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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

Q:

I'm not sure you did.

Foner:

This we worked out to be a Sunday afternoon program, because we had to figure out “When would members come?” It was Sunday afternoon, so they came with their families. We had Miriam Colon's Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, we had Teatro Hispanico, and we had a concert by Mongo Santamaria. I worked on that for about a month with his agent, to convince him to do it for like 1200 dollars.

Q:

That must have been great.

Foner:

Yes. We have no tapes of it, no film of it.

Q:

How many people came to see Mongo Santamaria?

Foner:

About 400. It was at the union.

Q:

You sold tickets?

Foner:

Yes. You can never have anything free because you never know who's coming. Everything is sold.

Then we had conferences. We organized a series of conferences on the topic, “Patient Care -- the Hospital Worker's Responsibility.” Something we had done before, but did it much more elaborately this time. We did a union wide conference on it all day Saturday, with workshops where we brought in patients. I have a videotape of that -- it's a very moving thing. One of the keynote speakers was a paraplegic who, you know, lived in the hospital. He was a man of great social vision, talking about how he identified with the hospital workers' struggle to organize the hospitals. Yet at the same time he wanted the hospital workers to understand the problems that people like him face. It was very very moving. Then they broke up in to workshops that were led by people -- by stewards, etcetera -- on this study.

There was an overall committee with representatives from the hospitals. I got a 35,000 dollar grant from a right wing foundation for this. Later on I've got to tell you about the Blue Cross grant. I got a grant from the United Hospital fund for this too, for 35,000 too -- for Bread and Roses, for the conferences. We also did a conference -- the Hastings Center was involved with us on the ethical issues. We then did the conferences inside hospitals. So we must have had about twenty-five, thirty in-hospital conferences, afternoons, on the subject. Then we had a series of lectures on “Health Care in the United States - - What's Ahead.” Lecturers included people like Uwe Reinhardt, of Princeton. Susan Reverby, “Women in Health Care,” and others like that. Then we had an all day conference on labor in the arts and





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