Georgetown Hospital Workers Beat Back Subcontracting Effort
A proposal to subcontract out food service workers at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC was recently defeated by 1199SEIU members. Medstar, the operator of the hospital, told workers that it intended to subcontract the entire dietary department to the operator that was already managing part of the area. But the members came together to oppose the plan, according to Tara Jernigan, an 1199SEIU delegate and Food Service Worker 2, who has been at Georgetown for six years.
“They are very disrespectful to the Union employees and we were not having it,” says Tara. “They aren’t good managers; employees don’t get enough training We sometimes don’t have the proper food to give our patients, the kitchen is frequently out of basics like orange juice and milk. If they can’t manage the kitchen, how are they going to manage the workers?”
A group of Union delegates met with Medstar management to voice their concerns about the plan and the proposed subcontractor. Tara says she told management that they needed to walk through the kitchen. “I told them the kitchen smells and they acted like they couldn’t believe it. We said that subcontracting would only make it worse. We talked about the food, the dirtiness, the disrespect to the employees from [the subcontractor]. We felt like we were being heard by management.”
The group told management that they wanted a response within seven days but they didn’t even have to wait that long. Within three days, workers received a letter from management saying that the subcontracting deal was off and that they were going to refocus efforts to improve the kitchen.
Heather Thompson, a cook at Georgetown for 19 years says, “We told our employer that we want to be Georgetown because we’ve been with Georgetown and they’ve been a better employer than the [proposed subcontractor].”
Beyond conditions in the kitchen, Jennifer Bangura, who has been a cashier for 26 years, says, “The benefits that the other people get are worse than ours. We get two or three weeks for vacation but they only get one. We want to be Union.”