1199 was founded by drugstore workers fighting for union right and dignity. This struggle is in our DNA.

Eighty-four years ago, 1199’s late President Leon Davis and group of his fellow pharmacists and drugstore workers came together to form what became Local 1199. The union grew to about 5,000 members, all in New York City. Then, 27 years after its founding, Davis and his comrades made a visionary decision: to organize the city’s hospital workers.

The decision was bold and courageous; bold, because this small, mostly Jewish, overwhelmingly male union would become overwhelmingly female and primarily African-American and Latina, and courageous, because at the time it was illegal to unionize New York’s hospital workers.

Those fearless drugstore employees of half a century ago provided the scaffolding on which our 400,000 proud sisters and brothers of 1199SEIU stand today. The mighty oak that is our modern Union grew from the acorn planted by Leon Davis and his co-workers decades ago, and now stretches from the Canadian border to the Caribbean among hospitals, nursing homes, the homecare industry and every other sector of the healthcare industry.

But now a powerful employer, Rite-Aid Pharmacies, is out to smash the acorn—our 6,100 pharmacists, pharmacy techs and workers in over 300 Rite Aid stores in New York and New Jersey who have had contracts with the company for some 40 years.

1199ers and Rite Aid have been in collective bargaining for the past 19 months, and it has become clear that the company wants to bust the union. It stopped paying into the debt to the Fund several months ago and is more than $8,000,000 in debt to the fund—a debt it wants our Union to waive. Rite Aid also wants to bar from the Union any pharmacists it may hire in the future.

On its website, Rite Aid’s mission statement reads, in part, “We provide an environment that inspires and motivates the best people to choose to work here…where they can reach their fullest potential. We dedicate ourselves to creating an experience for all of our associates that is easy, exciting and engaging.”

Easy, exciting and engaging? Nearly half the members of the bargaining unit work at minimum wage and 85 percent earn less than $15 an hour. Pharmacy techs earn $13.01 an hour. Rite Aid wants to split our pharmacists off from the rest of the workers and weaken everyone.

Keep in mind that Rite Aid is the largest drugstore chain on the East Coast and third-largest in the country, with 4,000 stores and 89,000 employees nationwide, and the company is now in negotiations to merge with Walgreen’s drugstores. In May, Rite Aid CEO John Stanley wrote to investors: “Fiscal 2016 was a successful, transformational and historic year for Rite Aid…We increased revenue by nearly 16 percent – from $26.5 billion in fiscal 2015 to $30.7 billion this past year.”

Stanley himself was paid over $22 million last year. It would take half of Rite Aid’s workers 1,500 years to make that much money. So we’re talking about a clear case of corporate greed here.

In our bargaining, an arbitrator has ruled in our favor that Rite Aid is engaged in Unfair Labor Practices. And a court has upheld the arbitrator’s ruling. Still, the company refuses to bargain in good faith.

Tensions are rising, but our members—pharmacists and store workers alike—are holding firm and holding together. Now it’s up to the rest of us to join them in the fight to secure their benefits and to safeguard our union in the retail drug industry. If the employer won’t bargain fairly, we have no option but to take it to the streets. At press time, contract talks were ongoing. Members were keeping the pressure on for a fair contract.

“We are not going to give away our members,” says Laurie Vallone, our executive vice president in charge of the negotiations. “1199 was started by pharmacists. They are the foundation of who we are.”

Amen to that.