‘Cover Stories’ Archives
Nurses Putting Patients Before Profits
Pickets ready to strike from the 2010 Nurses Strike / Photo from facebook.com/MinnesotaNurses Minnesota Nurses Association Authorizes Strike By HARRY, RN, MNA Union Steward On August 15th, the nurses of Minnesota’s union hospitals voted to authorize a strike. Here’s why: The world recognized the COVID pandemic as a war, the biggest global health crisis since the Black Plague. Healthcare workers, nurses in particular, were fighting on the front lines. But despite surviving this horror, and despite the hospitals sometimes lauding us, nurses were not given a hero’s parade. We got no GI Bill or significant wage increase for being battle-hardened survivors. Instead, we continue to face unprecedented workplace violence and a choice by hospitals to choose profits over patients. The Minnesota Nurses Association has been negotiating new contracts for nurses, the first new contracts since the pandemic. The hospitals that employ us, including Abbott Northwestern and [...]
Allina Builds Abbott Northwestern Hospital Utility Plant Before Getting Air Emissions Permit
Public Comment Period on Permit Opening this Fall Abbott Northwestern Hospital's Central Utility Plant under construction at E 26th Street and Chicago Avenue. According to MN Rule 7005.0100 Subp. 3a, activities that should not be started before an air emissions permit is issued include “installing building supports and foundations, laying underground pipework, and constructing permanent storage structures.” Photo by Ben Heath By LINDSEY FENNER If you’ve driven on E 26th Street through Phillips this past summer, you’ve likely gone past the construction site at 26th and Chicago where Allina Health is building a new Central Utility Plant for Abbott Northwestern Hospital. Besides the traffic headache this has created, the bigger problem is that Allina has started construction on the utility plant before getting the final air emissions permit from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). Allina Health, which owns Abbott Northwestern Hospital and has their [...]
Beware First Care
By MONICA BICKING First Care, with a new location soon to open on Chicago Ave and 21st St. is not a clinic, but rather an anti-abortion counseling center. It is an organization owned by Evangelical Christians with an agenda to shame and intimidate pregnant people to mantain their pregnancy and not have an abortion. It is part of a complex and multifaceted strategy to control female bodies and prevent abortions that has made great strides with the recent overturn of Roe vs Wade. While abortion remains legal in Minnesota, anti-abortion activists continue to be hard at work to make sure access to abortion is limited in Minnesota and throughout the country. As the name implies, the strategy behind First Care is to get to people before they see a medical professional, to be the first “care” a pregnant person receives. Their marketing thickly cloaks their true agenda. Their website suggests that they have the resources needed to help someone prepare for an abortion. It states that [...]
