Crain’s Red-Baits a Nurses Union Leader on Labor Day

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.thenation.com/article/181442/crains-red-baits-nurses-union-leader-labor-day#


The business press still insists on equating strong union organizing with communism.

Laura Flanders September 2, 2014



Nurses from Long Island College Hospital join Occupy Wall Street protesters along 47th Street in New York. September 17, 2013. (Reuters, Joshua Lott)

There is something about a trade union that the business press just doesn’t get.

Take Crain’s. Crain Communications owns thirty business publications, among them the health industry heavy-hitter Modern Healthcare and New York Business. Their audience, they say, is made up of “affluent educated, powerful executives.” So it’s no surprise that for their Labor Day edition the editors published a less-than-glowing profile of one of New York’s most innovative labor leaders.

What was surprising, for a twenty-first-century newspaper, was the way that in her article on Jill Furillo, executive director of the New York State Nurses Association, Crain’s reporter Barbara Benson worked the word “Communist” into the third paragraph.

Quoting a 1975 article written by Furillo when she was 24 years old, writer Benson attributes the reinvigoration of New York’s largest nurses union to Furillo’s history of “fiery activism.” “Her earlier belief that capitalism leads to social and economic inequality influences her values today,” wrote Benson on August 31.

FULL story at link.