Today we mourn one of our own union siblings in the labor movement, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA Hospital. A healthcare professional who dedicated his life to caring for our nation’s veterans in their most vulnerable moments.
As nurses and healthcare professionals, we see what others don’t always see. We see how poverty becomes illness, how injustice becomes injury, how a broken system breaks human bodies and minds. We don’t just treat symptoms, but we witness their causes. And when you witness suffering day after day, you can’t help but ask ourselves: what can I do to stop this at its source? That’s the question Alex was trying to answer when federal agents brutally took his life.
Alex saw a community in need of healing, and he responded the way nurses do, by showing up and putting himself on the line. His death is a loss for every patient he will never care for and every person he will never protect. It is a reminder that the same systems that fail our patients failed Alex.
As the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, we stand with Alex’s memory and his values. We stand for a world where healthcare is a human right, where working people have dignity and power, and where no one is brutalized for standing up for others.
Healthcare workers are on the front lines every day fighting for patients and each other. And when we fight for a more just world, you are doing the work of healing, too. Alex Jeffrey Pretti knew that. He lived it. And we will honor his memory by continuing that fight at the bedside and beyond.
- Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals, AFT Local 5017
For those within driving distance to Eugene, join us at the Eugene Federal Building on East Seventh Avenue and Pearl Street at 5pm on Tuesday, January 27th. For those in the Portland area, OFNHP is joining the Labor Against ICE march on January 31st, beginning at Elizabeth Caruthers Park (3508 S. Moody Avenue) at 3:00pm.
