued same woes of anything, any agency that’s funded by the government right now over the years, you’re correct. Our funding has been getting chipped away. And so really what we need, what people are saying, well, what’s wrong with the va? What’s wrong with the fact that we can’t keep getting the ultimate healthcare? We keep hearing about the issues that we’re having in the va. Well, we need the funding is ultimately what we need. We need to get a fully staffed va. We need to get all our funding, not getting leached out to the outside, but bringing back that funds back inside, invest in our va, invest in our staff, invest in our nurses, so that way we can give the best care and protect our veterans moving forward and provide the programs that we have so we’re not short staffed so we can give all the things that we say we want to give.

Irma Westmoreland:

One thing that can go with that is that I would like people to really look at what’s going on in the outside. If in the VA right now across the country, we have our primary care appointments, you can get a primary care appointment with your doctor in less than two weeks. We have same day appointments just like they do outside. They only have a few a day, just like outside. My husband is an army veteran. He was in an outside hospital because he got very sick and was taken there and he had to wait. If he didn’t see a different doctor and not his doctor he was assigned to for cardiology, he would’ve had to wait two and a half months for a cardiology appointment. And that’s on the outside, not as a veteran, but just as an outside person paying a private pain citizen in the va, we have the same kinds of things because we do have those staffing specialties, but we don’t have enough of them either.

So if you’re telling me I have got to send my patient outside, if he can’t get an appointment in 30 days, he’s got to go outside. That way you leach the funding away from the VA and send it to somebody outside because here’s what I’m saying, those doctors outside, they’re going to want to see the VA patient because the VA pays on time every time federal government on time, every time we’re going to pay you. So you’re going to your funds all the time. So those patients still have to wait, you go to send them outside. The appointment outside is longer than the appointment they had to wait for in the va. Correct. It’s ridiculous. Nobody is telling you that. I’m not saying that there aren’t some appointments that you can get faster. I’m not saying that, but what I am saying is many times what we are finding is that those specialty care appointments are just as long wait outside or longer than it is in the inside. And what we see is if you come back to the VA and be seen in the va, your care is faster, quicker, and better. And research has shown over and over that the morbidity and mortality rates and complication rates, death rates of our veterans are much less when we treat them in the VA than when they’re treated outside the va.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now, Sharda, Irma, we’ve sort of given listeners a bird’s eye view of the state of the VA leading up to 2025. Let’s talk about what the hell has been going on over the past few months, like the attacks from the Trump administration, both on federal agencies including the Department of Veterans Affairs, but also federal workers, many of whom we’ve interviewed on this show and at the Real News Network. There’s been so much happening in just the past few months alone. I wanted to ask if you could just sort of talk us through what the hell’s been going on in your world since the new Trump administration came in. What attacks have been affecting you all and your work directly?

Irma Westmoreland:

What I wanted to say about that is as I represent nurses from all of our VAs that we represent, I hear from across the country what’s going on. And what we have been seeing is that the first set of cuts that came forward was the terminating of probationary employees. And in general, none of those were nurses, registered nurses that I have been able to find. But what we have found is that the terminating of employees and cutting of employees has been all of the support staff kind of folks. So in a hospital where we work, every single person is important, whether it’s the groundskeeper to the housekeeper who cleans the beds and turns over our beds so that we can get them them back to us quickly and put a patient in, whether it’s the dietary staff bringing the food, the respiratory therapist doing Jet N treatments or the physical therapist, every single person is important.

The person who transports our patients or transports our labs down to the lab, all of those people are important. When you cut those people, when the Secretary Collins is saying to everybody that will listen to him and please hear exactly what he’s saying, he’s saying he’s not going to cut doctors and nurses that are front what he’s calling front facing staff. So that means people that are taking care of our patients on our med search units and our clinics and those sorts of things. So he’s not going to cut those people. But if you cut the secretary who’s answering the phone, who is going to answer the phone, it’s got to be the nurse. And when I am having to stop or my nurses are having to stop and answer the phone, when a patient needs something, they have to wait. And that is a problem for us as nurses.

We want to be able to spend our nursing time taking care of our patients, making relationships with them, assessing them so that when I come in to see you, max, if you’re my patient, I’ve had you for eight hours today. I’ve been in and out of your room multiple times. I’ve done my assessment with you, you and I, I’ve had you this my second day. I see you. I come in in a split second. I can tell you there’s something wrong with you. I know if you’re having a problem because I’ve been seeing you. I know I’ve watched you multiple times, I’ve spoken to you. I know in a split second there’s something wrong. We got to get something. What’s happening. I need to assess you. I need to reassess you what’s happening, and that’s what giving me my time to see you does. But also if you call me and you need pain medication, should you have to wait long for that because I’m having to go and take another patient down to radiology because I don’t have anybody to take care of radiology.

And then the nurses that are left on the floor that are taking care of patients got to pick my patients up too. So now instead of my five or six that I have, they’ve now got 10 or 11 or 12 patients they’re listening out for who can do that? Nobody can do that adequately. So what we need is to have adequate funding to fully fund the va. What’s happening with all these cuts and the proposed cuts is to starve the VA of not only dollars but to starve the VA of resources like staffing. When we’ve had these cuts, what people we’ve got freezes have a vacancy. Who’s going to want to come to the VA if they know now I’ve got firings coming, guess who goes first? The police senior who wants to come if they know who’s going to leave their solid job to come and work even in an ancillary job when they know those people are going to be fired first. So that starves us not only of dollars, funding dollars that ARD has been talking about, but also staffing dollars and resource dollars.

Sharda Fornnarino:

Max. I was I thinking about the question and a good analogy. What I can give you is really right now at RVA, we don’t have enough HR staff to even hire or go through the vetting process for an employee that does want to take the chance to come in and work with our veterans. So where a hiring process may take maybe three to four months for the va, it’s now taking longer. We just hired a PA dermatology. It took her 10 months to get onto the va and thank goodness she was dedicated and really wanted to come and work with our staff and our veterans. So she waited it out and was willing to come. But that tells you we can’t give that kind of timely care. We can’t fill these open positions fast enough in order to give that care to that patient. So that’s definitely a problem. And also Secretary Collins, as Irma alluded, they’re not cutting medical doctors, nurses, which thank goodness they’re not. But we don’t send in time of war. We don’t send just our frontline out to battle and then leave all their support people in the back and just behind and cut them out. We need all the support we can get to make the frontline snipers, whoever to be successful in the battle. So that’s how I feel. It’s like we’re going into battle without all our support, if that makes any sense.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, it makes tons of sense. And I wanted to also impress upon listeners that there is no shortage of need for this healthcare, right? I mean, before COVID-19, the fastest growing sector in the workforce was home healthcare and elder care because we have a generation of folks who are aging out of the workforce who need elder care. These are also veterans of 20th century wars who are going to need that care. But we also have this influx of new veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who are also needing that care. All the while the situation that y’all are describing sounds catastrophic, especially not only for retaining the existing healthcare staff that the VA has, but attracting new workers to join the va. It really does, I think kind of sound the alarm for us because I wanted to just ask if you could say a little more about that from the worker or perspective worker’s point of view, what exactly folks are signing up for if they’re signing up to work at the VA now, and what the hell we’re going to do when folks stop signing up because of all the things we’re talking about here?

Irma Westmoreland:

Well, what we’re going to get is exactly what they’re trying to get. Doge and all of the Trump administration, secretary Collins, they’re trying to the va, that’s what we’re going to get. So you keep taking the dollars and the resources away and then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Oh, the VA’s not doing their job. We need to streamline the care so we can streamline it. We need to cut 80,000 people so that we can streamline care, but it’s not going to affect that the care we give our veteran is the public stupid. No, they are not. All they need to do is listen to exactly what Secretary Collins says, we’re going to cut 80,000 people, but it’s not going to cut the direct care the patient gets. Let me tell you this. Or the veteran gets, you can’t cut 80,000 anything from any type of job or any type of anything and expect that they’re not to have any effect on the bottom line of a company or the bottom line of the amount of work that you get.

So people right now are afraid. So now we have chaos. They’re talking about, well, should I take a buyout if I can get a buyout because they’re not doing buyouts for a lot of nurses and doctors because guess what? We’re not going to cut them. So they’re not allowing buyouts to happen. They are allowing some early voluntary retirements or retirements, but then we’re going to have these cut staff. So we’re not allowing that to happen. So then people are thinking, am I going to be the person who’s going to be left? So then we have chaos, right? People are worried about their job, they’re afraid. People are scared about the va, scared about coming to work for the VA because what might happen with us, but what’s the bottom line is it’s again a self-fulfilling prophecy that we’re going to cut the VA to the point or cause such chaos that there is an issue and then we’re going to farm that out, right?

We’re going to privatize that, we’re going to farm that out. Then you farm more and more of it out with it goes the dollars to take care of it. When if you had just put those dollars back into the VA and reinvested in the va, we’d have it even better of a system than we have right now. But what will happen is that you get to a point where there’s a tipping point. It’s like a rollercoaster. You go up the hill, up the hill, up the hill, and when you get to a certain point, bam, you’re done. And so it becomes to a point when you tip the scale so far, it then goes over and what happens is they’re going to try to privatize the va, which would be the absolute worst possible thing that could happen for our veteran because our veterans need the care that we give because we over and over again provide the best care for our veteran in the care that they need and the systems that they need.

Sharda Fornnarino:

I can tell you max, that a lot of our veterans over and over will tell us they prefer waiting for the va. They want to be seen at the va. I have veterans every day that tell me they’d rather wait, and sometimes I have to encourage them to go to the outside to make sure they’re getting their care. But really this is why we’re here today is speaking up because of all this chaos that’s happening. We as union, we’re trying to make sure that we’re able to use our voice and say, look, you can’t scare us. We’re here. We’re here to stay. We are here to stand alongside with our veterans and give the best possible care that we can.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I apologize for kind of asking a question about something that you both have already touched on, but I really want to drive this point home for listeners. Could you just say a little more about what the cuts translate to on the ground? Irma, you were talking about the fact that when you don’t have an assistant to take your patient down to another ward to the hospital, you as the nurse got to do that, which means you are not tending to your patients. I want to just tug on that thread a bit more because on this show we talk to workers about their jobs, like the day-to-day reality of what they’re doing. And if we’re talking here about workers providing care and veterans and fellow workers or retired workers receiving care, could we just drive home a bit more like what the quality of care looks like when you are dealing with these impossible circumstances, not only from the recent cuts from the Trump administration, but decades of underfunding and understaffing?

Irma Westmoreland:

Absolutely. One of the things we’ve had is not just cuts in where we’re at right here, but logistics, which are the people that buy our supplies and then the people that bring them up to the units. So we have had shortages of supplies where we just came through the holiday weekend, Memorial Day weekend a couple weekends ago, and so we are supposed to have enough supplies on Friday afternoon to get you through till Tuesday morning of supplies. And routinely what we have is that there are supplies that are missing. We don’t have enough supplies, we don’t have people to get them. I’m running, I’m sending people to go to another unit. I’m on the phone calling down to the emergency room. I had a nurse explain to me. One of my nurses said, look, I didn’t have urinals. I mean just something just crazy that we have majority of veteran male staff patient, so I didn’t have urinals.

I’m calling around to every single unit to see who’s got some extra so I could run down to the found. I found four in the er. They gave me two of the four they had. So we run to do that. I had a nurse anesthetist tell me a story where they had to hold an OR case in the waiting room in what we call our holding room because they didn’t have the supplies that they knew were ordered for the case. They had to leave our facility, go to the other facility, which is about 10 minutes away, 10 15 minutes away, go up to the dock, warehouse dock, search through the stuff in the warehouse till they found the tray. They needed to take care of that patient and come back. And that is unfortunately not just an isolated story because there’s also shortages of supplies like normal sailing that have been national shortages across the country just because of shortages in medical supplies overall.

So it’s not just people, us not being able to get it. It has to do with what They’re not available in some cases, but we have shortages in those kinds of staff and so it does affect our patients, but what we have is that nurse anesthetist who knew what they were looking for, who knew what they needed and was able to go find it and go get it, they went and did it. Right? So that’s what you have for our nurses, what charter was saying, us as the union, we stand with our nurses. We are going to be standing with our nurses and they’re going to be standing with us and our veterans so that we know what they need so we can stand up and say, this is not right. This shortage shouldn’t have happened, this incident should not have occurred. So that our nurses don’t feel afraid to stand up and speak out for their veterans and speak out for our patients and their working conditions. And that’s really important to us as a union to make sure that these nurses have the way to do that and have a way to feel good about doing it so they know they’re not retaliated against when they do that.

Sharda Fornnarino:

I mean, the day-to-day work has been affected for the nurse between what Irma mentioned before of answering the phone. They need to grab a tray for their patient. Now their patient can eat again. They may been not been able to eat because of an impending procedure, but now they said, okay, well no, now you can eat. So now they have to run down to the kitchen and get their tray. Sometimes we are going down to the supply area to get supplies because they don’t have a supply tech to come up and bring up the supplies that we need, things like that. It takes away from the bedside care that we could be doing going in and checking on our patient. Those are the things that we need.

All these jobs are important to help support taking care of this patient that’s sitting on that bed, laying in that bed. So all these different jobs that people are saying that, well, maybe that’s okay, or maybe we can cut that or, oh, it’s only whatever. It’s never an only, it’s we all work together as a team. Whenever we take care of a patient, it is a team dynamic. Whenever there is a wheel, a cog in the wheel that’s missing, it’s a problem. So having these people leave because maybe they’ve decided to take the deferred resignation program or doing an early retirement or having an opening for more than a year and that position get cut because they can’t recruit. Having all these things are kind of leading to the demise and we have to fight back against this. We have to fight back against the privatization. We can’t do this anymore. We really need to make sure that we have all the people in the right places doing all the things that we need to take care of that veteran in the bed.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now, Sharda, Irma, with the last kind of 10 minutes that I’ve got you both here, I want to focus in on the union itself and talk about where NNU fits into the current attacks on federal workers across the board and the unions fighting back against it. We’ve interviewed folks here on this show and at the Real news, people working at the CFPB folks working for the National Park Service. I mean, cannot stress enough how broad these cuts have been to the federal workforce, but also how much of an impact it’s going to have if Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to eliminate collective bargaining rights for all these federal workers. What that is going to mean for federal unions, federal workers, and all of us who depend on their labor. So I wanted to kind of ask if you could talk about the attacks on Federal Union collective bargaining rights and how that connects to everything we’ve been talking about here. Why should folks listening to this, I guess care, it’s a blunt question, but why should folks care about the administration attacking your union’s ability to collectively bargain at places like the va?

Irma Westmoreland:

Well, let me just tell you right up front that President Trump’s order, if it’s enacted, will take away the federal bargaining rights for over a million federal workers. And he said from his own lips that the reason he’s doing it is because those are the people that stand up and fight against him. And so the Federal Union in itself or any union, us especially, we are standing up enforcing our contracts, enforcing our nurses’ rights to stand for their patient and to talk about issues that are going on and to make sure that our nurses are treated fairly and that we have adequate support to provide the care that we need for our veterans. And that’s our main job. Nurses, nurses, working conditions and our patients. Those are the two things that we stand for. And if I have told people over and over again that the federal workforce is a federal union, right?

If they decide to take it to say that we no longer are exclusively the nurses in the VA because they can never tell me I’m not a union member, they can never tell me that I’m not a union member. What we want folks to know is that the nurses are the union. I am the nurse, I am the union. It is not the contract. It is not the building. It is not where we’re at. It’s because us as workers are going to continue to ban together. We have joined the other five national unions in the VA to file a national, two national cases in the court against this cuts to try to stop the federal work. But what it is is just it’s union busting at its finest, right? That’s all it is. Union busting at its finest, but we are not giving up. We will always be here.

We will always be helping our nurses. We will always be doing it. Whether I have to do it at my lunchtime, whether I have to do it after hours, I’m going to still be doing it. And so are all our other nurse leaders. We are going to be assisting our nurses and helping them to navigate through the system so that they can still stand up for their patients because it will be harder. It won’t be as easy. It will be harder because you won’t have the same protections that you have with a contract right now of doing that. But let me tell you what you will have. You will have nurses and a union who will stand behind our nurses and we will be helping them every single day, every single minute of the day. We’re not going anywhere.

Sharda Fornnarino:

That’s right. Max Irma said, it’s so eloquently we are not going anywhere. But ultimately with nurses and the union, we’re representing and trying to fight for not just the nurses and the patients, it’s for their safety, their safety in working conditions. We talk about the working condition. We got to make sure that things are getting cleaned up, that our patients are safe, but not just the patients. The nurses are safe. We deserve to be able to go into work and not have to worry about will there be enough police officers to help me in the emergency room if a patient started to act out. We need to know that we are going to always be safe and be treated fairly and not allow people to step on us as we go along about our day. We did lobby recently for the VA and Play Fairness Act during Federal Lobby Day. And right now we’re continue to speak up. We’re supporting the United for Veterans Rally on Friday just to stand along the veteran and the VA nurse standing along. We’re speaking up, we’re doing our part. And the nurses all know that the nurses are all standing together and making sure they show that we’re a united front.

Irma Westmoreland:

And I would like to just say as related to that, the Unite for Veterans and Unite for America rally that’s happening at the National Mall on July the sixth. If you’re anywhere around that area, come out, join us. We’re going to be there with veterans groups and other labor groups that are going to be there rallying to bring issue to this. This is Friday, June the sixth. Did I say July? Sorry, June the sixth. It’s June the sixth. Friday two o’clock. We’re going to be there. I’m going to be speaking and lots of other people are as well. We have done congressional briefings, rallies all around the country talking about these issues, bringing them forward with our veterans groups, with our congressmen. We need the people who are listening to this podcast to call their congressmen, to call their senators and tell them to stop these cuts to the va.

They need to stop it. They need to pass the Employee Fairness Act to give us full bargaining rights, but they need to stop these cuts. They need to enact a law that will make sure that we have bargaining rights in the federal government for all federal workers, the whole million that they’re trying to take away, not just the ones for the va, but all of us. We need people to call their congressmen, call their senators, tell them this is not right, fully fund the va, whether it’s for internal resources, external resources, what we need to make sure we can care for our veterans every single day. Those veterans stood on the line for us and it’s time for us to stand on the line for them, come join us. And

Sharda Fornnarino:

We as nurses, we will not abandon our patients, we will not abandon our veterans.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And we will include information about that rally in the show notes for this episode. And I myself will try to get down there on Friday so that we can do an on the ground follow-up to this podcast. So stay tuned for that. And with the last kind of minute or two that I have you both here, I wanted to just sort of ask if you had any more notes about what folks listening to this can do to help and why they should get involved here. I mean, I think one of the biggest changes that I’ve seen in the national consciousness around unions and union workers since the time I started this show is that more and more people have learned to understand unions not as a special class of workers who have something that we don’t, but workers who have more power in key industries that we all depend on.

And people have learned to see the struggle of their fellow workers and union workers, especially as fights that involve their interests, right? So folks who don’t want to fly on janky Boeing jets that are going to fall out of the sky have learned to support the machinists who build those planes who are fighting against the company and all of its cost cutting corner, cutting crap. Same thing for the railroad workers. If you don’t want to train to derail in your backyard, like in east Palestinian, Ohio where we’ve been interviewing residents there, then folks have learned to support the railroad worker unions who are actually fighting against the companies that are putting all of us at danger with their cost cutting their corner, cutting to serve their Wall Street shareholders, so on and so forth. People have learned to see healthcare worker unions as important because our quality of care across the country has been going downhill over my lifetime.

And so if you want that care to improve, and you don’t want insurance companies just telling you that you don’t need this operation or that you got to support the workers who are actually fighting for that quality of care. And so I think there’s something really going on here where folks are identifying their common interests with the struggles that workers and unions are waging. But I wanted to ask in that vein for folks out here listening who maybe they’re not in a union, maybe they don’t have a connection to the va, but they are a working person just like you and me. Why is this important for them to care about what’s happening to the VA and what can supporting the union do to address the issues that all of us care about in this country right now? So any final notes you had on that and then we’ll wrap.

Irma Westmoreland:

Okay, max, I’ll give you a 32nd thing. And what I want to tell you is that workers need to realize that all of the things that they value right now, paid vacation, social security, sick leave, any of those things all came from workers uniting together with the public and fighting for those things. And right now, this fight that the federal workers are going through is just the tip of the iceberg. If the federal worker, this goes through and it happens and the federal workers lose their union, they’re going to come for the private unions next. And then what’s next? Your rights. We need to stand together with workers and healthcare workers and the federal unions because they are the people that are on the line right now fighting to make sure that you have healthcare, that you need adequate healthcare for our veterans, our teachers unions are out there. They’re fighting for you to make sure that your students are educated adequately. We need safe patient staffing ratios like they have in California, federal standards of staffing so that it isn’t related to the insurance company, that we need Medicare for all, for every person to have healthcare available to them as a human right in this country. And those are the righteous fights the unions are doing for you right now, every day, day in and day out that you may not see.

Sharda Fornnarino:

What we want people to do right now is, yeah, we need them to call their congressmen and tell them they do not want these cuts to happen. Last week I spoke to a veteran who was a little displeased with the fact that he had to wait so long to go see a provider on the outside and they had some issues connecting, getting records and all these things, and he wanted to voice me all his concerns that was happening, that he’s actually seeing right now the effects of some of these cuts. And I did explain to him, well, sir, this is what’s happening. This department has reduced in size. And so of course this was going on. And what can you do is contact your local congressman, contact your senators, let them know you don’t want this to happen. And unfortunately at that time, he said, well, if I felt like it would work, then I would do something. And what I told him is that if you don’t do something now, then when will you have a voice to do it? I encouraged him to use his voice now and stop what’s going on and to let his congressional people know what his best interests are and to help support him. And at the end of the conversation, he understood because if we lose his fight now, then where does it stop?

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Sharda Fornnarino and Irma Westmoreland of National Nurses United. And I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletters so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.


This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.