I’ve been wanting to do a story on Filipino nursing in the U.S. for some time and, this year, Hyphen gave me the opportunity to do so, even facilitating funding of the project through Spot.us. Issue 24, which is out this month, features a story I wrote about alleged discrimination against Filipina nurses on the part of hospital management all over the country. I focused on one hospital in San Francisco, St. Luke’s, where nurses claim hospital management enacted an illegal hiring ban against Filipinos—in an effort to squelch union activity among the largely Filipino nursing staff.
It was a very challenging story to write—not least because the nurses were (and continue to be) in the midst of a bitter labor dispute with the hospital chain. The dynamics of union contract negotiations are complex and both sides spin, spin, spin until you can’t left from right anymore. In the end, I’m still not sure what happened at that hospital. My great fear is that this article may not reflect that uncertainty as much as I would like it to.
But I hope the bottom line is clear: Regardless of what did happen at St. Luke’s, Filipina nurses have—and do—suffer systemic inequalities within the American health care system. The best part of this project was learning the long, fraught history of Filipino nursing in the U.S.: How overtly racist notions drove American efforts to “sanitize” the Filipino people in the early 20th century; how U.S. hospitals began recruiting Filipinas to bust up AMerican nursing unions in the mid-century; how nursing unions exploited cultural stereotypes and propagated gross misconceptions of Filipino nurses in order to limit their recruitment in the 1960s and 1970s; and how Filipino nurses managed to carve out a place for themselves and climb the ranks of nursing unions in the 1990s…only to feel the backlash of anti-immigrant sentiment in the 2000s.
My interest in the topic is also a bit personal, as many women in my family are healthcare workers who were trained in the Philippines, migrated to the U.S. to work, and send remittances back home. My little sister, who turned 20 this week, is in nursing school in Bicol province right now. Since she’s already an American citizen, she won’t have to worry about being recruited or getting a Visa, but will rather effortlessly head back to the States next year to try to find a nursing a job. I’m excited about being reunited with her. But, knowing what I now know about the myriad obstacles she may encounter as a foreign-trained nurse trying to make it in the U.S., I can’t help but worry, a little bit, about what her future will turn out to be.
Hope you check out the story at Hyphen, and consider subscribing to the print magazine (it’s changing dramatically next year, and you’ll want to see what surprises are in store…). Also check out spot.us, where you can support community journalism projects (It was started by one of my instructors at Berkeley!)
Check out this infographic I made for Oakland North, which illustrates some of the costs incurred by the City of Oakland as officials attempted to manage the Occupy Oakland protests.
