Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that most people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can stop using masks and social distancing for most indoor and outdoor activities regardless of gathering size. This is a major milestone in the ght against Covid-19 and an opportunity for the fully vaccinated to begin returning to pre-pandemic life. You are fully vaccinated two weeks after your second P zer or Moderna vaccine or two weeks after the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
It’s roughly one year after the COVID-19 pandemic peaked in New York and the state continues to make good progress vaccinating all New Yorkers, particularly health care workers. Nursing home workers are getting it done! Currently, 87% of nursing home residents and 58% of staff are fully vaccinated.
In February 1199ers at Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC) ratified a contract with historic gains that included significant wage increases, improved base rates and shift differentials, a $400 COVID-19 bonus, and preservation of the 1199SEIU Training and Employment Fund. Workers also placed introducing an official Juneteenth holiday on the docket for the next contract
Following the victory of the progressive 1199 slate in 1987, the leadership voted to organize a forgotten sector of workers – the overwhelming female and multiethnic home healthcare workforce.
Workers at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, already involved in the institution’s transition into the One Brooklyn Health System, are now also supporting the facility’s community vaccination program.
On a frigid day in December 2020, two weeks before the year anniversary of their contract expiration, with a snowstorm looming, more than three hundred 1199SEIU members with families, friends and community supporters held an informational picket in Hudson, NY, demanding fair wages and affordable health benefits for workers at Columbia Memorial Hospital (CMH). By all reports, this was the strongest worker and community outcry at in decades.
Home health workers across the Union have been leading the way for vaccinations and PPE for home-based care workers. In New York City, 1199SEIU homecare workers have helped organize a host of vaccination and PPE distribution events. Homecare members and staff have been helping workers get vaccinated and obtain PPE; they have been providing transportation assistance as well and helping their Union family with paperwork and vaccination appointments. Over 200 1199ers participated in a March 8 vaccination event at New York City’s Personal Touch Agency.
Shortly after his election in 2008, President Barack Obama famously responded to Republican attacks on the Affordable Care Act by reminding the opposition that “elections have consequences.” Indeed, they do.
1199SEIU members made history in April. Nursing home reforms that workers have been trying to win for decades were finally enacted by the New York State legislature. The fuse was lit last January, when angry, frustrated, and exhausted nursing home workers launched the Invest In Quality Care Campaign. Worn out by the pandemic and years of neglect, 1199ers took on a visionary, direct-action campaign that called attention to the desperate conditions in some of the state’s nursing homes, along with the lack of transparency and accountability that has allowed nursing home owners to enrich themselves. Even as workers struggled to find enough hours in the day to care for their residents.