Purple Power: Nearly 3,400 Join the Ranks of 1199SEIU
1199ers celebrate major new organizing victories. Photos/courtesy of 1199
By Steve Wishnia
More than 2,500 workers at a Brooklyn-based home health-care agency, along with another 880 at a medical lab in Nassau County, have added themselves to the ranks of 1199SEIU.
In elections certified by the National Labor Relations Board in late September, workers at the White Glove Community Care agency and Northwell Health’s Core Testing Facilities in New Hyde Park heavily approved joining the union. The votes were 842-357 at White Glove and 502-113 at the Northwell lab.
The result in New Hyde Park followed workers at Northwell’s Little Neck lab voting for 1199SEIU representation in December.
“Word of mouth” was key to the union’s victories at both labs, says David Greenberg, 1199’s vice president for new organizing. “These are the workers calling us, saying ‘we really need a union here.’”
The benefits, he added, were “becoming obvious to nonunion workers who work next to union members, either in the same job or in the same workplace.”
“This is our opportunity to fight for the benefits—health care, a pension, and more—that our Northwell peers have won as 1199 members,” Roland Denis, a senior clinical lab assistant, said in the union’s election-results announcement.
The pandemic showed how important both medical-lab work and “reasonable caseloads” for the workers are, says Greenberg. The union has also organized nurses, certified nursing assistants, and other hospital workers at Northwell Health, which is now both New York State's largest health-care provider and largest private employer.
The Little Neck lab is now negotiating a first contract with 1199SEIU, with talks at New Hyde Park to follow. The workers are seeking no-cost family health-insurance benefits, guaranteed pensions, retiree health care, job security, and, Greenberg says, “to feel like there is fairness in the workplace.”
Unpaid benefits provoke home aides
At White Glove, a Williamsburg-based agency that provides home health and personal care to elderly and disabled people in New York City and Westchester County, the overwhelmingly women workers also asked 1199 for help.
“They decided to organize a union after confronting years of low wages, unaffordable health insurance, and discrimination,” the union says.
Specifically, in December 2022, White Glove was ordered by the New York State Attorney General’s Office to reimburse workers for $2 million in unpaid wages. From 2012 to 2018, according to the stipulation agreement it signed, it failed to provide workers with benefits required by the state Wage Parity Act, with a minimum value of at least $4.09 per hour in the city and $3.22 per hour in Westchester, in addition to the $17-an-hour minimum wage for home-care workers.
The cards workers were supposed to use to receive benefits such as health care often didn’t work, according to 1199. White Glove employed between 1,000 and 2,000 workers a year during that period, according to the agreement.
The agency also agreed to pay the state and federal Medicaid programs $1,264,000 for filing claims that falsely attested that workers were being paid the legal minimum wage plus the supplemental benefits.
It reported $135 million in revenues for 2022, according to 1199. It also has offices in Rockland County, New Jersey, and south Florida.
“For me, this is about my patients,” home health aide Rose Wah said in the union’s announcement. “When we have a stronger voice in how things are done and how we are treated at the agency, we can take better care of our patients.”