Tag: healthy people

Last Tuesday, after thirteen months of fighting in Ukraine, Yaryna Chornohuz got off a FlixBus in midtown Manhattan. Chornohuz, a twenty-seven-year-old recon soldier, drone pilot, and combat medic, wore her military uniform with sapphire earrings and a nose ring; she has a serpent tattooed on her forearm, and she had her hair in cornrows. “It’s an Army hair style in Ukraine,” she said.

She was visiting the US from the front; she is on a rotation in the Donbas. Standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue, she was approached by several pedestrians who asked about her rank. “I’m, like, light infantry,” she said. She explained that her fatigues were from the Ukrainian Army. One man shouted, “USA! USA!” A policeman asked her the brand of her boots.

Just before leaving for America, Chornohuz had gone to the gray zone—“territory that is not ours, but perhaps not theirs,” she said. “You

Kaiser Permanente’s mental health therapists are entering the fifth week of a strike after contract negotiations on Monday with management failed to break an impasse. While Kaiser declined to discuss negotiations, the union says starting salaries and benefits for new hires are at the center of bargaining.

The approximately 60 clinicians, including psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and chemical dependency counselors have been on strike since Aug. 29. For months they have argued that severe understaffing at Kaiser’s health clinics has led to overwhelming caseloads and that Kaiser needs to make compensation more attractive in order to attract new hires.

The union says that instead, Kaiser is doing the opposite, proposing lower starting salaries and slashing retirement benefits for new hires. Currently, employees receive pensions and contributions to individual retirement accounts. Kaiser is proposing to eliminate these benefits for new hires