New Study Outlines Path to Safeguard Quality Patient Care and Healthcare Jobs in Lynn

1199SEIU members are standing firm against attempts by Rite Aid, one of the largest drugstore chains in the nation, to win major contract concessions from workers and severely weaken the Union’s bargaining unit. The fight for 6,100 Rite Aid members in New York and New Jersey has emerged as a major 1199SEIU campaign against corporate greed and economic inequality.

It was the Fight for $15 campaign that first attracted Beverly Miller to political action. She saw how effective activism could be. Miller now works at the Rosewood Gardens Rehabilitation Center in Rensselaer, NY. It’s her fear of a Donald Trump presidency that motivated her to sign up as a Weekend Warrior and get out the vote for Hillary Clinton.

Things you need to know as we head into Election Day.

Hundreds of 1199SEIU members at two NYU-Langone Medical Center facilities in New York City held informational pickets Aug. 31 to protest the hospital giant’s recent decision to leave League of Voluntary Hospitals and Nursing Homes, an association of hospitals and nursing homes formed in 1968 to conduct joint bargaining with 1199.

Members at Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, NY, took their safe staffing fight on the road Aug. 25 with a mobile billboard that called attention to their ongoing struggle to improve staffing levels and patient safety at their institution.

1199SEIU’s Training and Employment Funds (TEF) and the New York Yankees teamed up on Sept. 14 to raise money to train bilingual healthcare workers and improve the quality of health care in the Bronx.

Scores of 1199SEIU members, their families and local supporters held an informational picket at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville, NY on Aug. 23 to demand a fair contract and speak up for quality care in the Westchester community.

Just before midnight on Monday, Sept. 12, after hours of last minute negotiations, 1199SEIU members at Cedar Oaks nursing home in South Plainfield, NJ, and Norwood Terrace nursing home in Plainfield, NJ, reached a contract settlement with AristaCare Health Services. The agreement was ratified by an overwhelming majority of the membership in a vote on Wednesday, Sept. 14.

Eighty-four years ago, 1199’s late President Leon Davis and a group of his fellow pharmacists and drugstore workers came together to form what became Local 1199. The union grew to about 5,000 members, all in New York City. Then, 27 years after its founding, Davis and his comrades made a visionary decision: to organize the city’s hospital workers.

In the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on Sept. 26, Sec. Clinton spent the better part of the evening fending off half truths and lies. Instead of debating the facts of his platform, Donald Trump resorted to bullying, yelling and personal insults. This was no surprise. Delivered in his bluster was a self-serving platform designed to benefit already-thriving multi-national corporations and the one percent. His positions would set working people back decades and endanger international relations.