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

As we head into the third year of a pandemic that has lasted longer than expected, Governor Hochul’s 2022 State of the State honors the work and sacrifices that 1199SEIU members have endured. We are pleased to see the Governor is making a significant commitment to invest in the current healthcare workforce, increasing the number of new workers joining the workforce, and moving them along their career pathway. We are also glad to see industry-wide solutions, including a new portal for potential healthcare workers and others seeking training. While we await more details in the budget proposal, we do have key questions about support for vital safety net institutions that have provided lifesaving care during this pandemic and about how the need for permanent wage increases will be addressed.

We all expected and hoped against hope to see a healthier new year. But, the Omicron variant, raging across the world, has quashed that vision for now. The reality is that we are once again in crisis. We may be better prepared on some fronts this time. Still, we are concerned about the risks associated with the CDC’s newest recommendation to reduce quarantine time and allow healthcare workers who test positive, without symptoms, to return to work in five days.

Forty years ago, 1199’s Bread and Roses Program revived its wildly successful musical revue. Whereas the original production in 1980 was titled “Take Care,” the 1982 version was named “Take Care, Take Care.”

MIAMI---The state’s largest union of healthcare workers, 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, has published “A Crisis Of Their Own Making,” a white paper highlighting the failures of the long-term care industry as illustrated by one of Florida’s largest nursing home chains.

More than 70 Home Care members from New York and Massachusetts traveled to Washington, DC on November 16 to join a national rally attended by the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), along with several other Congressional representatives from New York, to press for the passing of the Build Back Better bill. The legislation provides billions of dollars of investment in community based care, including Home Care. It passed in the House a few days after the rally and, at press time, the national campaign for Build Back Better had moved to the Senate.

Every employee expects a grace period when they first start a new job. No one expects that a new employee should be operating with the same speed and precision as someone who has worked in an institution for 30 years.

It is said that: “The race is not given to the swift or to the strong, but to the one who endures to the end.” This has rarely been more apt than when 33,000 members from 249 nursing homes in the greater New York metropolitan area reached a contract agreement with their employers on the brink of the first large scale 1199SEIU strike in more than three decades.

On October 26 and 27, 1199 members at Nuvance / Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, and Nuvance/Putnam Hospital in Carmel, NY, voted overwhelmingly to ratify their one-year contracts after a long, hard fight with the new owners, Nuvance Health.

The holiday season is upon us. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Eid Al-Fitr, or none of the above, this time of the year is a season of giving, of peace and love.

The willingness to stand up for ourselves and our co-workers up to and including withholding our labor when necessary–no matter how long our odds of winning seem to be–is the hallmark of 1199SEIU membership and has been from the very beginning.