Cheers reverberated among all supporters of labor in all 58 counties of California and across the nation as the California Nurses Association won confirmation in Sacramento Superior Court on March 4, 2005 of its hard-fought victory to reduce nurse-patient ratios, saving our lives and mandating decent working conditions for nurses.

The press release is on the California Nurses Association website at:

http://www.calnurse.org/?Action=Content&id=715

The tentative ruling was by Judge Judy Holzer Hersher in Department 16, in pdf format at:

http://files.calnurse.org/assets/03032005Tentative_order.pdf

and Word format on the Sacramento Superior Court website, at

http://www.saccourt.com/courtrooms/trulings/dept16/mar04d16-04cs01725.doc

It was an injunction against viciously anti-labor Governor Schwarzenegger's emergency regulation preventing the implementation of better nurse-patient ratios on January 1, 2005 which the nurses had won through legislation, AB 394 or California Health & Safety Code Section 1276.4. Thus the nurse/patient ratio is now 1:5 in medical/surgical units.

As to the profiteering hospitals that claim they cannot afford this, labor certainly has a solution: National Healthcare System for all paid for with the progressive income tax, guaranteeing free and fabulous healthcare to all from cradle to grave, as exists in the rest of the industrialized world. It is time to take the profit motive out of healthcare, and eliminate the bankruptcy crisis that it promotes, with about 50% of all personal bankruptcies caused by inability to pay medical bills, even though the debtor has insurance. Most medical insurance does not cover 100% of major medical bills. We pay more for medical care in this country on a per capita basis than the rest of the industrialized world, and get far less for it, because it is all to enrich insurance companies and private profit medical corporations.

This victory by the nurses is hopefully a tide-turning, bellwhether action as Nazi Schwarzenegger plans to spend millions of our tax dollars on a special off-year election in November 2005 to promote viciously reactionary attacks on labor with various initiatives attacking government workers pensions, including those of firefighters and police, attacking teacher's tenure with the favoritism game known as merit pay, and redrawing assembly and congressional districts by a retired panel of judges instead of the Legislature so as to elect more fascists like Nazi Schwarzenegger.

Should this election take place, we expect every supporter of labor to be AT THE BARRICADES this fall, demanding everyone vote a BINGO NO on Schwarzenegger's ANTI-LABOR INITIATIVES!

Ahnold is Bush's Poodle and Bush is the Poodle for Big Corporations. Since Medical Facilities are owned by Pharacuticals which are only interested in The Bottom Line. They'll Be Back.