A Page from Labor History

How Local 1199 Organized NYC Hospital Workers

In the spring of 1959, New York City was rocked by a six-week hospital strike. Thousands of workers, who were mainly black, Puerto Rican and women, fought to win union recognition and an end to poverty wages and long hours. The labor movement rallied to their side, with craft unions at hospital building sites joining the pickets. This union solidarity was key to eventual victory.

The strike came out of an organizing campaign started in 1958 by Local 1199, then part of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. It transformed that small union local of mainly Jewish pharmacists into the huge multiracial hospital union that 1199SEIU is today, with 450,000 members across five states and Washington, D.C. During the strike, Jewish pharmacists, black and Puerto Rican cleaners and white skilled trades workers were on the picket lines together, showing that class struggle can cut against the bosses’ attempts to pit workers of different races against one another and that the unions can fight in the interests of all the oppressed.

Nonetheless, the militancy of the strikers was constrained by the Local 1199 leadership under President Leon Davis, which sought to bind the aspirations of the workers to the “good graces” of Democratic Party politicians. This subordination of the union to so-called “friend of labor” Democrats (and even a few Republicans), who in fact are the bosses’ agents, has been the hallmark of the 1199 officialdom ever since. Today, these labor statesmen sometimes give a nod to the importance of the 1959 strike, but avoid class struggle like the plague.

The 1959 Strike

Today, as in the 1950s, the majority of hospitals in New York City are private “voluntary” hospitals, often misnamed “not for profits” or charities. Far from providing charity, they extract exorbitant fees from patients and their insurers, and those who can’t pay are dumped on the city hospitals. The voluntaries, which pay no taxes because they are said to offer a “community service,” can make huge profits. Their boards of trustees are packed with financiers, landlords and industrialists—members of the capitalist class that derives its profits from the exploitation of the workers.

Today, the hospital bosses grudgingly tolerate the union under its current misleadership as an adjunct to their lobbying for government funds. But in the 1950s, the bosses were dead set on keeping the workers in the basement kitchens, laundries and workshops voiceless and unorganized. Most of these workers were recent migrants from the South, Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean. In the hospitals, as in broader U.S. society, where black people are segregated at the bottom and oppressed as a race-color caste, the racial hierarchy was rigidly enforced. For example, black men were restricted to the least skilled positions, while eastern and southern European immigrants filled more skilled jobs. Wages and conditions were even worse than those in the underfunded city hospitals, which had mainly white workforces. Indeed, many voluntary hospital workers were welfare recipients.

In 1958, amid intensifying civil rights struggles against Jim Crow segregation in the South, Local 1199 launched a voluntary hospital organizing drive. At the time, the membership of Local 1199 was largely Jewish, not least due to anti-Jewish exclusion in the medical schools, which drew many, like Davis, to become pharmacists instead. Through a series of strikes against the drugstore chains in the city, Local 1199 had won a 40-hour workweek by 1953. Union members were determined to extend such conditions to the harshly exploited hospital workers. They voted to pay an extra dollar in monthly dues to fund the recruitment of black and Puerto Rican workers into the union. Many joined the “crack of dawn brigades” that went to hospitals with union cards and distributed bilingual leaflets in what was called la cruzada. The union soon collected cards from a majority of workers at several locations who embraced the union, including because of its record of fighting on behalf of black workers.

The first big breakthrough success was at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, where the board agreed to negotiate with Local 1199 in December 1958. But the boards of the other hospitals stiffened in their opposition to the union. In response, Davis sought to assure management that if it agreed to union recognition, Local 1199 would agree to a no-strike pledge and binding arbitration, which is nothing but a trap designed to give the bosses the upper hand in contract negotiations. This offer to give up the strike weapon curried favor with some Democrats like Eleanor Roosevelt, but it did nothing to break the resistance of the bosses. And why would it? The interests of workers and the bosses are entirely counterposed. The bosses exploit the labor of workers to make profits, and withdrawing that labor collectively is the only way to hit the bosses where it hurts.

The strike began at six hospitals on May 8, after the bosses’ Greater New York Hospital Association, a cabal of all 81 voluntaries, arrogantly declared it would never recognize Local 1199. The walkout was extended to a seventh hospital on June 5. The strikers fought back with great courage against the anti-union intransigence of the capitalists on the hospital boards. They defied injunctions, arrests and beatings, vilification by the bourgeois press and maneuvers by Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. to force them back to work empty-handed. This Democrat, who won office with the support of the labor officialdom, regularly unleashed his cops to attack the strikers.

The strike was very popular with the city’s working people and poor, who were all too familiar with the racist contempt of the capitalist rulers and their club-wielding NYPD thugs. Huge quantities of food and donations poured in for the strikers. Crucially, Teamsters and laundry workers refused to cross the Local 1199 picket lines, while other unions helped build the lines. As the Militant, the newspaper of the then-revolutionary Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, observed: “Union solidarity has gone beyond financial and moral support. Skilled construction workers who make as much money in one day as some hospital workers do in a week have walked off the job on new buildings going up at three of the struck hospitals. The Building Trades Council declared that construction will not be resumed until the hospital workers win recognition” (8 June 1959). These concrete acts of solidarity on the picket line brought black and white workers together to advance their common class interests.

The conservative head of the IBEW electricians Local 3 and the NYC Central Labor Council, Harry van Arsdale, provided money and other support for the 1199 strike, but also insisted on limiting the strike to a handful of the hospitals, which is exactly what the Local 1199 tops did. Workers at other hospitals voted to join the strike but were not called out. Criminally, Davis kept offering management a no-strike pledge in exchange for union recognition. After six weeks, the strikers had no better offer than a deal the mayor had proposed early in the strike and which the strikers had decisively rejected.

The settlement, which was basically the same raw deal, did not include union recognition but allowed workers to elect a representative for grievances. Working conditions in the hospitals were to be reviewed by a “Permanent Administrative Committee” with six bosses and six “neutral” appointees who were chosen by a New York State court. However, the courts are not “neutral” but a part of the repressive state apparatus that defends the profits and rule of the bosses. At the ratification meeting before the vote, Local 1199 president Davis proclaimed: “We won backdoor recognition. But we’ll be in the front door soon” (quoted in Moe Foner, Not for Bread Alone, 2002). This was, however, by no means assured.

Building the Union, Winning Recognition

Despite not winning union recognition, strikers went back to work with Local 1199 buttons on and their heads held high. Management, try as it might to hold back the tide, had a new reality to deal with: Workers had an organization and identified with their new union. Members held regular meetings and elected stewards, who collected dues in person and handled grievances with management.

At the time, hospital workers were excluded from laws codifying collective bargaining rights. The Local 1199 bureaucrats peddled the lie that winning this right was a matter not of waging class struggle but of putting pressure on capitalist politicians to change the laws to favor the workers. In 1962, this dead-end strategy was behind the sellout of a strike for union recognition at Beth El Hospital (now Brookdale) in Brooklyn and Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital. When this strike reached a stalemate, Leon Davis welcomed the intervention of Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller and pushed a rotten settlement on the strikers that included a promised collective bargaining law. The Militant (30 July 1962) warned:

“One political implication of the settlement is that in order for Rockefeller, a Republican, to live up to his promise, he will have to be re-elected this November. The labor leaders who made the deal with him previously supported Democratic candidates.

“Except for the retroactive pay, the strikers have won only promises from capitalist politicians. Similar broken promises forced them to strike in the first place. Even if the law is passed, it will not give the workers a union contract—not to mention good wages. It will only mean the hospitals are obliged to negotiate. But the proposed law bars strikes and experience has taught that these hospital managements grant nothing unless forced to.”

Sure enough, the Local 1199 tops called for a vote to Rockefeller. After his election, in 1963, state law was changed to grant collective bargaining to hospital workers only in the five boroughs, while compelling Local 1199 to accept binding arbitration of disputes; strikes were prohibited during the life of a contract. By preaching faith in capitalist politicians, the union misleaders betrayed the interests of the workers who had been militantly fighting for union recognition.

Despite this class collaboration of the Local 1199 bureaucracy, the strength of the union continued to grow, as workers eagerly fought to get better pay and work conditions. By 1963, the union had won a contract at 23 hospitals. Whereas in 1959 wages had been as low as $32 per week ($280 today), by 1968, when several managements formed the “League of Voluntary Hospitals” to negotiate a contract with 1199, the union secured a guaranteed minimum weekly wage of $100 with a pension. Local 1199’s organizing drive also awakened the desire for union representation among city hospital workers, who got a union contract under AFSCME District Council 37 in 1966. This growth of union power was due to the collective organization that came out of the militant strike of 1959.

The Early Years of the Integrated CIO Industrial Unions

The men who led the Local 1199 hospital organizing campaign in the 1950s had been supporters of the Communist Party (CP) during the tumultuous class battles for integrated industrial unions in the 1930s. These unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) represented all the workers in a particular industry, regardless of their race, ethnicity or craft—a significant advance over the AFL unions, which were steeped in race and craft prejudice. The CP provided a significant component of the CIO leadership at the time.

Fleeing Jim Crow terror and relentless poverty in the South, thousands of black workers were brought into huge industrial plants in the North, where they were segregated into the most menial and dangerous jobs. In the struggle to organize these plants, as well as various industries in the South, the unions had to take head-on the bosses’ divide-and-rule tactics meant to prevent the unity of black and white workers. As a result, the growth of the industrial unions was the greatest advancement for black rights since the Civil War and Reconstruction, and was a tremendous advance for white workers, too.

Leon Davis was active with the CP, which aimed to organize all workers in the pharmaceutical industry among many others, when in 1932 he helped found the Pharmacists Union of Greater New York (PUGNY), the precursor of Local 1199. The union went up against desperate conditions in Depression-era Harlem. In 1936, only seven black pharmacists were employed there. That year, PUGNY initiated a successful campaign in Harlem not just to secure jobs for black pharmacists in drugstores, but also to promote black workers from backroom porters to soda men, who dealt with the public.

PUGNY fought against racist exclusion by establishing the closed shop in the industry. When a store boss needed a worker, the union would send the first on the list. If the shop owner objected to hiring a black man or tried to hire a non-union worker, the union would close the store by picketing until the owner agreed to hire the union member dispatched for the job. Union recognition meant employers had to hire whoever the union sent, regardless of their race. In this way, the union showed how the struggles for labor rights and for black rights go forward together.

The labor upsurge that resulted in the organization of the CIO unions had begun to radicalize workers, with a layer open to the building of a workers party independent of and in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans. But the Stalinists of the CP and other CIO leaders diverted this incipient radicalism into support for the “progressive” Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, which was designed to restore the profitability of American capitalism and prepare the country for interimperialist World War II. The unions’ support of the Democratic Party has handcuffed them ever since.

The CP’s futile reformist strategy of pressuring a supposedly progressive wing of the capitalist rulers underscored that it had long since abandoned the revolutionary internationalist program that animated the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It was left to the Trotskyists to uphold that banner for the abolition of wage slavery and fight for the complete independence of the working class from the bosses and their political representatives. The Roosevelt administration was backed by not only Northern industrialists but also the Southern Dixiecrats, who administered the system of rigid Jim Crow segregation.

The CP got no thanks for its class betrayal from the capitalist rulers, who launched a ferocious anti-Communist witchhunt that entered every facet of life in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Democratic president Harry Truman enforced the strikebreaking 1947 Taft-Hartley law that outlawed such labor weapons as secondary strikes and barred Communists from union office. Thousands of union members, many of them key leaders of the CIO organizing drives, were purged from the labor movement, in some cases resulting in the destruction of whole unions.

Local 1199 had to defend itself against government harassment and raiding attempts by both AFL and CIO unions. In the late 1950s, black and other minority workers in the North were finding inspiration in the mass struggles for integration in the South. Local 1199’s hospital organizing campaign tapped into the clear will of black workers in NYC to fight against their own racist degradation, too.

In that campaign, Davis and Teddy Mitchell, a black leader of Local 1199, worked together with Moe Foner and Elliott Godoff, who had led a sit-down strike in 1937 to build a union local in what is now Maimonides Hospital. Moe Foner, the Local 1199 public relations officer, and his twin brothers Philip and Jack (both academic historians) were driven out of City College during WWII for Communist activities. As a pharmacist, Godoff was known to dispense the CP’s paper, the Daily Worker, along with medications.

No Reliance on the Democrats!

The 1958 deal that recognized the union at Montefiore Hospital was brokered by Mayor Wagner. Notably, it included increased city subsidies to the voluntary hospitals to help cover the medical costs of uninsured patients. These funds made it easier for the bosses to swallow the bitter pill of unionization. Government money has become an ever-increasing part of hospital revenue, especially since Medicaid and Medicare were introduced in 1965. In Upheaval in the Quiet Zone (2009), a history of 1199, Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg commented that a hospital boss “seems justified, then, in concluding that by 1968 collective bargaining between the union and the hospitals amounted to finding out how much the government was willing to pay.”

Today, a central activity of the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats is to lobby the government (be it City Hall or Albany or Congress) for money for management. Lobbying is also a rationale for them to support one bourgeois politician or another. But it is not the job of the union to figure out where management can get its money, or how to balance the state budget. The notion that the workers will get a cut of increased revenue is patently false; the bosses will give up only what the workers wrest from them through class struggle.

In all respects, the union bureaucracy operates within the framework set by the capitalist rulers. As Local 1199 took root in the hospital industry, the union tops created guilds within the union that separated off members with more training, like lab techs and clerical workers, reinforcing bourgeois prejudices of “professionalism.” The union didn’t attempt to recruit nurses, who had a professional association, until the 1970s. An industrial hospital union would join together all non-management titles, including nurses as well as clerical, skilled trades, cleaning, food service and laboratory workers.

Local 1199 (now 1199SEIU) represents a huge multiracial workforce providing an essential public service to millions of people, including in U.S. imperialism’s financial center, where many capitalists themselves receive health care. But the union leaders tell the membership that their power lies in the fact that they are voters and that the union Political Action Committee has a lot of money. In so doing, the bureaucracy keeps the workers atomized and demoralized, rather than mobilizing their social power as a union—an organization of workers who make the hospitals function.

The union tops promote Democratic Party constituency politics, with each oppressed group getting a page in the 1199News magazine, all for the purpose of being hustled into supporting the class enemy. The aura of 1199 as a progressive and democratic union is really a device for tying the workers to the Democrats.

For Socialized Medicine!

Since the 1980s, there has been a one-sided class war against the unions. Today, hospital executives take home seven-digit sums, and rents are being raised much more than wages are. In order to protect their own livelihoods and to fight for the interests of the class as a whole, hospital workers would do well to learn the lessons of the past in preparation for future battles. To counter the increasing immiseration of the class, the union movement must be invigorated through a concerted drive to organize the unorganized, not least in low-paying industries where black and other minority workers are concentrated.

There is a burning need for a class-struggle leadership of the unions, one dedicated to breaking all ties to the Democrats and building a revolutionary workers party to arm working people with a program for sweeping away the capitalist system in which class exploitation and racial oppression are rooted. A central component of that program is the fight for black liberation through socialist revolution. Such a party would strive to mobilize health care workers, especially those in strategically placed unions like 1199SEIU, as a crucial part of the vanguard of a popular struggle for quality health care for all, free at the point of service. It would fight to get the capitalist parasites out of health care altogether by expropriating them without compensation.

The call for socialized medicine must be linked to the struggle for a workers government. Only in a society where those who labor rule will high-quality health care be provided based on need, not private profit. A workers government alone can bring about racial and social equality by ensuring a decent life for all through a planned, collectivized economy.