Hospital PCA Brenda Morisette asks the congressional candidates about the proposed for-profit hospital takeover in Waterbury.

Kicking off the 2012 elections, hundreds of 1199 and other SEIU members gathered at our annual Political Action Conference in mid-January, held at Central Connecticut State University.

“It’s important for healthcare workers to be here, because politics runs the world,” said Ellen Jeffries, a CNA from Blair Manor nursing home. “The class warfare against working people scares me. The rich 1% will get out and vote. We can’t let someone decide for us – we have to vote!”

At the conference, members interviewed candidates running for U.S. Congress and seeking 1199’s endorsement, including:

• Susan Bysewicz, Chris Murphy, & William Tong — each running to replace retiring U.S. Senator Lieberman
• Chris Donovan, Elizabeth Esty, & Dan Roberti – each running to become the new U.S. Representative in the 5th Congressional District (Waterbury, New Britain, Meriden, Danbury and western CT region)
• Jim Himes – running for re-election to U.S. Representative – 4th CD (Fairfield County)
• Joe Courtney – running for re-election to U.S. Representative – 2nd CD (Eastern CT)

Members vote on candidates to recommend for endorsement.

As always, 1199 members then together discussed the pros and cons of each candidate and made recommendations on who 1199 should support. These recommendations are then forwarded to the elected rank-and-file 1199 Executive Board for final action.

Karen Baldwin, an 1199 member at the Blackstone Valley ARC, addresses the rally.

On Valentine’s Day, 1199 members from the Blackstone Valley ARC joined with advocates, family members, and allies of the developmentally disabled to call on the RI General Assembly to “Have a Heart” and restore the $24 million in cuts passed last year – cuts that are now causing to program closures, layoffs, wage and benefit cuts for direct care staff, and more.

The action was covered by several different media outlets – including the Providence Journal, Channel 12, WPRO-630AM, and the Boston Globe, which noted:

Perhaps the most in-depth story came from ABC6 – click here to watch the ABC6 video which features several 1199 members!

Together with our allies, we will continue to call on decision-makers to increase taxes on those with incomes over $250,000 per year who can afford to pay a little more so that our most vulnerable neighbors can have the care and support that they deserve.

I assure you that District 1199 is adamantly opposed to the closing of any Healthbridge facility.  It would seem, however, that Healthbridge, having employed the lockout tactic at West River, is now employing threatened closures to pressure its employees and their Union.  More and more Healthbridge’s words and actions send the following message to the Union, Healthbridge employees and the State of Connecticut:

Healthbridge’s investors are not satisfied with the rate of profits from its Connecticut Union nursing homes.  If the Union will not agree to massive concessions that will dramatically increase Healthbridge investor profits (concessions that would, of course, drive many of its employees below the poverty line), Healthbridge will simply wash its’ hands of its obligations to its residents, its employees and the State of Connecticut by attempting to close the homes and use the real estate for more profitable pursuits.

If the Union is correct, and there is much evidence to suggest it is, eternal shame on Healthbridge and its investors; the Union will do all in its power to oppose such an infamous scheme.

Click here to sign the petition to support the locked-out HealthBridge workers and the residents who depend on them.

Now we are bringing our concerns to the Waterbury Board of Aldermen on Tuesday, February 21st at 6pm.  Click here for a flyer about the event, and BE THERE to send a message to our local elected officials about how important this issue is to the entire community.

As a part of a coalition called Community United – together with the Alliance for Retired Americans, the National Physicians Alliance, CT Health Care Associates, CT Citizen Action Group, the Working Families Party, the Western CT Labor Council Health Care for All Coalition, and the Naugatuck Valley Project – 1199 has helped lead the way in asking the LHP Hospital Group to sit down with the community, answer our questions, and work with us to develop a plan that improves health care and protects jobs in Waterbury.

“We have been asking LHP to meet with us since December but they have refused,” says Community United co-chair Steven Schrag. “We wrote to them and talked personally to CEO Daniel Moen, but he would not set a meeting date with us. We were promised by Dr. Jerome Sugar that we would try to set up a meeting, but Dr. Sugar couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do it either.” Both Moen and Sugar have said that LHP would meet with community people “at the appropriate time.”

“We refuse to be an afterthought in this process,” says Schrag. “So we are bringing our questions to the Board of Aldermen to see if they can help.”

Click here for a downloadable flyer about the event.

Thirty years ago, nursing home work paid minimum wage, had no benefits or protections of any kind and turnover rates often exceeded 100 percent annually. Then as now, caregivers were primarily women, people of color and immigrants, who had no power to address these obstacles to self-sufficiency until they organized themselves into a union of health care workers.

Over three decades, they have slowly succeeded in raising standards to a point where they have a modicum of economic stability. Today, one for-profit chain of nursing homes based in New Jersey, HealthBridge/Care One, is demanding to turn the clock back, driving caregivers into near poverty to fatten the corporate bottom line and widening the already cavernous income inequality in our state.

[...]Allowing HealthBridge to achieve these goals will have a deep and lasting impact on the women and men who care for the elderly and infirm residents in HealthBridge facilities in Connecticut. The economic cuts on which the corporation is insisting will add up to …nearly $61,000 for the average HealthBridge worker over six years. [...That] means choosing between paying the electric or the water bill, running short when you need to fill your gas tank on your way to work, not being able to set aside enough even for in-state tuition for your child’s future. It means another big step away from self-sufficiency and back toward economic instability.

[...]By exploiting the current climate of economic uncertainty and unemployment fears, HealthBridge has put at risk the quality of care for the residents of its nursing homes here, eroded desperately needed good jobs with benefits in Connecticut, and pushed caregivers inexorably away from even the smallest measure of self-sufficiency — all to inflate the corporate bottom line, with no accountability to the public that funds its business.

If HealthBridge wins, we all lose.

Click here to sign the petition in support of HealthBridge caregivers and the residents they care for.

1199 members express their outrage over state budget cuts to vital programs and services to several State Representatives from Pawtucket & Central Falls at a forum on February 8.

Nearly 50 members of 1199 who live and work in the Pawtucket and Central Falls area gathered at a forum last night to describe the harmful impact that budget cuts have had on the people that we serve, as well as on our own families.  The forum was attended by four area State Representatives — Bob DaSilva, Mary Duffy Messier, Jay O’Grady, and Gus Silva — who listened to powerful testimony and answered questions for nearly an hour.

Amanda Hitchener and Michael Crompton speaking with Rep. Jay O'Grady.

Workers from the Blackstone Valley ARC, who care for the developmentally disabled in a community-based agency with both residential and day programs, talked about the harmful impact of last year’s $24 million in cuts on the consumers they care for – including cuts in services that diminish the quality of care.  Amanda Hitchener, a direct care staff member asked the elected officials:

Do you remember the Ladd School? That was where the state basically kept developmentally disabled people locked away out of sight and didn’t invest in their care.  With these budget cuts, we’re heading back to that model — and it’s wrong.

Other BVARC workers spoke about the impact of the cuts on their wages, which were already so low that many of them to struggle to keep a roof over their heads.

Nursing home workers from Genesis of Pawtucket & Greenville testified to many of the same issues – staffing ratios that can sink as low as one CNA per 20 residents and reduce the level of attention and care that each resident receives, and their current struggle with their employer, who wants to force them to accept a health care plan that is thousands of dollars more expensive than their current plan.

Deb Mosley from BVCHC speaks up.

Debbie Mosley, a Dental Assistant and union delegate at Blackstone Valley Community Health Care, Inc. added that many of the patients that receive dental care at their clinic are now at risk of losing their Medicaid dental coverage in next year’s proposed budget.  She reminded the elected officials:

As health care workers, we are doing valuable work and providing an important service, but now because of all the tax breaks for the rich you are saying that we have to take a cut.  But trickle-down economics doesn’t work.  It doesn’t work!  These rich people keep getting all the tax breaks to supposedly create jobs – but where are the jobs?

Many 1199 members from Women & Infants Hospital also attended, and lent their support to the struggle to make sure that our communities get the resources necessary to care for our neighbors and our own families. Sukie Ream, a nurse in the Labor Room who also lives in Pawtucket, added:

We appreciate the legislators who attended and listened to our concerns.  We hope they leave with a deeper understanding of how every decision they make has an impact on real people, and a deeper commitment to go back and fix these problems.  And we hope they share this knowledge with their colleagues, especially the ones that were invited that didn’t show up.

For our part, 1199 members in Rhode Island are going to continue organizing and educating our elected officials to make sure that they hear the voice of health care workers and those we care for.

Right-wing talking heads and editorial boards want to blame union members — like teachers, firefighters,  and health care workers — for today’s economic problems.  Their goal is to shift the focus away from the reckless speculation and greed of Wall St., and away from profit-hungry private equity firms whose CEOs are rewarded handsomely for outsourcing jobs, and away from a system where the richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined.

Back in October 2011, 1199 Delegate Mike Doyle, a Community Clinician at the Bridgeport Mental Health Center, was fed up with all of the lies and misinformation and the attempts by the 1% to divide-and-conquer working people.  So he wrote a powerful letter that was published in the Connecticut Post in which he called urgently for job creation for the unemployed and for holding corporations accountable.  It’s worth reading again today:

…Most major industries were able to exit [our state] with no strings attached.  If a parent did that to their family they would be in jail for dereliction of duty to their family, endangering the welfare of minors, etc. Our politicians stood idly by and waved goodbye, hoping that the CEOs would remember them and ask them to go golfing or fishing sometime in the future, while their constituents struggled to keep their heads above water and their bank account out of a deep hole.

Doyle also offered a strong defense of the important role of state employees in providing vital services to the public, sometimes at great danger to themselves:

Do the authors of vicious attacks against state employees ever pick up a shovel to fill a pothole on our highways as cars go whizzing by at 70‐plus miles per hour? Do the authors of that right-wing propaganda ever hold someone down while they were going into a seizure from alcoholic withdrawal or having a psychotic breakdown?  The answer is no.

To read the letter in its entirety, please click here for a downloadable and printable copy.  And click here to stand up for the locked-out HealthBridge workers and their residents by signing our petition.