ARTICLES

Who They'll Kill First

SAN DIEGO WORKERS GROUP UNDERSTANDS THE ENEMY

Only a politician could have called this bill "Death With Dignity." For only political language, as George Orwell once said, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable." Last month AB-1592, the "Death With Dignity" bill, was worming its way through committees to the floor of the state assembly. If the bill becomes law, it will legalize "physician-assisted suicide" which, as the author of 1984 would have hastened to point out, means doctors murdering patients at their own request.

"There's no way in the dynamics of healthcare in America that it's good to mix assisted suicide with HMOs," said Ned Dolejsi, director of the California Catholic Conference." That's why the Sacramento-based Catholic group was "very excited" when the Western Service Workers Association came asking help in opposing the "Death With Dignity" bill. The workers association asked permission to solicit the support of Catholics, "and we told them to contact the local dioceses," Dolejsi said.

Here in San Diego, Bob Rice obtained more than 150 signatures against the bill from Catholics who worship at the indult Latin Mass in Holy Cross Cemetery chapel (off Hilltop Drive). Rice, a Respect Life coordinator, said that he first heard about the workers-sponsored petition from the San Diego diocesan social ministries office. "I think it's worth our time to get these signatures, and I hope they have some impact," said Rice, who planned to load DJean Becker, director of the San Diego workers group, with them the next day.

That Wednesday, armed with thousands of signatures, and reinforced with a busload of Western Service members, Becker charged lawmakers in Sacramento, including state assemblywomen Susan Davis (D-San Diego) and Charlene Zettel (R-Poway), both of whom serve on the appropriations committee. (At press-time, the appropriations committee's vote on AB-1592 had been postponed until the following week.)

Earlier that month, Becker explained why this was so important to her and the workers association, which started as volunteer agency to help workers who fall through the interstices of government and union safety nets. "The publicity on this so far," she said during an interview in the group's downtown center at 3014 Imperial Avenue, "has pointed to an easier, softer way to let a very small number of terminally ill patients end their lives. It's promoted as a choice. We believe that's as far from the truth as you can get."

Becker and her fellow volunteers have already been breaking their backs for years trying to push workers without health insurance back into a healthcare system which has let them fall through the cracks. Every month she and her volunteers go door-to-door: "we sign up 100 members a month through canvassing," she said. She counts 20,000 members paying dues of 62 cents a month. That was what unrecognized workers were making in Suffolk County, New York, when the movement started back in the '70s. The Western Service Workers Association came to San Diego in 1977.

Becker's unofficial statistics, based as they are on personal contact, cry out for attention. "Unrecognized workers" means "those workers who are not recognized under existing labor law," she said. These can be "domestic, temporary, seasonal" workers and even "independent contractors" (such as free-lance journalists). "They make up 60 to 70 percent of San Diego's workforce," Becker said.

The majority of workers in San Diego are unrecognized workers?

"That's what I found," said Becker. "The majority of our members work if not one then two or three jobs. The problem is, they get minimum wage."

And no healthcare?

"Forget medical care," Becker replied. "It has become a luxury for a significant portion of the population." She keeps coming across families that are working and therefore make too much for MediCal. "Their one luxury is to keep the phone on," she said, "that way they can get called to get jobs.... We found literally eight of 10 families, low-income families, this is in southeast San Diego, are without any regular care because they can not afford it," Becker said.

Western Services has stepped up to fill the gap. "We have one to three general medical sessions a month" in which doctors volunteer to examine about 15 Western members. "We urgently need more doctors to help us," Becker added. There are also about 10 pharmacists who volunteer their time. In the last medical session, doctors found cases included "parasites, hypertension, diabetes --"

-- All of which are preventable, I said.

"-- Absolutely," Becker said. "'An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure': it's so very true. That prevention would save taxpayers billions of dollars; and of course we would have a much healthier population.

"We've got a couple women whose lives are on the line right now," she went on. One is Hispanic, 37, a mother of two, and works cleaning houses; the other is white, 29, a college graduate who works 50 hours a week on a service job. The mother discovered a large lump in her breast; a clinic referred her to a doctor to whom she paid a reduced copayment. But the doctor, having examined the lump, told her it was nothing but nerves; If she insisted on a mammogram, she would have to pay $85 -- the mother's food budget for 10 days.

When a Western Services volunteer doctor later examined her, however, he demanded that she get a mammogram; another volunteer arranged for the diagnostic test to be donated. The lump was not cancerous -- but that's not the point. The point is, there was no way of knowing this without the mammogram -- a mammogram which the mother could not afford.

The other woman, the college graduate, probably does have cancer. Four months after suffering from swelling in her neck and shoulder, she paid for a doctor's visit at low-income clinic. A blood test came back clean, but the pain continued. The doctor prescribed antibiotics for which the woman paid.

Four months later, still suffering, she went to the workers association. "We took her to our doctor," Becker said, "and he spent 40 to 50 minutes with her, and he broke the news to her that she had lymphoma." Because she works, the woman neither qualifies for MediCal nor county medical services; she makes too much money. Yet it would cost her more than two months' salary -- $2,000 -- to get a biopsy. Becker is currently begging a biopsy donation.

Becker's words thud one by one: "Our membership dies regularly from treatable or preventable illness because they have no money."

That's why Western Services saw "Death With Dignity" and foresaw death with ignominy. "We're being killed now by omission," said Becker, "by a medical system that is founded on profit...AB 1592 is the commission."

"'Death With Dignity' is a lie," Becker said, "because what's underlying that is a tremendous incentive for HMOs and insurance companies who would only have to pay $35 for a lethal injection instead of $50,000 or $100,000 for treatment.

"There's a list of folks -- obese, smokers, elderly, chronically ill, foreign-born, poor and also non-white -- who are considered to be unprofitables," she went on. "Deny somebody sufficient heat and food and see how they stand up." Her eyes flashed. "As unprofitables, this kind of law would solve all that."

"By killing them?" I asked.

There was a long pause. I looked at Becker; her head drooped like Christ's on the cross. After a while she looked up; but she seemed to gaze at someone, or many someones, far away.

"Yes," she said.

Since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has encouraged Catholics to work with humanists, even if they are atheists. The conciliar document Gaudium et Spes opens with these words: "The joys and the hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ." It concludes by saying that through Vatican II the Church, like a good samaritan, comes "to the assistance of every man of our time, whether he believes in God, or does not explicitly recognize him.... By virtue of her mission to shed on the whole world the radiance of the gospel message, and to unify under one Spirit all men of whatever nation, race or culture, the Church stands forth as a sign of that fraternity which allows honest dialogue and invigorates it.... For our part, the desire for such dialogue, which can lead to truth through love alone, excludes no one, though an appropriate measure of prudence must undoubtedly be exercised."

In a subsequent interview, Becker and I dialogued some more. As a full-time volunteer with Western Services (one of two in San Diego) how does she support herself? Becker said that lives entirely on what people give, week in and week out, from the food that she eats to the clothes on her back. And she has lived this way for 18 years now.

"I was working three jobs in Santa Cruz, cruddy jobs, living in Beach flats...a really bad neighborhood." Not surprisingly, therefore, "I was met on a door-to-door canvas [by the workers group volunteers] in 1981. I told them I didn't know what the hell an 'unrecognized worker' was but I thought I was one. They asked me if I wanted to volunteer some time. So I started volunteering and it made a tremendous amount of sense to me." So much sense, in fact, that she became a full-time Western Services volunteer in Santa Cruz later that year. (There are 11 autonomous Western Services centers in California). "It's not like all of a sudden I had a revelation," Becker said, "one thing led to another."

What inspired her to plunge into unrecognized worker advocacy? Some grand theory?

No, says Becker, who never finished college. "I'm definitely self-taught."

But something must motivate you to live a life so demanding; it seems as demanding as what Catholics call religious life!

"I don't have any particular religion," Becker replied. "I do this because it makes a lot of sense to me; it seems to me a logical, lawful, reasonable thing to do. I've read lots of philosophers and I've met a ton of people, but the very bottom line of it there is a majority of working people who can't make a living at their work."

Like Becker back in 1981: "I was working three jobs; I was struggling; I was phone soliciting; I was a secretary of sorts; and I was working in the theater." Since all these jobs were part-time, she got no benefits.

To her, it's simple: having gone through what unrecognized workers suffer, Becker is tries to show them compassion. That reminded me of a scripture in Hebrews (5:8-9) about Christ: "though he was a Son, yet he learned obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he became the author of salvation unto all that obey him." I cited that to Becker from memory as best as I could. "God in his providence let you go through that experience so that you could become a leader of other people who are still trapped in it," I said.

"I have no problem with that," Becker said.