Jorge Mancillas

Hello and welcome to the PSI Health Blog.

I am Health and Municipal Services Officer for Public Services International (PSI), the global union federation that represents public sector workers. For more information about PSI, visit the website www.world-psi.org.

I joined PSI in February 2007 with a mixed background in biomedical research and union organizing and political action. I had learnt the importance of unionization many years earlier, as at the age of eight I began working in my hometown of Ensenada, Baja California, in the Northwestern corner of Mexico. I obtained my first college degree in Psychology at the age of 20, after which I was hired as Director of the Rehabilitation and Counseling department of a stage agency in Baja California. The department provided counseling and rehabilitation mechanisms for the more than 15,000 sex workers in four cities. I also did some university teaching and participated in the building of national university employees’ unions in Mexico.

After migrating to the United States and earning a Ph.D. in Neurobiology, I spent several years as a biomedical researcher and professor at UCLA. During that period, I used my scientific expertise to advocate on various public health issues. I worked, for example, on raising awareness on the dangers of exposure to neurotoxic substances in various settings, including in the workplace, and advocating for regulatory and legal remedies.

During the last 10 years, after leaving academia and before starting to work at PSI, I have mostly worked for public sector unions.

I see health care as a strategically important issue for the labour movement. Health is a fundamental human right, but that is still denied to too many. That’s not only due to inaccessible or inadequate health care, but also because of inadequate wages, unsafe working conditions, sub-standard housing and sanitation, malnutrition, and many other determinants of good health. Health care is also an issue around which it is much easier to make a case for Quality Public Services and against their privatization and commercialization.

Please feel free to comment on my blog, and contact me if you have any ideas to improve it.

Jorge Mancillas