On August 15th, 2022, we saw 15,000 nurses in the Twin Cities and Twin Ports overwhelmingly vote to authorize a strike. This is a sign that the situation in healthcare is dire. Ultimately, we have to make sure this struggle is focused on winning adequate staffing for patients and respect for the profession of nursing. Nurses are the most trusted profession for a reason: because we tell it like it is even when the truth is hard to hear.
— Nick Shillingford
An Immigrant Child
I was a child immigrant who moved from rural to urban centers in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota when I was little. My mom grew up in River Falls, Wisconsin. She got married to her first husband when she was still a teenager. He was in the Air Force and got stationed in England. At seventeen she was alone with a baby—and another on the way—in a 300-year-old house off the base, in a new country. When they split up, she stayed in England. He took the kids and went back to the States.
My mom met my dad in an acting class. I was born in John Radcliffe Hospital on the Oxford campus in Oxfordshire County, England in 1984. Thatcher’s government was in power, and the miners were on strike. My first Christmas, my parents went to the strike site to provide support. They took me along and left me with an older lady they just met, while they delivered presents to the miners’ children.
My dad was in the Labour Party and a member of the Young Socialists of Britain. There were right wing violent attacks against the Young Socialist newspaper office, so my dad and other members took turns camping out there, to protect it from vandalism. Dad was the political activist. My mom went along. She remembers labor picnics with sandwiches she didn’t care for, and poor hygiene facilities.
In England, my dad designed computer models for tools used to make vehicles. He used this knowledge to get work with computers in New Zealand. We didn’t stay there long. My mom was homesick, so we came to the United States. For a while we lived with family in River Falls while my dad found work. He got a job at Dunwoody in Minneapolis teaching computers, and then a more lucrative job in Chicago.
I didn’t ever quite fit in anywhere. Though I was christened in the Church of England, I wasn’t raised to be religious, which made me different than other children. Religious stories and references still go over my head. I also didn’t have cable TV at a time when it was just becoming universal. Kids would call me Nickelodeon, and I didn’t know what they meant.
My parents got divorced. It was a long process. There was a period of counseling, and the breakup was amicable. I was around nine. They agreed to move up to the Twin Cities region together. For a while my mom stayed in Illinois where she had a good job, while my dad moved up to Minnesota. Eventually she moved to River Falls and then St. Paul. I spent the rest of my school years in Eagan, MN.
Struggling in School in Eagan
I was all over the place in school. I had attention deficit disorder. They had me in regular classes, then decided I was smart, so they put me in accelerated classes. When I didn’t do well there, they put me in remedial classes. I went from a college prep science class where and I was completely floundering with little guidance, to a remedial class where I was constantly disagreeing with the teacher over expectations.
Becoming a Socialist
As an immigrant I had been an internationalist my whole life. In high school, I joined the Unity Club, a place to celebrate diversity and international cultures.
My dad wasn’t politically active for a long time. He was unclear about where to plug in, and also he was busy having a kid and trying to figure out new jobs. He started becoming active again when I was an undergrad at Inver Hills Community College. He found a branch of Socialist Alternative that had formed in 2007 and started trying to get me to go to meetings. I remember I watched some movie on Cuba in black and white, and I wasn’t super excited about it.
What made me a socialist was Hurricane Katrina, seeing the level of neglect of human needs in this country. People were denied access to the most basic services—for example, transportation so they could escape. That is when I started connecting with other socialists.
Becoming an Organizer
I had a philosophy professor in college who made it feel like the philosophers that we were studying were talking directly to us, and that our views mattered. He had a degenerative eye disease and went completely blind over spring break, 2007.
There was a unit in that class on Ray Kurzweil, a futurist who believes we will someday be able to download our consciousness into computers. I had thought of philosophers as ancient. His work excited me for this reason. There were two other people in the class that were interested in him as well and they also were interested in progressive left politics. One of them was the child of an auto worker who had been reading books on socialism. The other had an interest in philosophy and law and eventually went to law school.
I worked with those two people to teach a unit on Ray Kurzweil for the professor after he went blind. He met with us over many weeks to help us figure out how to teach. It was a very good experience. He told us when he first started teaching, he couldn’t wait to find out what all these young minds had to share. He would lay out his ideas and the students would respond with complete silence. So, he began starting the class by giving the students the weakest argument a philosopher could come up with, inviting them to knock it down. The classes would respond, and eventually they gained the confidence to tackle more complex ideas and engage in lively discussions.
That was the guidance he gave us on presenting our topics: don’t overwhelm people with information. I have found this helpful as an activist. We can be a little heavy on tearing systems down but if we don’t give people a chance to process ideas, and the space to agree and disagree we don’t move people.
I started a branch of Socialist Alternative in River Falls. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were going on. We had the largest antiwar demonstrations in River Falls since Vietnam: 100 people. We marched from the library in River Falls to the university. We organized with the College Democrats and the River Falls Peace and Justice Coalition, which had Vietnam-era members who were still protesting war. We read the names of soldiers killed in Iraq. We had some bands play. There was food. We made space for groups that came after us organizing around abortion access, the Black Student Union, and organizing around police brutality after the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul. I was proud of the work we did.
There was a strong right wing Republican group at the school that wrote letters to get faculty removed for their progressive perspectives and opinions. We did several debates with Republicans and Democrats and got positive responses—even from conservative Republicans—about our ability to debate, be respectful, and because we attacked ideas not people. We got some donations from people who said, “I completely disagree with you, but I see you here every day doing something. I don’t see anybody else doing anything.” Through these experiences, thinking about bridging the urban/rural and ideological divides of working people became part of my consciousness.
One of our last campaigns was about saving a building that had previously been a hospital. My grandmother was the first baby ever born in it. Now it housed a reproductive health clinic. The coalition we put together to save the building included conservatives who didn’t care about reproductive health but were into historical preservation. It was an interesting campaign, though we lost. They tore down the building and built a new City Hall.
In Minneapolis a few years later I was involved in Occupy Homes. That was exciting. We won six or seven home loan adjustments here in Minneapolis and that was pretty successful.
Becoming a Nurse
My mom worked in nursing homes for a long time. I had been volunteering there since I was small, and I liked it. I had a good relationship with my mom’s parents. I connected with older people. I was good at helping people and finding solutions to conflicts.
At first I didn’t sign up for nursing school because I was afraid of the math component of it. In fact, I majored in marketing communications at University of Wisconsin River Falls because it had the least amount of math required.
I learned how to create websites and Microsoft programs. When I graduated 50% of what I learned was already obsolete. That was when the Great Recession of 2008 hit and there were very few jobs. I went to this recruiter who told me “Your options are sales or sales. Do you want to work for a big sales company or small sales organization.” I worked in sales, unsuccessfully, for several years.
In 2008, I was in a bad car accident as a passenger. I fractured vertebrae in my neck in three places. I had to lay still on a board for seven hours. I got such good care from nurses while I was in the hospital. I was in a neck brace for months and couldn’t return to work for a while. It was during that time I decided to overcome my math issues and pursue nursing. I liked the idea of helping people in this way.
It took me awhile. Time flies by when you’re trying to survive. I got hired and laid off from several sales jobs between 2008 and 2013. I was a contractor for a while. I worked for a Canadian company that built custom software and connected with colleagues in Canada every day. In 2011 I bought a house in Minneapolis.
In 2013, things were falling apart. I got laid off again. A relationship ended. I thought I was going to lose my house. My grandma had lung cancer. I rented out my house and moved to River Falls to take care of her. She went through hospice and died Christmas 2013. I stayed with her until her death and then took care of my grandfather for a year.
After that, I moved back to Minneapolis and started getting my prerequisites for nursing, at Inver Hills Community College. I got a job as a psych associate at the University of Minnesota Medical Center Riverside, one of the largest regional crisis centers for mental health. There were things I didn’t like about that work: having to restrain people to protect them from themselves or others. That comes with a great level of responsibility. Working on the mental health side of the health care system made me an advocate for integrating mental and physical health.
I started nursing school in 2015, and graduated in 2017. The math was not nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be. I got a master’s in nursing. In that program we were doing clinical seven weeks in, so I was a nurse, with supervision, right away. When I graduated, I started in the float pool at the University on the West Bank. That was ambitious. I had to move among four different units. It required more training, but it was good for my attention deficit. All that variety kept my attention. After a year, I went into critical care, which meant in addition to my other roles I was now working in the emergency room dealing with a high number of mental health emergencies. I was also a “flyer,” moving around the hospital, helping with whatever arose.
Nurses’ Union Work
I was getting frustrated in the emergency room because it was not staffed properly. I started to raise concerns on a regular basis. There was a camera room where staff could remotely keep an eye on people in danger of harming themselves because we didn’t have enough time to get into rooms often enough to check on everybody as frequently as we should. Sometimes there weren’t enough staff to keep an eye on the camera room.
I became a steward for the float pool nurses, pushing consistently about the staffing issue. I circulated a petition with the most basic demand: no reductions in staffing, even though the status quo was not enough. I wanted to get as many people to sign up as possible. I got 90% of the critical care nurses at the hospital to sign. The administration said no to the petition.
The other thing I did was to take a survey to find out if there were times we could predict when emergency room staffing levels were unsafe so we could focus on more staff during those times. The administration rejected my survey but shortly after they did their own.
Meeting My Life Partner
I met my wife, Laura Lomax, through political organizing in the Twin Cities. She is from the Cuyuna Iron Range in Crow-Wing County, which has a shorter-lived mining and labor history than the larger Mesabi Range. Our legal marriage took place in December 2018, around the winter solstice. We had our marriage ceremony for family and friends on the Summer Solstice of the next year at a small orchard owned by my mom’s family in Centuria, Wisconsin. We ate pulled pork and other picnic foods and roasted marshmallows over a fire.
Nursing During the COVID 19 Pandemic
In 2019, I cross-trained on a biocontainment unit at the hospital built specifically to respond to Ebola. I volunteered for the training with the idea that at some point in the future they could call me up if we had an epidemic. In October 2019, I noticed all the supplies on the biocontainment unit were out of date. I pointed it out that our supplies were not epidemic-ready. They said, “just trust the process. We’ve got a great process.”
Shortly after, we started hearing about COVID. My mom was living in Texas at the time, and she alerted me. She knew stuff was happening in China and she was already out getting gloves and masks and food. She was pretty sure it was going to be in the U.S. soon.
In March of 2020 the rest of America noticed there was a pandemic happening. At my hospital they divided the emergency room into two halves, one for COVID positive and one for not. But they didn’t increase the staff appropriately. On the contaminated side it took two people to do what one person used to do. If you wanted to get a COVID test from somebody you would have to have another nurse outside the door, take your bag sample and deposit it in a second bag.
We lost the ability in the emergency room to gather staff to respond to a crisis. If patients became violent, for example, it was harder for your fellow nurses to respond to help.
We had kids that were at the hospital for mental health needs, in there for 170 hours, more than a week, waiting for a mental health bed. If you were not already experiencing a mental health crisis, sitting in an emergency room for a week will give you one. At one point they were housing people in an ambulance garage. Staying in an ambulance garage for a week is also not good for your mental health.
Before COVID vaccines, many nurses were only in contact with family by phone. Doctors were locking themselves in their basements. I had colleagues who were sacrificing their family lives: not wanting to risk infecting immunocompromised family members, they stayed in hotels. The response from management was, “Oh, well we all have to sacrifice.”
There was little evidence of management sacrificing anything. It took them a year into the pandemic to put a sign in the elevator that said, “Stand 6 Feet Apart.” At every level the response of management was that slow.
Town Hall Meeting with Governor Walz
I was vice chair of the metro steward group, made up of stewards representing 13,000 MNA nurses across the metro. At the height of the pandemic, we were meeting weekly as opposed to our usual monthly meetings. We had a nurse that was fired for wearing hospital scrubs at United. We were able to wear hospital scrubs in my emergency room because one of the doctors had gotten infected right away by a patient and had demanded it, but that was costing the hospital money because they had to launder all those scrubs.
In May of 2020, we had a town hall meeting with Governor Walz. We told him we were not getting the protective equipment we needed. He said, “Well, when I talked to the hospital managers, they said you’re getting everything you need.” The governor said he didn’t know who to believe so he needed to have a meeting with management and nurses at the same time.
Then the video of George Floyd’s murder by MPD in Minneapolis made headlines, there was the Uprising, the governor sent in the National Guard, and the nurse/management meeting on protective equipment was never brought up again.
According to Walz, the federal government under Trump was stealing protective equipment allocated for Minnesota. So, at every level, those with the power were abdicating responsibility.
I called everybody I could think of, including the Minnesota Department of Health and the attorney general. Everyone said there was nothing they could do.
The chair of the steward group resigned because things were getting so bad, so I ended up becoming the chair. I left slightly before my term was over—because I left the hospital entirely—but I was able to weather that equipment crisis and get them set-up for a good process for the next election. But I feel guilty about leaving, even though it was not a choice.
Leaving the Hospital
There were a lot of people leaving the hospital. On some units it was in double digits. We were losing years of experience. We had periods when people didn’t know who their manager was because one manager would quit, another manager would be a fill in for an interim then get moved somewhere else, or they would also quit.
In my unit, we had young people on the adult side who were having mental health emergencies, and were at risk of violence. We had people who were actively suicidal who were on the COVID side where there was not enough staff to deal with their mental health crises. It was very dangerous.
It got bad enough that I decided I could not work in the emergency room anymore. I felt it was putting my license at risk. We simply couldn’t do our jobs. I was putting myself and my patients at risk. I scaled back my critical care status at the hospital and went back to working on those four inpatient units, but even there staffing levels were dangerously low.
Last September I went on a leave of absence. The conditions we were forced to work in had affected my own mental health. I was working with patients with significant wounds, who were not getting the care they needed to heal.
It came to a head for me one weekend. When I came in on Friday, we had our complete complement of staff and five patients–almost too busy to handle. The next day we didn’t have either of our nursing assistants. They were sitting one-to-one with patients that were actively suicidal. We didn’t have our support staff that could do things like help people go to the bathroom. Nurses had to do everything from passing medications to getting people water and juice.
I had to deal with a situation where I had a wound I was dealing with, and I needed some assistance. There wasn’t anybody to help me. My anxiety was through the roof. I was acting flustered, and I was usually very calm. Someone told me, “You’re not doing well.” I reached out to our nursing supervisor and said this is not safe. She had already gotten another call saying the same thing. But when they finally sent another nurse, they had her doing admissions.
Later, when things were quiet, my adrenaline was still sky high. I felt like I was just waiting for something terrible to happen.
I took a leave of absence. I am working for Fairview now, doing community vaccinations.
Health Care: What Needs to Be Done
From what I am hearing things are still not good. There are still people in the hallways because they don’t have rooms for them. We already had a broken healthcare and mental health care system before the pandemic, but the pandemic has shown that public health is not a priority.
Health care should not be profit-driven. We should push for Medicare for all (although there are plenty of problems with Medicare too). In addition to expanding access, we need to make sure medical treatment is not driven by profits. Executives, like James Hereford, CEO at Fairview, make huge salaries. Until we get the staff we need, we should not be putting our money into administrative salaries.
Before the pandemic we were working to keep hospitals open that administrations thought were not profitable enough: Bethesda Hospital and St. Joes. It should not be a surprise to anyone that if you close two hospitals, other hospitals in the area will quickly become overburdened.
Support Seniority. One thing people don’t understand is that a nurse that’s been somewhere for 20 years can manage a larger load of patients than somebody who has been there for three. It takes years to learn the ropes. You can’t just replace an experienced workforce with all new people. Management fights seniority benefits because they don’t want to pay higher wages. They’re unwilling to do what’s necessary to staff a unit appropriately with a mixture of new and seasoned nurses.
Listen to Nurses The most immediate thing that we need is to listen to nurses who know their staffing requirements. Right now, if the hospitals just followed their own requirements for staffing that would be a great improvement.
Administration may say if three nurses can do the work of four, then maybe we can go down to just two nurses, or maybe each nurse can just take one extra patient. But the fact is, we are already understaffed, so any reduction in staff or increase in patient load is only making an existing problem worse.
Give healthcare workers control over their environment and treat them like professionals.
The de-professionalization is like what is happening in education: taking decisions out of the hands of those who are at the bedside or in the classroom and putting them in the hands of somebody who has never been a nurse or a teacher.
Stop Cuts and Hospital Closures. In 2020 we formed the No Cuts to Quality Care Coalition to oppose hospital closures. We had some public meetings. In Chicago they wanted to close a hospital but a committee that oversees the big public health picture ruled that the hospital, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, needed to stay open.
Patient Ratios. We need patient ratios. They have this in California: a set number of patients on an ICU or medical surgical unit for each nurse or each support caregiver that you cannot go above.
Support Rural Health Care. Hospitals have been shutting down in rural areas for ages. If the Democrats were serious about reaching out to rural America, health care would be a top priority. Rural people must drive 50 miles to get care. Many small-town facilities are being closed by healthcare organizations who are instead getting into sports medicine and delivering babies: medical care that makes money. Any health care that does not drive increased revenues ends up suffering.
A Global Perspective. The problems with nursing staffing are worldwide. The NHS, back in Britain, where I was born, is also experiencing a staffing crisis. If health care remains a commodity, then you’re going to have people cutting corners. I just watched a documentary on Romania about the huge corruption within the hospital industries there. I don’t think we are approaching that level of fraud in the U.S., but any cutting of corners is a slippery slope.
Integrate Mental and Physical Health Services. Today we have patients who come with mental health concerns and those with physical ailments, but many people need both. I propose we have a unit for patients experiencing mental health crisis who also have a significant medical issue. I brought it up at Riverside but there was no real push to do anything like that. We need a holistic perspective.
Community Supports for Preventative Health Care. Many times, a patient’s health care problems can’t be solved in a hospital. They need food, clothing, and shelter to heal. Having more nurses isn’t going to solve all the problems but we need to begin by not having our health care providers working with one hand tied behind their backs.
Nurses’ Unions and the Larger Labor Movement
Workers at Starbucks and Amazon, teachers, and nurses, are standing up. Each has an impact on all workers. The biggest motivating factor to get people active is to see people win.
During the Wisconsin Uprising, union people came out to occupy the capitol, causing a favorable attitude towards unions and their demands across the state. You know, there’s a lot of talk about where the Democrats went wrong in the Wisconsin Uprising. Ultimately, we learned that when people come out in mass to challenge authorities, we see this huge spike in support. That support can come crashing down when people don’t feel super optimistic about the ability to win. I think we need to set ourselves up with some fights we can win, that can fire people up.
My Next Steps in Health Care
When I was able to do my job, I loved working in a hospital. I’m a certified public health nurse. I think public health is probably what I will focus on now. That is what I’m doing with the vaccination position. I might try to look more at in-home care. I just don’t think I can go back to the hospital at this point because of the moral injury I sustained when I was unable to deliver needed care to my patients in that setting.
Socialist News and Views Podcast
I won an award for radio journalism at University of Wisconsin River Falls when I was there the first time in 2006-07. With my philosophy professor, Imtiaz Moosa, I did news reports and a feature on the ongoing U.S. wars. In 2013, working with people I met through the Occupy Movement, I began doing internet radio programs that we combined into the Liberty and Justice Radio Network. We had a couple of roundtables but it didn’t last long. Soon after that I started putting on my podcast on my own on SoundCloud.
People need a way to access information in this era of shrinking independent journalism. I think that algorithms reward bad journalism on Facebook and other places. People have been starved of resources and shut down—in some cases violently. The U.S.-backed regime in Israel bombed the Al Jazeera and Associated Press offices in Gaza in 2021, for example, and George Bush spoke with British Prime Minister Tony Blair about wanting to bomb the Al Jazeera World Headquarters in Qatar in 2004. The U.S. also forced the United States offices of Russia Today to shutter during the recent conflict in Ukraine.
What I’m doing with my podcast is sharing stories and creating an archive. Someday people will stumble on an ancestor of theirs, interviewed by me. I am laying down a marker of what people thought was important in this place and time.
MN Nurses Strike Notice, August 2022
On August 15th, 2022, we saw 15,000 Minnesota nurses in the Twin Cities and Twin Ports overwhelmingly vote to authorize a strike. This is a sign that the situation in healthcare is dire. We also saw nurses at Hennepin County Medical Center come out on their first informational picket ever. Ultimately, we have to make sure this struggle is focused on winning adequate staffing for patients and respect for the profession of nursing. Any campaign that hopes to win these things needs to make strong connections with other unions, such as the teachers, and the broader community. Nurses are the most trusted profession for a reason; because we tell it like it is, even when the truth is hard to hear.