Red Star Live talks to Elizabeth Lalasz, a nurse at Stroger Hospital, Chicago’s main public hospital, and a member of National Nurses United, about the conditions she and her coworkers face amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Hospitals like Stroger were left unprepared and short of critical supplies because of government austerity, in the form of spending cutbacks and short-staffing, and a free-market medical system in which health care is a privilege, not a right. Elizabeth talks with Red Star’s Sarah Hurd about how both health care workers and patients (including the most vulnerable patients of all, Cook County Jail prisoners) have been put at grave risk by this system—and what workers, their unions, and those who support them are doing to organize a resistance and an alternative.

To learn more, look for the NNU on Facebook (@NationalNurses), Twitter (@NationalNurses), and the web (NationalNursesUnited.org).

Red Star Live is a production of the Chicago chapter of Democratic Socialists of America that provides a socialist perspective on different aspects of the coronavirus crisis in our city.