“Can we … unionize?” my  coworker and I asked, cautiously looking over our shoulders as we sat across from an 1199 new member organizer in a top-secret meeting at a Manhattan coffee shop one night in August 2018. It was our first encounter with a union. We worked for a largely non-union hospital in New York City, and were motivated by broken promises from human re-sources, fear of layoffs, and a vague awareness of the union difference. 

I peppered the organizer with questions, her voice low to keep things under the radar, and mine thrilled to be part of a covert opera-tion. Then a man a few tables down, overhearing my enthusiasm leaned over on his way out to say, “Good luck with your union drive!”

I left that meeting with the in-timidating assignment of connecting with workers I’d never met, across job titles located far from the small sleep lab where I worked as a tech-nologist. Meanwhile, the skilled maintenance staff, disillusioned after receiving backpacks instead of rais-es, began organizing in their own department. Together, after months of planning and despite the upheaval of Covid, we held elections, voted for the union, and won a contract in September 2020.

What followed is a story many of us know well: managerial obstruction, blatant contract violations, wage theft, and the constant challenge of convincing our coworkers that yes, getting involved in the union re-quires a leap of faith—but the dignity and rewards that come from stand-ing up for what’s right are worth the risk of the boss’s retaliation. A con-tract means nothing without member enforcement. There really is no sub-stitute for shop-floor participation.

Since unionizing, we have had both victories and setbacks. We col-lectively won back nearly 3,000 va-cation hours, over $170,000 in unpaid night shift differentials, and restored wrongfully cut long-term disability in-surance. We earned back shortchanged Covid haz-ard pay, and just recently reformed system-wide Paid Family Leave policies impacting thousands of workers. At the same time, we’re still lagging on mul-tiple fronts, and we need much deeper rank and file involvement to achieve our full power.

This feels especially urgent now. More than $1 trillion is slated to be cut from healthcare funding 
over the next decade. 

Many 1199ers are already facing job losses, SNAP cuts, and a dark road ahead. We are staring down a genu-inely unprecedented threat to Amer-ican healthcare. Does that mean austerity is inevitable, and there’s no point in fighting back?

Defying the odds, Zohran Mam-dani won the 2025 New York City mayoral race by openly and unapol-ogetically calling for reinvestment in public services. His campaign challenged the assumption that scarcity is the only way forward. That electoral message succeeded using something deeply familiar to those who have organized a workplace: building trust, one conversation at a time. I joined some of those conver-sations knocking on doors in Jackson Heights, Queens, and many of my fellow union members spent count-less hours working on the campaign, driven by a positive vision of the fu-ture rather than fear.

No matter where you live, we can build our 1199 chapters in much the same way. Start small: Try connecting with your coworkers and creating a departmental WhatsApp group. Then, you can begin to gather the in-formation that empowers you. Do you and others in your title have a copy of your job description and your contract? Do you know when your next Union meeting is? Do you have copies of the 1199 “Unsafe Staffing Form” so you and your coworkers can track concrete examples of dangerous levels of understaffing? Do you know the contact infor-mation of your area’s political organizer? If not: ask. Push. If you hit a wall, go up the chain.

I’ve seen the wall move before. I saw it in that coffee shop in 2018. I saw it in our contract win in 2020. And this fall, my city saw it again.

I know that if every 1199 member up and down the East Coast moves together, we can scale that wall.