A Moving Experience: The Nanny versus the Health Care Establishment
Who was “The Nanny?” I had no idea. One result of living outside one’s native country is that some cultural references are lost, notably TV shows that don’t travel abroad. One of the latter was an American TV comedy of the 1990s, reasonably successful in its time but completely unknown to me, a longtime resident in Europe.
So when the headline speaker at a luncheon this week was announced as Fran Drescher, the star of “The Nanny,” I was like “Duh?” I wasn’t attending the event for her acting chops, but for the fact that she was the recently-elected president of SAG-AFTRA, the largest trade union in the United States. Her pre-publicity said that she would address the intersection of labor, sustainability, and health, but I had no idea what THAT meant. I hoped she might talk about the future of television, the ascendancy of streaming, the convergence of media and technology, or maybe something banal like banning live guns on movie sets. In fact, she did address the latter during the Q & A, but her prepared remarks were entirely focused on the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in the US, how their greed is making people sick, and what individuals can do to take charge of their own well-being.
Drescher explained why this topic was pressing. Trade unions have the responsibility to negotiate for their members’ benefits, and health care benefits are a BIG item. The problem for union leaders is that health care costs in the US (independent of COVID) are increasing far beyond industry’s ability to cover them, so something has to give. Contract bargaining can achieve only so much under the circumstances, but a union has no such constraints in encouraging its members to adopt healthier personal practices.
The former “Nanny” exhorted the audience to avoid chemically-laced household products. She noted that she makes her own household cleaners; she didn’t say how. I was thinking that, in Italy, the good-old basics of ammonia, bleach, and vinegar — depending on usage — have been staples for generations, never mind that chemically-laced and heavily advertised brands line the supermarket shelves there as here.
Drescher also admonished us to choose organic meats and farmer’s market veggies over their industrially-produced counterparts. In Italy…
