1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East
 |
|
| Full name | 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1932 |
| Members | 347,139 (2013) |
| Head union | George Gresham, president, 2007-Present |
| Affiliation | SEIU |
| Key people | Dennis Rivera, president 1989-2007 |
| Office location | New York, New York |
| Country | United States |
| Website | www |
1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East is the largest healthcare union the United States. With a membership of 400,000 including retirees, its stated mission is to achieve quality healthcare, good jobs and social justice for all. It is the largest local union within the Service Employees International Union.
Local 1199 was founded in 1932 as a local of the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union by Leon J. Davis to organize pharmacists in New York City. The local also included pharmacists, pharmacy clerks and "soda jerks". The union led pioneering pickets and strikes against racial segregation and racially discriminatory hiring in Harlem and elsewhere in New York City during the 1930s.
The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Local 1199's leadership in 1948 for Communist "infiltration". 1199 was a tiny local at the time, however, and during the expulsions of large left-led unions from the CIO in the 1940s, 1199 eventually found shelter under the auspices of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
Local 1199 first successfully organized nonprofessional hospital workers in 1958, mobilizing a heavily Black and Puerto Rican workforce in the first flush of the postwar Civil Rights Movement. On 8 May 1959 about 3500 hospital workers began a strike against seven large private hospitals in New York City that lasted forty-six days. This unprecedented action ended when both sides agreed that labor relations in the hospitals would be supervised by a quasi-public agency, the Permanent Administrative Committee. The committee was successfully challenged in 1962. The local began organizing professional and technical workers in 1963, and in the same year won the right to collective bargaining under provisions of the state's labor relations act. In 1965 it was granted the power to represent workers throughout New York State, won a contract in 1968 that for the first time secured a minimum salary for workers of $100 a week, and in 1973 began to organize registered nurses.
...
Wikipedia