The President's Column

Our Diversity Enriches Us

Dennis Rivera

Our Diversity Enriches Us
And our union makes us strong.

Former New York City Mayor David Dinkins used to describe the city as “a gorgeous mosaic.” The same could be said of our union. The original 1199, a drugstore union, was primarily comprised of Jewish men. When Leon Davis and his colleagues set out to organize New York City’s hospital workers, they transformed the union into a majority female, largely African-American and Latino institution.

The last two decades, first with the organization of homecare workers, have mightily transformed our union. Since 1998, with the merger of SEIU and the subsequent joining together of over 15 former SEIU healthcare locals into what is now 1199SEIU, we embrace the great diversity of the United States.

We may not have millionaires and billionaires, but aside from that, we’ve got it all. We work in every sector of the healthcare industry—hospitals, nursing homes, homecare agencies, community-based clinics, labs, pharmacies. You name it.

We have thousands of highly skilled and trained registered nurses and other professionals—physician assistants, social workers, pharmacists and the like. We have clerical and technical workers, service and maintenance workers, members who work in patients’ and clients’ homes and members who work in institutions of several thousand workers.

And with our growth and expansion up the Hudson into upstate New York, Massachusetts and Maryland, we are no longer only an urban and suburban union, but also a rural one.

The fact of the matter is that we healthcare workers—and the American working class as a whole—reflect the diversity of our country like no other sector of the population. And this is all to the good. Rather than being a divisive factor, our diversity makes us culturally richer and politically stronger.

What we have in common transcends any differences in background or primary language or whether we live in a city apartment or in a rural village. We are all human service workers.

We devote our working lives to giving care, solace and comfort to the sick, the infirm, the injured, and those who cannot care for themselves. We preserve and prolong lives. It is noble work and essential to the wellbeing of society.

But the word workers is important, too. We are employees and, as such, we need and deserve decent wages, healthcare benefits for ourselves and our families, guaranteed pensions and a secure working environment.

Our union is what allows us to achieve these things. Employees who have no union work at the whim of the employer. Even a benevolent employer can take away with one hand what he gives with another. But our wages, benefits and working conditions are guaranteed under the contracts we bargain, which have the force of law.

Despite the myths of the “power of the individual,” a working woman or man alone has no power. “You can’t fight City Hall,” has a ring of truth to it—if you are fighting on your own. But we have fought City Hall and governors and presidents and employers’ associations, and have achieved many successes. It is the union that makes us strong, and the larger we are, the stronger we are—as 1199SEIU has proven time and time again.

The old labor anthem, “Solidarity Forever,” had it right: “When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun; Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, But the union makes us strong.”