Union looks to organize at Hub's top hospitals

A powerful New York healthcare union with a $20 million annual organizing budget and a quarter of a million members is poised to merge with a Boston local and intends to launch a major organizing drive at the city's top teaching hospitals.

Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union is the biggest healthcare union local in the Northeast and a major player in New York politics. It has grown while other labor unions have weakened, with its membership exceeding 250,000 workers in 76 hospitals, including 29 academic institutions.

Union leaders say organizing healthcare workers in Boston is a central part of their strategy to extend their reach along the East Coast.

The union would not reveal details of its plans, but two Harvard Medical School-affiliated hospitals that currently have no unionized medical workers, Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, are likely targets, as are Brigham and Women's Hospital, Tufts-New England Medical Center, and Children's Hospital Boston.

''The hospitals in Boston are significant, flagship institutions for the hospital industry nationally, but in spite of that esteemed status, the hospital workers in these institutions don't fare nearly as well as their counterparts in New York," said Mike Fadel, an organizing director in Boston.

The New York union has secured health benefits with no employee premium contributions for a majority of its members, and also offers extensive job training programs, Fadel said.

The upcoming organizing effort is contingent on a merger of 1199 SEIU with a sister local, SEIU 2020 in Boston, which represents about 12,000 healthcare workers at Boston Medical Center and elsewhere in Massachusetts. Union officials expect the merger to easily win approval.

Besides lobbying hospital workers, the SEIU will most likely push state and city politicians, university faculties, and other unions to pressure hospital administrators to allow unionization, said Jarol Manheim, a professor of political science at George Washington University who has studied SEIU's growth.

''They are very smart and very experienced in these things, and they play hardball," Manheim said. ''They have grown or held steady in recent years as every other union has continued to lose members because they have been aggressive about going after healthcare companies."

A major reason for the 1199 SEIU's success in New York has been the unlikely alliance between its president, Dennis Rivera, and Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, the lobbying group for hospitals. Rivera and Raske have won major legislative victories in Albany, including earmarking more than $2 billion for hospital employee wages from the proceeds of the transformation of Empire Blue Cross from a nonprofit to a public company.

The union is bigger and more powerful than any of the existing healthcare unions in Massachusetts. It has a permanent phone-bank operation with 80 to 100 operators and can call up to 50,000 voters a day, Rivera said. It has often deployed that operation to lobby in favor of better funding for healthcare in New York.

Rivera said he wants to work cooperatively with Boston hospital executives. ''Our message is: We've got to get to know each other. We want to convince you that we are the best thing that could ever happen to you and your institution," he said.

So far, the outreach efforts with executives have had mixed to poor results. SEIU officials from New York were rebuffed late last year when they sought to meet with Ronald Hollander, president of the Massachusetts Hospital Association, to discuss their plans to expand into Boston. Paul Wingle, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Hospital Association, confirmed that Hollander had declined an invitation from the Greater New York Hospital Association to sit down with 1199 SEIU officials.

''We did not see a need for the meeting," Wingle said, citing an existing working relationship with Massachusetts SEIU and other union officials on issues like expanding healthcare coverage for the uninsured. ''From time to time we collaborate with the Massachusetts-based SEIU representatives," he added, ''and the merger shouldn't affect that."

Higher labor costs in Massachusetts would translate to higher health insurance premiums for residents and decreased access to healthcare, Wingle said.

''There's a balance to strike. We do have to pay fair wages. We do have to worry about costs to consumers," Wingle said.

In Massachusetts, the healthcare and social-assistance sectors account for about 14 percent of employment in the state, or about 437,000 workers. Of those, about 161,000 work in hospitals. The rate of employment growth in the sector during the last year was nearly double that of the total employment increase, according to the state. The government does not track the number of unionized healthcare workers, but union estimates yesterday placed it at well below 50,000, less than 12 percent. Employees at teaching hospitals have sometimes resisted organizing efforts in the past. For example, a 1995 organizing drive by the Teamsters at Mass General failed, as did an effort by the SEIU to sign up maintenance workers two years ago at Beth Israel.

Representatives of Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center struck a neutral tone regarding the union's plans.

''They have achieved some public policy successes in New York. The question is whether their model can work in Massachusetts," said Thomas Glynn, chief operating officer of Partners HealthCare, the parent organization of Mass General and Brigham and Women's and a former deputy secretary of labor in the Clinton administration.

The extent of the union's success in Massachusetts could hinge on its ability to deal with the biggest healthcare union in the state, the Massachusetts Nurses Association, which has 23,000 members, including 2,200 at Brigham and Women's, 1,500 at New England Medical Center, and 900 at Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Center.

The union's executive director, Julie Pinkham, said her union would help 1199 SEIU organize hospital workers, as long as it does not attempt to organize nurses.

But Fadel, the SEIU organizer in Boston, gave no such assurance.

''We represent everybody in hospitals," he said.

Christopher Rowland can be reached at crowland@globe.com.