The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

Workers at Chicagoland's Resurrection hospital chain have been battling management for the past several years as part of an AFSCME Council 31 effort to organize what was once a group of charity hospitals run by impoverished orders of nuns. There are still nuns on the governing board, but they are hardly impoverished: Sr. Sally Marie Kiepura earned a $317,633 annual salary in 2005. If you walk into any Resurrection hospital, one can see the religious paraphenalia from its Catholic past.

If Jesus were alive today though, he would take out that whip of his and drive these moneychangers from the health care system of Illinois. Resurrection has sued poor people for hospital bills and has fired workers who have spoken up against the deteriorating working conditions that have accompanied a drop in the quality of patient care.

At our local West Suburban Hospital, management has pursued a nasty racist campaign against Black and Latin housekeeping workers who have dared to speak out. This has led to several demonstrations at the hospital. As a representative of the Oak Park community, I gave a short speech at an AFSCME organized "Funeral of Racism" that included a Dixieland Jazz band and a NOLA style funeral march.

Speech given at the Oak Park IL Funeral of Racism: June 2007

My name is Bob Simpson. I've been a resident of Oak Park for 20 years. First of all I'd like to thank the housekeeping staff of Resurrection. They are doing one of the most important jobs in this community, protecting the health of the people who walk into that facility.

When I was in college, I studied history. I learned that sanitation and cleanliness has saved more lives than all of the CAT scans and MRIs on this planet. When the housekeeping staff punch out from work, they can hold their heads up high because of the quality and importance of the work they do.

A few weeks back, I heard public testimony about how the Resurrection management is treating these heroes of health care. The racial harassment that Resurrection workers described was so disgusting it was hard for me to keep my composure. It was painful. Very painful. Now I've got a few gray hairs. No that's not true. I've got a lot of gray hairs.

I grew up under segregation. We called it Jim Crow where I came from. I can remember the "White-only" signs. The "Colored Entrance in the Rear" signs, the "white" and "colored" water fountains. The whole sick scene. Now when I was studying history in college, I discovered that Jim Crow existed for a reason. You just have to follow the money.

The idea was to divide working class people along racial lines, stir up hatred and strife and then profit off the misery that follows. It started in the plantations of Virginia in the 17th century and spread like cancer through the entire continent. We didn't always have racial division in this land of ours.

In the very early days, European-born and African-born workers resisted oppression side by side. You can look it up in that library over there if you don't believe me. So the plantation owners of the 1600's decided to give White workers a little more freedom and few more privileges. They put Black workers under a whole lot of restrictions and oppression that came to be called slavery and segregation. Similar things were happening in Mexico, the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas. It was the birth of racism American-style. It was divide and conquer.

Employers and owners then used racial division to drive down wages and working conditions and make it harder for working class people to organize and defend their rights. So here we are in 2007. We live in a world where we have the Internet, cell phones, instant text messaging, satellite TV, cars that run on used cooking oil and scientists who are probing the secrets of the universe from tiny sub-atomic particles to the very nature of time and space itself.

And what do we have over there at West Suburban Medical Center? An employer who thinks they are a a 17th century plantation boss. I don't know about you, but I think that is really sad and pathetic. It sure looks to me like Jay Kreuzer and the Resurrection Hospital Corporation are using that same ugly racial divide and conquer strategy that this country was supposed to put behind us when we finally passed the Civil Rights laws.

Now some of you may have noticed that I often wear a Brooklyn Dodgers hat. The Dodgers were the first major league baseball team to hire a Black player, a young man by the name of Jack Roosevelt Robinson. If you've heard of him, you probably know him as Jackie Robinson. Jackie was a hero to a lot of us kids back in the 1950's. I used to love the way he stole bases by outsmarting the opposition infielders. It was like watching a ballet dancer. Amazing...truly amazing.

Anyway, Jackie was well educated and brave and an incredible natural athlete. But Jackie couldn't have made the Dodgers into a world-class team by himself no matter how brilliant he was. His team mates had to learn that what counts in baseball is not color, but talent and hard work. The Dodgers of the 1950's learned to put some of America's ugly racial history behind them and become a team...a world-class team that went on to win the first world series in Dodger history.

It was not easy believe me. It was hard. Very hard. A lot of nasty racial stuff stuff happened before they clinched that world series. So why is this man talking about baseball at a time like this?

Because if we want a world class health facility over there at Resurrection , the workers there are going to have to become a team. A world class team. A team at least at least as strong and united as the Brooklyn Dodgers of Jackie Robinson's time.

Fortunately we have people right here who are experts at team building...they're the union called the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees( AFSCME for short). They've been building strong teams since before I was born. My first union experience was with AFSCME when we were trying to overcome racial divisions among workers in my home state of Maryland.

After a lot of hard work and struggle, we had some success. Trust me, people. AFSCME has the experts to help build that world class team of heath care workers. So my message to Jay Kreuzer and Resurrection management is this...if you can't lend a hand to this team building effort, you just move on out of the way and make way for those who are building for a beautiful future....not an ugly racist past. Power to the People, Thank you.