Yesterday in Massachusetts, hundreds of tearful SEIU members in lined the streets of Boston clutching purple signs with a simple message: "Thank You Teddy."

1199SEIU joined other labor organizations and tens of thousands of grateful citizens who lined the route from Kennedy's home on Cape Cod to the JFK Presidential Library - saluting the Senator as he made one final trip through his beloved city of Boston.

As the motorcade entered the city -- passing over the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, the park Sen. Kennedy helped to create to give mothers and their children green space in the heart of the bustling metropolis -- many were overcome with emotion, sadness and appreciation for the Senator who had spent the last 47 years standing beside and fighting for the working class.

After watching the hearse pass by and greeting members of the Kennedy clan, 1199SEIU members marched to Faneuil Hall - joining Boston Mayor Tom Menino in ringing a bell on the steps of City Hall Plaza 47 times - to commemorate each of Kennedy's years in the U.S. Senate. At the same time, the Kennedy family headed past the JFK federal building, home for decades of Kennedy's Boston office, and then to Dorchester Street and into South Boston and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Dorchester.

Sen. Kennedy will lie in state as thousands come to pay their respects -- just steps away from the 1199SEIU Massachusetts Division headquarters -- until Saturday morning when funeral services will take place.

Although he did not live to see the passage of healthcare reform in Washington D.C., SEIU has pledged to honor his memory by working even harder to win quality affordable health care for every American. View SEIU's tribute page to Senator Kennedy here.

Across the country, nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers providers are partnering with their hospitals and healthcare facilities to sign surgical scrubs with stories and messages about our broken healthcare system--and why healthcare reform is needed.

Since the national launch of "Every Patient Matters" campaign with the Partnership for Quality Care the second week of August, numerous SEIU Locals with members working in health care facilities have already held scrub-signing actions at health care facilities their members work at.

When lawmakers return to Washington in September, nurses, doctors, and other caregivers will deliver tens of thousands of these signed scrubs to the Capitol to ensure the voices of front-line caregivers and the stories of their patients are heard in the debate over healthcare reform.

Looking to get involved in the Every Patient Matters campaign? Let us know.

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The Partnership for Quality Care (PQC) is a national labor-management coalition committed to ensuring quality, affordable healthcare for everyone in America. It includes public, private, religious, teaching and nonprofit hospitals nationwide and integrated health systems; and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Our members care for more than 60 million patients annually.

The 1199SEIU Social Cultural Committee has been hard at work for months to prepare for Working Its Way to the Parkway--the annual Labor Day Parade on Eastern Parkway that showcases Caribbean cultural heritage in NYC and brings millions of participants to Brooklyn.

Since June, Committee members have been at the Mas Camp making the MesoAmerican female/male adult and children costumes that will stand out in the midst of the crowds when they're worn on Labor Day, Monday, September 7th at the 42nd annual West Indian American Day parade and carnival. The event is one of NYC's biggest cultural festivals by far and a highlight on the calendar of 1199SEIU members in New York. Grand Marshalls at this year's parade will include Governor David Paterson, Gen. Colin L. Powell (Ret) and NYPD Chief Joseph Esposito.

The 1199SEIU Social Cultural Committee is supported by Bread and Roses, the union and its members and staff who help to make sure 1199SEIU's presence on Eastern Parkway grows each year. Buy tickets to the parade online here.

Are you part of a local union that is planning or participating in a Labor Day event this September 7th? Please share with us what your union is doing--we'd love to highlight it on the SEIUs blog.

Collective bargaining on behalf of some 140,000 hospital and nursing home workers is beginning this month in New York City. Representing 1199SEIU will be an elected Negotiating Committee of some 500 rank-and-file healthcare workers. They will be conducting parallel talks with representatives of the League of Voluntary Hospitals and Homes and the Greater New York association of nursing homes.

The nursing home negotiations are set to begin today, May 8; the League talks will open on May 13. Union Negotiating Committee members from "Me Too" institutions--those that model their contracts on the League's but don't belong to it--will attend the League negotiations. The goal of the joint decision to reopen the contract is to find ways to stabilize the pension fund and preserve members' pension benefits.

For more information, visit 1199SEIU's news center.

More than 800 healthcare workers at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, the largest medical center in the Caritas Christi Health Care chain, voted last Thursday to unite together with thousands of healthcare workers in 1199SEIU.

"This is a time of great challenges and unprecedented opportunities," said 1199SEIU President George Gresham. "Now that St. Elizabeth's workers have a union voice, we can all work together to defend healthcare funding, expand access, and make life better for the caregivers at St Elizabeth's and their families."

Over the past 35 years, workers have attempted to form a union at St. Elizabeth's at least three different times, to no avail. Under new leadership, Caritas Christi Health Care reached an historic accord in January 2009 with 1199SEIU and the Area Trades Council, which established a code of conduct under which workers would be free to make their own decisions on whether to join together as a union under fair secret ballot voting conditions.

"We are overjoyed and thrilled. People were crying with joy in the halls Wednesday night," said St. Elizabeth's PCA Sonia Marshall, "We believe in the mission of St. Elizabeth's, and we're excited about working together to make our hospital the best that it can be for our patients and also for hospital workers and our families. We look forward to the day when all of our sisters and brothers across Boston are able to have free and fair union elections." Workers at St. Elizabeth's have pledged to help organize healthcare workers at other Massachusetts hospitals, including other Caritas Christi facilities, where union election campaigns are expected to launch in the near future.

Read more at www.StElizabethsWorkersTogether.org

When executives at Northern Berkshire Healthcare received word that the nursing home staff at Massachusetts Sweet Brook Care Centers petitioned to join 1199SEIU in January, they wasted no time before launching an anti-organizing campaign.

Their thinly veiled effort to strip caregivers of their voting rights didn't fool anyone--including the National Labor Relations Board. The Boston Regional Office of the NLRB issued a decision in favor of the long term care workers at Sweet Brook Nursing Home in Williamsburg, MA, on Monday, ruling that registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and lead certified nursing assistants will be eligible to vote in an upcoming union election.

In their 19-page decision reached after lengthy hearings, the NLRB rejected all arguments presented by executives at Sweet Brook and Northern Berkshire Healthcare (NBH) as part of an effort to exclude the caregivers from exercising a voice at work. NBH argued that registered nurses, LPNs and "lead" certified nursing assistants have supervisory authority that would prevent them from becoming union members.

"They were trying to say that we manage the other CNAs and have the power to change things," said Betty Higley, a lead certified nursing assistant in the dementia unit at Sweet Brook. "But you're just there to make sure the paperwork gets done. There was nothing that the hospital brought up that proved we were managers -- I still work weekends, I still work holidays. You can't dispute the truth."

Caregivers estimate that Northern Berkshire Healthcare has now wasted many tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer and patient care funds on executive junkets and a discretionary, totally meritless and unfounded legal battle against the voting rights of NBH employees at the Sweet Brook Nursing Home. Health system officials' defense is that they wanted to ensure the local's establishment was done correctly, and that the $500 an hour specialty lawyers were needed for last week's National Labor Relations Board hearings on union organizing at Sweet Brook that were held in Boston.

What were some of the many tactics Northern Berkshire Healthcare, led by CEO Richard Palmisano, employed while workers fought for the right to hold an election to have a voice at work?

1. Threatened service reductions and layoffs by hospital executives due to budgetary shortfalls at North Adams Regional Hospital.
   
2. An internal campaign of intimidation waged by the nursing home's own CEO, to guilt-trip employees by convincing them that forming a union would be equivalent to giving up their goals of improving resident care and jobs at the home.
   
3. One-on-one meetings with workers about their private voting choices, conducted by NBH executives.
   
4. Six days of NLRB hearings and testimony in Boston and Leominster, where testifying caregivers were kept away from their families and the nursing home residents for whom they care. During this hearing, NBH officials also tried to bar 35 nurses and certified nursing assistants from the election.

The answer: all of the above.

The overwhelming majority of eligible staff at Sweet Brook have already expressed, in writing, their support for forming a union at the nursing home. "Management at Sweet Brook has been doing everything in their power to prevent us from voting in a union election," said Betty Higley, a lead certified nursing assistant at Sweet Brook who attended the hearings, "They kept us away from home for almost a week. Enough is enough. Let us vote!"

Tremendous support from the workforce in question isn't stopping NBH, however--- Vice President of External Affairs Diane Cutillo said on Monday that the health-care system is appealing the decision to the National Labor Board in Washington, DC.

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"Local 1199 represents the authentic conscience of the labor movement."
- From Dr. King's remarks at 1199's Salute to Freedom celebration in 1968.

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One way to celebrate black history this month is by focusing on the history of African Americans in the labor movement. No single person made greater contributions toward the advancement of both the civil rights and labor movements than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was killed while in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers trying to form a union. Dr. King always saw strengthening unions and lifting up workers as critical to achieving long term justice for African Americans. He helped motivate hundreds of thousands of activists--both black and white--through his speeches and the example he set.

"I'm often disenchanted with some segments of the power structure of the labor movement, but in those moments I begin to think of unions like Local 1199," said Dr. King in one of his last speeches at 1199SEIU to union members and supporters before his assassination in 1968. "It gives me renewed courage and vigor to carry on and the feeling that there are some unions left that will always maintain the radiant and vibrant idealism that brought the labor movement into being," said Dr. King.

Listen to Dr. King's full speech about continuing fight for social and economic justice here:

The 1960s saw Dr. King address countless labor gatherings, and he did not confine his support to just speechmaking. He often joined workers on the picket lines; and when the 1199SEIU drive to organize New York City's voluntary hospitals began in 1962, Dr. King called New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and urged him to support collective bargaining legislation.

Coretta Scott King addressing an audience at 1199 headquarters

Just two months after Dr. King's death in 1968, 1199 hospital workers won the historic $100 per week minimum wage. And on the heels of that victory, Dr. King's widow Coretta Scott King, agreed to serve as honorary chairperson of the 1199 National Organizing Committee. She went on to remain a close friend and ally of 1199 for the rest of her life, speaking at 1199 conventions and Black History Month celebrations.

Unionists across the nation have drawn strength from Dr. King. "His dedication to the rights of the workers who are so often exploited by the forces of greed has profoundly touched my life and guided my struggle," said the late Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farmworkers of America and an icon in the labor and rights movements. "During my first fast in 1968, Dr. King reminded me that our struggle was his struggle too. He sent me a telegram, which said, 'Our separate struggles are really one. A struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity."

"As we continue to learn from some of the greatest innovators, activists, intellectuals and community leaders in history, the best way we can honor and remember their legacy is to continue their work for equal and fair treatment, and support the fight for decent wages, benefits and improved training for all workers. Advancing their cause is one way we can truly celebrate Black History Month," said Kyle Bragg, Vice President of 32BJ SEIU.

*Visit www.seiu.org/blackhistorymonth

1199SEIU's magazine and website www.1199seiu.org won numerous awards in this year's journalism contest sponsored by the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), the professional organization for labor journalists. The contest was open to all labor media produced in North America in 2007 including labor print publications, websites and radio, television, and film productions.

1199SEIU--which represents 300,000 members and retirees in NY, MD, Wash., DC and MA--took home prizes in a total of eight categories, winning high honors for top-ranking U.S. local union website and local union publication with a circulation over 20,000, Our Life and Times magazine. The local's magazine also won the Saul Miller Award for Best Collective Bargaining Story for an article featured in the magazine's September issue about the importance of keeping unions strong, written by social worker Jim Gilbert. "Lessons Learned" narrates Gilbert's first-hand experience being forced out of his management position due to company downsizing after 28 years as an 1199er.

--> Read the entire listing of awards 1199SEIU took home this year.