On August 27, UE members joined National Nurses United in a set of demonstrations across the country demanding that hospitals and elected officials immediately cut ties with the artificial intelligence giant Palantir.

“We’re proud to be out here with National Nurses [United] today, to support the demands of nurses who are the workers who make this health care system run,” said April Ma, Local 197-TRU, who spoke at the NNU rally in Washington, DC. Ma condemned the prioritization of “the incarceration, the punishment, and the mass surveillance of the working class at the expense of marginalized patients,” and declared, “We refuse to lose sight of a future in healthcare that truly puts patients first.”

Local 1122-NUGW President Theo Clifford addressed the rally in Chicago, noting that Local 1122 “experienced our institution’s eager complicity in the form of the deal which Northwestern signed with the federal government last year … [which] has tightened the noose of surveillance on the nearly one third of our bargaining unit who are not US citizens.” Clifford concluded, “Only by standing together as workers, within and across borders, can we take back power from these institutions and demand a world in which education and healthcare are accessible and affordable to all.”

NNU, a close UE ally, organized the demonstrations to bring attention to the fact that Palantir software is widely used for scheduling and staffing in U.S. hospitals, taking staffing decisions out of the hands of local managers. The union’s press release [1] notes:

Already, Palantir manages more than one-fifth of U.S. hospital beds. For nurses, this marks a dangerous threat to the nursing profession, which is seeing a glut of untested and unregulated technology introduced into patient care settings. ...

Even these limited applications are already exacerbating the nationwide staffing crisis, as executives are rushing to use untested and unregulated technology to replace clinical judgement and make critical health care decisions like how many nurses are on a unit to take care of patients on a shift.

Palantir’s technologies have also been used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to aid in their mass deportation efforts, which has included the detention of approximately 500 babies and over 6,000 children.

“No part of the country has been untouched by the terror and violence of ICE and CBP, enabled by Palantir’s technology,” said NNU President Jamie Brown, RN. “While nurses have had to witness the fear and desperation of our patients and neighbors facing the threat of immigration raids, we have also seen hospitals start to buckle under conditions of extreme scarcity. That's why we have to resist a future where tech billionaires control our politics and our public resources. Otherwise, we will see fewer and fewer resources for working people — for our health care, for our education, for our housing.”