BREAD & ROSES, CRUSTS & THORNS: THE TROUBLED STORY OF 1199

...When, in 1936 and 1937, New York City hospital workers made moves toward organizing (including a rash of sit-down strikes), their efforts were quickly put down and their claims denounced by those who otherwise accepted the need to deal with organized labor...

...An overwhelmingly female black service-worker base (a majority of whom had not finished high school) was now nearly matched in numbers by highly educated and ethnically diverse professional and technical members...

...1" of the Voice of the Mortar and Pestle proclaimed the goals of the New York Drug Clerks Association (NYDCA)—to gain union recognition, better conditions, and generally "develop a militant spirit of struggle against wage cutting, speed-ups, unsanitary conditions, etc...

...From the Greensboro lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960 through the death of Martin Luther King in 1968, the drug and hospital workers union was a constant fixture in the civil rights campaigns...

...The district election will offer the first real test of worker reaction to the changes that have affected their union in the past four years...

...Ralph Abernathy and by Andrew Young), hospital workers challenged the state university hospital to recognize its all-black service work force...

...An expanding list of health benefits, an 1199 credit union, training programs for job upgrading, academic scholarships, and summer-camp stipends for workers' children helped to define a new standard of living for union members...

...At times, for example, Moe Foner had the unpleasant duty of rousting retired members and die-hard comrades from the building to prevent them from making their accustomed rounds with the Daily Worker...

...But by the second day of the strike, when he signed up as picket captain, Nicholas was with it around the clock...

...No "ordinary worker," asserts Olson, "would have done that...

...In exchange for the 5 percent wage boost, Turner had agreed to choose from a list of "offsets" (mostly union benefit deferments) estimated at $29 million to $45 million...

...Determined to unify a drugstore work force on "industrial" lines, the largely Jewish pharmacists and clerks tried to add black porters and stockmen to their organization...

...Adopting a style very much in keeping with the union's past, the national union's officers call for across-the-board organizing campaigns, community coalitions to defend health-care services, and for a radical reversal of AFL-CIO foreign policy on Central America...

...Economic downturn, increasing managerial sophistication, and interunion jurisdictional conflicts had blunted 1199 initiatives, beginning in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970...

...Now facing uncertain prospects, past ideals and visions must necessarily give way to a sober reckoning with recent lived experience...

...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...

...Codification of labor relations, beginning with the Wagner Act and extended in restricted fashion by the Taft-Hartley (1947) and Landrum-Griffin Acts (1959), further centralized authority and responsibility away from the shop floor...

...In labor circles a high price is put on public display of unity, and in this respect 1199 was perhaps more zealous than most...

...On March 31, 1929, "Vol...

...For Mount Sinai orderly Henry Nicholas the 1959 strike served as the launching pad of a new career...

...In place of Leon Davis's secularist leftism, Doris Turner reached her rank and file with a new, open display of religious faith, active encouragement of Bible reading among union staff, and invocation of divine providence before contract talks...

...On one occasion the Harlem pharmacists hid Davis in the 135th Street YMCA to protect him from process-servers...

...Occasionally, 1199 leaders made symbolic journeys and gestures to their past...

...Although the 1959 strike did not result in an immediate recognition agreement,* it broke new ground for hospital workers around the country...

...This, however, was only one division within the union...

...It was not unheard of, for example, for maintenance workers to pave the driveway of a boss on hospital time...

...Distinguishing itself as "a union with soul," 1199 proved a dynamic social force from 1959 through the mid-1970s...

...On one level the split between Davis and Doris Turner was a simple power play and a clash of individual wills...

...Is there still life in such a message...

...Without group rights or formal standards of job equity, informal deals of all kinds were cut between the reigning departmental supervisors and their "charges...

...Davis's long and unquestioned authority had united quite different social groupings under the same roof...

...With civil rights forces in disarray, a conservative political tide sweeping the nation, and 1199's own organizing drives slowed down, there seemed less urgency for the union as a "movement...

...On the other hand lie the nagging issues affecting nearly all contemporary labor unions...

...On another level, however, the Davis-Turner division reflected deep-seated tensions within the main body of the hospital workers' union...

...Impatient and defiant, the Guild vicepresident, veteran black staff member and exCPer David White, bolted to Turner's side during the early intraunion fray in December 1981, charging Leon Davis with practicing "benevolent racism...

...The bottom rung of the economic ladder, that "other America" holding vast numbers of unemployed and unskilled workers, experienced little contact with organized labor...

...Richardson, a past president of Radio Free Europe and future assistant-secretary of state under Nixon, had seen FBI files on the Communist backgrounds of 1199's leaders...

...Particularly in New York City, where the crusading spirit of the early organizing days was now a fading memory, the traditional left-wing rhetoric of the leaders must have seemed out of touch with the bureaucraticadministrative reality of much of union life...

...This merger would mean a more powerful union...

...Party circles, for example, would continue to be an important source of organizers...

...From the late 1950s through the 1960s the union regularly 182 picked up endorsements of black leaders, from Adam Clayton Powell to Martin Luther King...

...The Save Our Union (which joins Unity and Progress with independent dissidents) coalition nominated Georgiana Johnson, a black social-work assistant, at a November 1985 convention to oppose Turner...

...An unprecedented six-week citywide hospital strike affecting 50,000 workers was the result...

...When an opposition "Unity and Progress" slate (led by elected area vice-presidents and organizers) emerged in early 1984 to challenge Turner's April reelection bid, Turner sought and received authority to hire and fire all organizers herself...

...Throughout the 1950s a contingent of the party, led by pharmacist Jesse Olson, operated as a caucus within the union, with at most 40 members clustered in the activist steward positions...

...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...

...While no secure union foothold emerged in Charleston, the union had sent the clearest possible message around the country...

...Support for rent strikes, community-controlled schools, and an early, active opposition to the Vietnam War consolidated 1199's maverick public stance— not only winning the blessing of King ("my favorite union") but even securing support from such black radicals as Malcolm X. The lively public image of the union was strengthened by an ambitious cultural pro183 gram, designed by Moe Foner...

...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...On January 13, 1983, and 25 years to the day after he had come on staff, Jesse Olson, 185 cut off from all influence and even subjected to telephone threats to his life, quit the Guild division...

...By the mid-'60s, nonwhites made up three-quarters of service and maintenance workers at New York City hospitals...

...After attempts by Heaps to trustee the national union (to place it, effectively, in receivership) and to dissolve 1199 altogether were temporarily checked in the courts, the warring parties settled on a truce...

...On the one hand lie immediate questions of what constitutes responsible and competent union leadership even as the health care industry enters an era of drastic organizational change...

...Bitter triangular infighting between Heaps, Nicholas, and Turner nearly suffocated the union in the following two years...

...It was in such circumstances, at least, that the urgent demand for power by second-level black leaders in the union went up—a demand embodied in the moves of Doris Turner...

...In the two decades before 1970, paced by the voluntary hospitals, some 2.5 million employees were added to the nation's health-care work force, while costs skyrocketed by 1,500 percent...

...The very loss of such senior talents only increased the sense of siege within the district...

...More than a thousand 1199ers gathered at the famous Washington civil rights demonstration in 1963...

...Despite the reportedly tattered nature of the strike mobilization itself and indications of demoralization and even mass defections at the picket lines, the new union president had, it seemed, successfully pulled her chestnuts out of the fire...

...Two recruits in particular from this 1959 campaign would figure prominently in the union's future...

...Identification of the union with minorities helped influence liberal white opinion among newspaper editors, political officials, and even hospital trustees...

...The "civil rights union" would do whatever was necessary to bring justice and new hope to black workers...

...Davis also refused to adopt a unilateral position on the Rosenberg case...

...In small-town and white ethnic settings, and among skilled technicians and nurses, 1199 discovered that its militant "Black Power" image was more hindrance than help...

...It was too alien, too undemocratic...

...While reaching a pragmatic accommodation with most New York City voluntary hospitals—that is with union and hospital officials pushing the state to find money for contract settlements—the union undertook a range of initiatives...

...They were looking for actual control . . . that goes further than being elected to office, a kind of grasping for power to demonstrate their ability or lack of it...

...The 1959 strike ended with the establishment of a socalled Permanent Advisory Committee or third-party grievance mediation panel, an arrangement that turned into out-and-out union recognition within three years...

...q To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your ms—the mails aren't always reliable...

...Afterward, Nicholas worked as a union organizer...

...When she won her job back through arbitration, "The men in the kitchen spread their aprons down for my new-carpet entrance...

...Then, late in the year, he approached Department of Labor (DOL) investigators with a bombshell...

...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...

...served alongside Elliott Godoff, the national organizing director...

...Looking back on the past four years, it is clear that something more than a mere transfer of office occurred at New York City District 1199...

...Leon Davis himself resigned from the CP at the beginning of the decade in order to sign the Taft-Hartley oath and claim rights under the national labor laws...

...Within the New York City Central Labor Council, both AFL craft-union leader Harry Van Arsdale and right-wing socialist and CIO leader Moe Iushewitz gave support to the 1959 hospital drive...

...Late in 1983 Turner's own comptroller, Roy Anderson, resigned his position and sought protection of the courts over the fall-out from having delayed checks to Turner's "Jewish political enemies" within the union...

...Refusing to pay out a penny of the new settlement until the union kicked in its contract subsidy, hospital officials insisted that their financial bottom line had remained firm from Day One...

...On another the North Harlem Pharmaceutical Association closed up a hundred stores rather than see them certified by a raiding union...

...In the end it was Turner who broke up Davis's succession scenario, crippling the merger effort and swiftly moving to consolidate her own power as District 1199 president in May 1982...

...Phil Kamenkowitz, a pharmacist and staunch Republican who later became vicepresident of the drug union, remembered the union headquarters as a "sloppy cubbyhole" with a desk, a wooden bench along the wall, and "four guys playing chess...

...Before 20,000 cheering union members at Madison Square Garden on August 28, Turner proudly announced a strike settlement including full implementation of EOWO and 5 percent annual wage increases and, she added, "We didn't give back a thing, nothing...

...My father believed that everyone had to be prepared to survive on their own, without depending on anyone...

...In that same campaign, Moe Foner remembers being called at night by Arnold Beichman, aide to Van Arsdale and an alleged labor-CIA operative...

...First came the effort to drive out the colonialists, who included almost every veteran white official in the union-12 district vice-presidents and 12 of 14 Guild organizers, for example, were effectively forced out of office within two years of Doris Turner's accession...

...There, under the joint direction of 1199 and the SCLC (then led by the Rev...

...First, a steady expansion of acute-care facilities disrupted the personalistic authority of administrators and department heads over the smaller and slower-moving chronic-care institutions...

...The hospital drive of 1199 looked different...

...Olson himself had come to believe that the party "was not an organization that would advance the cause...

...Finally, as if to deny internal weakness, Turner staked herself to a defiant negotiating stance with employers in July 1984 biennial contract talks...

...Three structural changes within the hospital industry helped to enable unionization in the postwar period...

...What remained were habits of mind, a disciplined behavior, and a network of associations based on "the old days...

...Here was a tiny old CIO local of drugstore workers challenging one of the staunchest nonunion sanctums of postwar America, the giant voluntary hospitals...

...Bringing live theater through federal dollars to thousands of union members during their lunch hours in the hospitals, the Bread and Roses program offered the most polished testament to the way older Jewish radicals had sought to legitimate social unionism among a new body of urban workers...

...In 1959 James Wechsler, the New York Post columnist who had "named names" before HUAC, began his sympathetic reporting for the cause of the hospital workers...

...A contract would not in fact take effect until the union committed itself to making up a shortfall in hospital income occasioned by the settlement...

...A bit later he turned to full-time political work for the CP–USA...

...Simply put, can 1199 stave off the rank-and-file resignation and bureaucratic demoralization that have left American trade unions virtually crippled as fighting units...

...And while the hospital workers had practically provided an alternate campaign headquarters for Frank Barbaro's left-liberal challenge to Mayor Edward Koch in 1980, Doris Turner proposed in 1982 backing Koch for governor on pragmatic grounds over the more liberal Mario Cuomo (in the end the union made no endorsement...

...The NYDCA met twice a month at Stuyvesant Casino, 142 Second Avenue, and its publication carried an endorsement from the Scientific Vegetarian Restaurant on Madison Avenue, a place to "meet for a good meal after the Dance...

...The "laying on" of cultural and political values (such as class unity, interracialism, peace politics)—so the Turner revolt indicates —was rejected and even resented by segments of the union's own internal command...

...I knew that my only salvation was to win and I had to do what was necessary to make sure we won...

...Other party members simply gave up political work (Moe Foner in 1956, Jesse Olson in 1958) before joining the union staff...

...The district's executive vice-president, David White, had silently resigned at the end of the '84 strike, a consequence of his growing disaffection from the Turner leadership...

...Promising immediately to restore democratic accountability while setting the status of home-care workers and the rerecruitment of some two thousand disaffected RNs as top priorities, Johnson ties the future of the district to reunification with National 1199 (now the National Union of Health Care Workers) and ultimately to nationwide organizing initiatives...

...In 1967 she became a Medicare case aide, then took advantage of the union's training and upgrading program and soon became a union stalwart, serving as a delegate on many committees but liking best of all the cultural extravaganza, Bread and Roses...

...They joined the Freedom Marches in the mid-'60s and, only months before Martin Luther King's assassination, gained his praise as "the authentic conscience of the labor movement...

...A new ballot, to be administered under DOL supervision, is slated for March 1986...

...The fledgling hospital union, however, depended above all on its capacity to mobilize the city's "new working class" of black and Hispanic service workers...

...From doctors to janitors...

...Split shifts, deductions for meals, and demeaning separate dining rooms were common...

...A local strike of upholsterers was his baptism in labor unionism...

...While rhetorically still paying homage to the union's liberal social-political agenda, she made abrupt changes...

...As her former top aide would put it, "Doris had a ghetto cunning that Davis didn't understand...

...I f the rise of 1199 in New York and beyond tells us something about the historical possibilities for labor opened up by the civil rights movement, then recent, severe troubles inside the union equally reflect the disintegration of those social forces from which 1199 originally drew strength...

...With 1199 leadership guaranteed the top executive position for the first eight years of a new National Hospital and Health Care Employees Union, Davis chose Henry Nicholas for his heir apparent, nominating him as president of 1199's national union, a position Davis had held together with the New York district presidency...

...Identified as a union firebrand during the strike, Turner was fired shortly thereafter...

...If one were to single out the most telling personality weakness of the unions," labor economist Neil Chamberlain observed in 1960, "it would be their passion for respectability...

...He also was seen as gifted in dealing with a socially diverse membership...

...And within unionized basic industry, industrial relations had largely become a tame, routinized affair...

...Soon Turner left the hospital permanently, this time to work on the union staff...

...Though most workers did not know it, Turner had signed no real contract but rather an agreement that left important pieces of the hospital financial puzzle unresolved...

...One of the last straws of disaffection, reportedly, was Turner's public distancing from the 1978 contract that had sacrificed her priority on the EOWO (Every Other Weekend Off) issue to other ends...

...Later, in 1948 and 1949, when the union came under political attack both from rival CIO unions and from the government (in 1948 Davis took the Fifth before the Hartley Committee, including an inquisitively hostile young Senator John F Kennedy), black Harlem pharmacists gratefully came to the rescue...

...I want to follow the idea of Leon Davis and organize health care workers from top to bottom...

...and in 1981 assumed the presidency of the national union...

...Raised in Ware Shoals, South Carolina, by her grandmother who took in laundry for a living, Johnson quit school after one year of college to get married and come to New York...

...Then, there was the cultural issue...

...was elected to lead the union's Philadelphia district...

...Still, had there been no merger movement, or had Turner been tapped over Nicholas for the top job, the differences between the two camps and the two generations within the union leadership might have been finessed...

...And Leon Davis visited the Soviet Union three times and once entertained a Soviet trade delegation at union headquarters...

...Turner's triumph, however, quickly turned bittersweet...

...Further consolidation of the new regime followed: the president's term of office was extended, the number of elected officials sharply reduced, and the autonomy of the union's separate divisions within the election process abolished...

...I found out," Davis himself volunteered shortly after retirement in 1982, "that the frustration that blacks had for the role of leadership is something that I underestimated...

...Such agitation, in line with the generally aggressive stance of the American Communist movement on Jim Crow, had its counterpart in the internal life of the union with annual celebrations of Negro History Week and constant reiterations by Davis that "in 1199 we mix and live as one...

...extraordinary measures were justified to defend the revolution...

...Only the strong survive," his sharecropper father had said...

...That's how you acquire power...

...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...

...it would also mean a union less New York-focused, more skilled, and less black in membership...

...Another was the gap between the "bread-and-butterism" (or focus on incremental, material advances) of the union as it affected the average member and the development of higher meanings, goals, and strategies by the union's intellectual and highly politicized national leaders...

...As of this writing, nearly 16 months since the strike's end, workers' first-year raises and full implementation of EOWO still await a union designation of substantial givebacks...

...A PROUD AND SOMETIMES even arrogant union, 1199 has lived through good and bad times...

...The threat of being run off your land or fired by your hospital seemed to him part of the same "administration of things...

...Later, in a bitter 1965 campaign, when the union took on the antiunion and racially closed community of Bronxville, New York, one of two prominent local families siding with the strikers was that of John Richardson, Jr...

...Amid public charges and countercharges (after White, another witness came forward to confirm his story), the DOL sought control of the disputed ballots...

...Key Davis lieutenants— such as Moe Foner, executive secretary, Jesse Olson, Guild leader, and Robert Muehlenkamp, the national organizing director— might have willingly made the best of serving a new leader...

...The goal most ardently sought by union leaders generally . . . is to be accepted by their communities as good middle-class citizens...

...Second, and at the same time, third-party (that is, insurancepayment) and public financing (Hill-Burton in 1946, state subsidies, Medicare–Medicaid in 1967-68) displaced fee for service and charitable contributions as the anchor of hospital budgeting...

...Turner, who was the great-great-granddaughter of a slave midwife and the daughter of a skilled shoemaker, never lacked initiative...

...In 1931 the sectarian NYDCA merged with another organizing venture, the Pharmacists' Union of Greater New York, to form Local 1199...

...The person most responsible for the union's 25-year independent survival was Leon Davis, president of 1199 since 1934...

...Risking sanctions from the AFL-CIO for raiding and throwing more than a million dollars and all of its manpower into a competition with the much larger, wealthier, and betterestablished American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the beleaguered 1199ers won only modest gains in three-part balloting...

...Promerger organizers within the district, for instance, found their pay docked and even access blocked to union headquarters...

...It was no accident that Local 1199 played a leading role...

...The 1959 strike led by Local 1199 in New York City raised the demand for recognition by that "other America" for whom the postwar boom had been more myth than substance...

...Civil rights activism not only linked the old left leaders of 1199 with the minority work force in the Eastern metropolitan areas, it also seemed magically to transcend older political and ideological divisions among whites...

...As early as 1948, for example, he ignored a party-backed resolution that Theodore Mitchell, a black porter, become union secretarytreasurer, giving the position instead to former sodaman William J. Taylor, who would guide the union's benefit and pension programs for decades to come...

...For years Davis had staked the union's future on a campaign of national expansion...

...While finishing high school, young Davis waited on tables, worked on a tobacco farm, and soon began to immerse himself in politics...

...But paper 186 tigers don't usually go into battle, they go to the brink of battle...

...Coupled with her personnel actions and her priority on semiskilled home-care workers rather than on nurses in organizing drives, Turner's style signaled a clear commitment to a black-majority union...

...Turner called White a liar, a paid stooge, and a Communist...

...Union tensions first erupted in 1980 over the coinciding events of a merger move and a fight over succession to the leadership held for 50 years by Leon Davis...

...Going from a $175-a-week salary as a registered pharmacist to $110 in an organizer's position, Olson acquiesced...

...Davis was born November 21, 1906 in Pinsk, White Russia, and came to the United States in 1921 to live with an aunt in Hartford, Connecticut...

...Turner, White claimed, had personally engineered and managed a massive vote fraud in the internal union elections of April 1984, which had deprived the promerger Unity and Progress slate of the right to a run-off with the incumbent administration...

...President of a notoriously weak international, of which 1199 was the biggest unit, Heaps had reluctantly been dragged along in the merger process until Turner's opposition gave him a new reason for delay...

...Every union that is strong in the country," says Johnson, "has organized the whole industry...

...The trouble at Mount Sinai, Nicholas came to feel, was like the fight for survival facing the black farmer in Mississippi...

...When a pipe bomb exploded in Heaps's office at Christmas time 1981, severely injuring the union leader, the issue seemed unofficially sealed...

...Davis insisted on independence from all outside political directives...

...For years 1199 stood as an exception constantly remobilizing itself on behalf of new organizing campaigns and infusing its internal life with a social vision that went beyond immediate bread-and-butter goals...

...Taking a job in 1956 at Lenox Hill Hospital to buy material for her needlework, she quickly found herself "involved with the people who worked there...

...In 1937 the union began a successful campaign in Harlem, including open-air meetings of the unem181 ployed, to secure jobs for black pharmacists and promote the "invisible" porters to sodamen positions...

...This, he felt, was "God's work...

...A combination of hard-headed, indefatigable organizing and the determination to cross racial barriers was a direct legacy of left-wing CIO unionism washed out of labor's mainstream by the purges of the late 1940s...

...Its first strike for recognition in May 1959 came at a time when many longtime admirers of the CIO were noticing signs of decline in American unionism as a social movement...

...Convinced that Turner has been "unfair to the members" even as she judges the old leadership as too long closed to new blood, Johnson presents herself as a lowkeyed but determined alternative: "I'm not a person who kicks over the table and I'm not a revival-type leader...

...Despite overwhelming endorsement by 1199 convention delegates and the membership in a mailed referendum, the merger was dead...

...In a delayed and disputed count, presided over by an all-Turner elections board, Slate 2 candidates (the opposition) in early May were declared to have lost so overwhelmingly as to make a run-off unnecessary...

...First, the giveback issue refused to go away...

...District 1199 nearly doubled in size through the success, under Olson's direction, of a separate Guild division of professional, technical, and clerical hospital employees...

...Governed by blue-chip boards of directors, the nation's largest hospital system in New York City was a big business still practicing the personnel principles of a charitable relief agency...

...Third and finally, there occurred a dramatic demographic switch in northern big cities as older European "new-immigrant" workers were replaced by Southern blacks and by Hispanic and Caribbean migrants...

...Leaving the Navy in 1957 and not wishing to return to his native Mississippi, he dreaded the thought of losing his first foothold in the city...

...After nearly 1,000 arrests, this militant campaign was resolved by intervention from the federal government...

...Implicitly, she will count on the visceral identification of black workers with the only black woman union president in the country...

...I t was the association with the civil rights movement that gave the fledgling hospital workers union the crucial boost...

...Despite their undeniable energy, however, the Nicholasled forces seem to have collided precisely 187 with the logic that led Davis to seek a nationwide merger in the first place...

...CAUGHT BETWEEN THE hospitals' intransigence and renewed pressures from within her union, Doris Turner delayed, appealing to the NLRB to release the workers' raises...

...Turner's own hurt pride was no doubt an important ingredient in the crisis that would overtake the union...

...Turner will likely stand on a platform of continuity and loyalty, portraying her enemies as a mixture of bosses, racists, and reds out to destroy the union...

...In the heyday of domestic social spending, hospital administrators could relax their bottom line without disastrous consequences...

...Turner's second setback concerned the scandal of election fraud...

...City labor chieftain Harry Van Arsdale rallied contingents of the newly united AFL–CIO to adopt the strikers' cause, while A. Philip Randolph, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Eleanor Roosevelt added their support...

...Receiving less than minimum wage, many (perhaps a third) were eligible for welfare benefits even while working full-time...

...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...

...The service staff of nurses' aides, orderlies, dietary and laundry workers, and maintenance employees lived in a world apart from physicians and even from the underpaid nurses who often supervised them...

...Turner also sought to instill a new spirit of nationalism in place of the suspect cosmopolitanism of the former leaders...

...Thus, in one of the most economically dynamic and technologically sophisticated American institutions, there remained a mass of unskilled menial laborers—largely black and overwhelmingly female—upon which the system depended...

...rally on June 12, 1982...

...Not only had a nonprofit institution been breached by the union, but unskilled black and Hispanic workers were now claiming rights and a level of welfare that public authorities would have to accommodate...

...Hospital picket lines were joined by church groups and civil rights organizations, and by other unions wishing to identify with civil rights...

...His friend and union steward Julio Pagan almost had to pull him into the picket line when the strike began, and Nicholas still remembers his initial embarrassment when first spotted by his supervisor...

...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...

...This strike—one of the first Northern campaigns to tap a growing civil rights coalition composed of black community leaders and white liberal allies—foreshadowed much of the operating style of Local 1199 for the next two decades...

...A decision announced in early September 1985, however, upheld the hospitals' position on the dispute...

...In New York City, heart of 1199, union members who have passed from an age of crusading-but-paternal benevolence to a narrow-minded-but-homegrown political machine must reckon with their history and figure out if they can do better...

...By the time Olson himself quit, the party and its influence had faded...

...Attacking the "whole vicious system of white supremacy" as early as 1951, Leon Davis spoke for a "union of 5,000 men and women who have learned through bitter experience that real progress cannot be achieved unless there is progress for all the people, Negro and white, Jew and gentile...

...These changes accentuated the contrast between the separate castes within the hospital work force...

...It was more like a cruel parody of Third World liberation...

...A tradition of award-winning publications, out-sized press coverage, and a union art gallery culminated in the unprecedented $1.5 million Bread and Roses theater-and-arts extravaganza of 1979 —82...

...Over the following two decades, she became a celebrated symbol of the union...

...In spring 1984, Local 1199 split down the middle into two unions, one half (Turner's New York district) remaining within the RWDSU, the other half (Nicholas's national union) forming an independent AFL— CIO international...

...The first "national" effort of 1199 in Charleston, South Carolina in 1969, highlighted the self-conscious merger of "union power" and "soul power...

...MEANWHILE, THE FRAILTY of the national union in its current geographically splintered and reduced state was demonstrated in the mixed results of a recent organizing drive among some 10,000 state mental health employees in Ohio...

...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...

...Elliott Godoff's son remembers his father scoffing that the party people were "losers...

...Exempt by hospital-lobby pressure from the minimum wage, Social Security, and labor legislation of the 1930s, voluntary hospital workers as "involuntary philanthropists" began at $30-a-week pay...

...Interestingly, one of her few white appointments was a former New Left activist, who still openly professed a "white-skin privilege" philosophy that saddled the white working class with guilt for the plight of the world's poor and oppressed...

...Despite such enduring sentiments, however, for the pragmatic union leaders the party remained irrelevant at best, and more often an embarrassment of uncertain proportions...

...Despite signs that the state under Cuomo's direction was clamping down on reimbursement rates, Turner, rejecting a 4 percent pay-raise offer and 26-weekend-off hospital compromise, held fast to substantial money demands and commitment to full implementation of the EOWO benefit...

...And he worked smoothly with Davis and the union's largely white national executive staff, something that could hardly be said for his chief rival, New York Hospital Division leader Doris Turner...

...Well before the union appeared at the hospital, she had fought and won a grievance over racial discrepancy in pay, and another over a freemeal subsidy (previously granted only to male kitchen workers...

...In the hospital, Henry Nicholas suppressed a smoldering resentment of his white bosses...

...The Retail Drug Employees' Local 1199 was one of a cluster of predominantly Jewish and Communist-led unions, which during the 1930s had organized a sector of New York City's retail trade, then hung on for dear life...

...Leon Davis and Elliott Godoff, both immigrants from Russia, friends note, carried a "touch of Russian nationalism...

...Union membership in bluecollar industry had, as Daniel Bell wrote in 1958, substantially reached its upper limit, while the explosive service, sales, and whitecollar sectors were proving all but impenetrable to organizing efforts...

...Over its first 25 years in the hospitals, 1199's contracts registered a 140 percent minimal gain in real wages...

...Her chief ally in the intraunion warfare was the RWDSU's president, Alvin Heaps...

...When Davis needed a hospital organizing staff, he typically turned first to Olson, a man he had previously put off —"He said my head was always in the clouds," recalls Olson...

...THE EDITORS 111 188...

...I, No...

...With a merger move likely to put off forever their expected inheritance, Turner and company now repeated with a new bitterness the insiders' joke that "Jesse, Moe, and Dave ran the union while driving home to Queens each night...

...Or take a chance and send us your article...

...When, after court injunction, the federal officials acquired and inspected the tally, they found cause to call for a new election (the only redress for fraud under the Landrum-Griffin Act...

...While the perpetrators of the bombing remain unknown, Heaps, perhaps fearing any move away from the status quo, indefinitely suspended talks with the SEIU...

...During the organizing drive Nicholas had shied away from talk of a strike...

...She cut his throat the first chance she got...

...Nicholas traces his reaction to survivalthinking implanted years before...

...The deportees were overwhelmingly white, and many were Jewish...

...Tracing a bureaucratization process that had transformed unions from hungry fighting units to stable holding operations, C. Wright Mills spoke of the "new men of power" in union leadership who had their counterpart in the "organization men" of the business world...

...Turner had reportedly never taken to Davis's sporadic attempts to "educate her" about union and political issues, while Davis had grown increasingly impatient 184 with a vice-president "who did not even read the newspaper...

...While the ideological commitments of the drug union's leaders remained largely intact, their ties to the Communist party grew increasingly irrelevant and finally disintegrated in the 1950s...

...As a protegee of the union's president Leon Davis, Doris Turner was elected vice-president of the district in 1964, and by the early 1970s she appeared to be heir apparent to Davis...

...It turned out," said the former League of Voluntary Hospitals president, Norman Metzger, who has dealt with 1199 since 1959, "that the union was a paper tiger...

...The Irish-Catholic Van Arsdale, likely sensing an opportunity to aid black workers without disturbing white jobs, avoided a public-relations problem by publicly accepting a simple declaration from Leon Davis that he was "not a Communist...

...This in turn became a model for a late-1970s drive among registered nurses...

...Beichman, as it turned out, simply wanted instructions on how to join the hospital picket lines...

...The experience of the 1970s had convinced him and his close advisers that a New York-based 1199 could not by itself sustain the effort...

...Across the city the campaign not only turned out masses of workers on picket lines at considerable sacrifice to already meager family budgets, it also summoned a group of rank-and-file activists from whom the union's future stewards and organizing staff would emerge...

...With the exception of Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, indirect employee representation plans in Minnesota and Toledo, and a few scattered cases of 179 collective bargaining, unionization in the nation's hospitals remained negligible until the early 1960s...

...In building up a Philadelphia district of 10,000 members, Nicholas had demonstrated talent...

...180 Doris Turner also came on staff after the 1959 strike, identified as an articulate, natural leader by chief organizer Elliott Godoff and the union's president Leon Davis...

...Fearing union division, he characteristically deferred the matter to a stewards' assembly and only then joined the demonstrators...

...Under these circumstances, Davis nurtured to near-completion a merger between his own international, the RWDSU, and the SEIU (the Service Employees International Union), the nation's largest health-care union, which would complement 1199's East Coast strength with deep California moorings...

...By the end of her third year, Turner would claim that some 80 staff personnel had "deserted" her administration...

...Along with sympathizers from the Trade Union Unity League, the Communist-led federation, he set out to organize "all workers in the pharmaceutical industry...

...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...

...For when it came to making sacrifices, old comrades came cheap...

...In this crucial sense, then, the hospital workers' crusade joined the methods of industrial unionism with the fervor of a poor peoples' movement resting on a civil-rights awakening...

...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...

...The union conducted a successful direct-mail campaign for contributions to the Angela Davis legal defense in 1971...

...New York's 1199, for example, was uncharacteristically inconspicuous at the city's giant "No Nukes...

...A passionate advocate of civil rights, Richardson felt the issues were more important than political histories...

...During the strike, however, he and his antagonists were on "separate sides of the street...