50 Who Carried The 1199 Torch (Page 8)

Profiles of our pioneers

Theodore Mitchell

1199's First Black Officer

Theodore (Teddy) Mitchell, 1199’s first black officer, was one of a handful of organizers who began 1199’s hospital organizing efforts half a century ago.

Mitchell joined Elliott Godoff and Marshall Dubin in the campaign that led to the union’s first hospital election win, a 628-31 victory Dec. 30, 1958, at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx.

Mitchell was raised in North Carolina by his grandmother, a freed slave. After coming to New York he joined 1199 in 1937 when he was a stockman at the Whelan Drug chain. He was soon elected shop steward for 15 stores, joined the staff in 1949 and soon afterward was elected a vice president.

After the Montefiore win and the 1959 New York City hospital strike, Mitchell worked closely with Godoff and a huge volunteer army of drug and hospital members to organize some 80 New York hospitals and nursing homes. Working with him, Godoff, Dubin, organizer Jesse Olson and former Montefiore LPN Thelma Bowles were the drugstore members who volunteered for the Crack of Dawn Brigades that handed out organizing leaflets before reporting for their regular jobs.

Mitchell, an amiable man with a rolypoly build, consistently aroused crowds with his high-pitched voice and impassioned oratory. He died in 1989.

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Mary Moultrie

Charleston Strike Leader

In 1969 a group of 500 workers – mostly young, Black women – at the Medical College Hospital of the University of South Carolina and Charleston County Hospital, both in Charleston, S.C, went on strike to protest the firing of 12 of their co-workers.

Among the strike’s leaders was Charleston native Mary Moultrie, who was then a 24-year-old nursing assistant. Moultrie had not yet been radicalized. “I just knew it was survival,” she says. “I knew I had lost my job and I had to get my job back.”

The strike was a milestone for 1199, because it forever forged the link between workers rights and civil rights and opened the Union’s 15-year chapter as a national healthcare union.

“The strike lasted 110 days. We had daily picketing. There was the national guard,” says Moultrie. “Charleston looked like an armed camp.”

Workers didn’t win union recognition, but they did win increased wages and they got their jobs back. They also changed Charleston, says Moultrie. “People began talking more,” she says. “Wanting to make changes, being more sympathetic.”

Mary Moultrie is still an activist in Charleston. She’s working on organizing the city’s environmental service workers.

“Working conditions have regressed so much for a lot of people,” says Moultrie. “Especially for younger people. I have to wonder why. I tell them when we say unions we’re not just talking about strikes. We’re talking about improving your life.”

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Henry Nicholas

From Fear to Fame

The life of Mount Sinai orderly Henry Nicolas was turned around by the 1959 strike. “I was very scared,” Nicholas recalls, “ but understanding that fear has helped me to organize workers.”

On the second day of the strike, Nicholas volunteered to become a strike captain. “Initially I was afraid to sign the union card,” he says. “But one day while I was picketing outside the hospital, I looked up and saw my boss on a balcony looking down on us. The fear left me.”

By the time 1199 began its organizing in the South a decade later, Nicholas, a Navy veteran born and raised in Mississippi, was Organizing Director Elliott Godoff’s chief lieutenant. He later rose to the position of director of organizing. When Leon Davis retired in 1982, Nicholas was elected president of 1199’s national union.

Today he is president of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

“I still work as hard now as I did then,” Nicholas says, adding that he usually puts in a seven-day week and runs five miles every morning. He is one of the founders of Pennsylvania’s Kensington Welfare Rights Union and a driving force behind the AFSCME campaign to organize Charleston, South Carolina, sanitation workers.

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Mike O'Brien

Breaking Ground in Western Mass.

In 1977 Mike O’Brien had returned from the service several years earlier and was working as a respiratory therapist on Long Island in New York. He and his wife decided to move their young family to Northwest Massachusetts to the small, picturesque town of North Adams. O’Brien took a job at North Adams Regional Hospital, one of the area’s local hospitals.

“I saw unfairness in some of what management was doing to different workers,” says O’Brien. “I didn’t like the way they were dealing with the dietary and housekeeping workers.”

“So I went to the second secret meeting for the organizing drive and I started talking to people because I wanted to see things change,” says O’Brien.

It was a bold move. The region of the state had at the time relatively low union density for healthcare workers and the hospital was one of the town’s major employers.

“We were successful,” says O’Brien of the organizing drive. “We were known as very loud and very pushy.”

O’Brien is still a delegate and still leading workers who he encourages to be as “pushy” as the generations before them.

“It’s our job to motivate them,” he says. “This is where the rubber meets the road - when you can get the members to step up and do something for themselves.”

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Jesse Olson

Organized 1199 Professionals

Jesse Olson (1924-2009), who for 20 years led 1199’s drive to organize white collar employees, was a central figure in building 1199 as a hospital union.

Olson was best known as head of the Union’s Guild of Professional, Technical, Office and Clerical Employees. The Guild, begun in 1964, grew to 30,000 members under Olson’s leadership. In addition, Olson was a close advisor to Pres. Leon Davis in all important Union decisions. Olson joined 1199 as a Manhattan pharmacist in 1948. He was a delegate when the Union began its city-wide hospital organizing drive in 1959. He took a pay cut that year from $175 a week as a pharmacist to $110 as a strike organizer at Beth Israel because, he said later, it was an opportunity to do “God’s work.”

After retiring as a New York 1199 executive vice president in 1984, Olson worked with Local 1199C in Philadelphia for five years and finished his union career as a prescription drug plan consultant for the 1199 Benefit Fund. His retirement from the Benefit Fund in 1998 rounded out a 50-year career with the Union.

“Jesse was one of the last major links to 1199’s earliest successes,” said Pres. George Gresham at the time of Olson’s death at 84 last January. “He personified the dedication and commitment of the inspired generation of pioneers who built our Union.”

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