when heartless hopitals get their comeuppance

If you ever read Deborah Elkin's dissertation on Labor and the Left at Yale between the 1920s and 1950s, you'll read one anecdote from 1948 concerning a union campaign at Grace-New Haven Hospital. If you sift through old New Haven Registers and Modern Times from the late 1960s and 1970s, you'll find more than a few articles about the long push which won recognition for some 150 members of Yale-New Haven Hospital's dietary unit in 1974(?) but was precluded by changes in the labor law from the kind of department-by department organizing model 1199 had employed previously elsewhere. In 1998, organizing began anew at the hospital, a joint project of 1199SEIU/New England Health Care Employees Union and HERE, which had represented Yale University workers since the 1950s. The hospital met the campaign wih captive audience meetings and other intimidation tactics. Hospital administrators harassed workers. They arrested eight leafletters during the week of the Lcoal 34 and 35 strike votes (four of these as I looked on,) and meanwhile they put 10,000 people in debt by denying low income patients state-bankrolled "free bed funds" (which they instead shoveled into their own endowment,) by engaging in vicious and predatory "debt collection" tactics which involved garnishing the wages of Yale-New Haven employees whose meager pay didn't allow them to afford the company's ludicrously expensive health plan, by throwing debtors in prison for failure to appear in court, and by placing a thousand liens on New Haven area homes. They fired a rank and file leader of the organizing drive to intimidate other workers against the drive. They repeatedly rhetorically equated unions and their supporters with cancer and refused to negotiate with the city, the union, or CORD, the powerful and dynamic coalition formed to intiate a real dialogue between the "Heartless Hospital," as Paul Bass called it, and the residents of the working class African American and Latino neighborhood into which it was rapidly expanding with its tax exemptions, lax environmental regulations, "bad debt," and refusal to negotiate with workers in good faith or provide free care to those in need. They attempted to force the city to alter its zoning laws at their whim, attempted to reshape the geography, social, political, economic, of New Haven by fiat. Though hospital pr flacks proclaimed otherwise, the denial of free care and the predatory collection practices continued.

By all reports, as the hospital, the union, and CORD announce today the signing of a community benefit agreement guaranteeing jobs to Hill residents and close scrutiny to allocation of free bed funds, addressing parking, housing and environmental concerns as well as ensuring care for New Haven children, and, let's not forget, agreeing to a closely-monitored, agreed-conduct method by which 1800 workers can win union recognition, current CEO Marna Borgstrom seems to have abandoned the hardball strategy of her "distinguished alumnus of 2003" predecessor in the face of massive resistance from community organizations across the city and a powerful, united labor movement able to hold elected and corporate leadership accountable. The Yale-New Haven Register and Yale Daily News are calling this a victory for the hospital, and in a sense it is, although this is also to some extent evidence that so many years later, both papers continue to tow the administration's line uncritically. But looking at the faces of the folks in the photographs accompanying the NHI post and register story, people I've marched with many times, been arrested with, and some of whom I've walked beside on the streets of Greenwhich Village as well as New Haven, i suspect and examining the terms of the CBA as they have thus far been reported, YNHH workers and members of the New Haven community and the Communities Organized for Responsible Development seem to have won a victory far more than eight years in coming.