Striking rehab workers demand health benefits

CATHERINE SANKER, an employee of the Kingsbridge Heights Rehabilitation Center, talks to a reporter on Feb. 19 as her co-workers look on. Photo by Joshua Bright

By N. Clark Judd

The heated battle between the administration of the Kingsbridge Heights Rehabilitation Center and its employees' union, SEIU1199, got even hotter last week.

Beginning at 6 a.m., on Feb. 20, center employees went on a roundthe- clock strike, marching, chanting and banging on pots and pans outside the center to call attention to a contract dispute that has left them without health benefits since November.

Regardless of who will emerge the winner in what may be the last round of a fight spanning years of picketing, strike threats, allegations of intimidation - from both sides - and a recently-decided case before the National Labor Relations Board, 250 health care workers at the rehabilitation center have already endured the duress of going without health care for themselves and their families for three months.

"We got kids," said Alexandra Hernandez, a nursing aide at the center who chanted and marched in the cold before the center, at 3400 Cannon Place, on Feb. 20. "My kid's asthmatic. I have machines in the house."

Without benefits, she said, she cannot pay for the oxygen tank her 18-year-old son requires, or for the private nurse he needs, she says, because he thinks and feels at a 15-year-old level.

"We don't have no benefits, we haven't had a contract for over four years, and we just want a contract signed," she said.

Ms. Hernandez said that she had to ask her son's father, whom she is no longer with, to put her son on his insurance plan instead.

Others do not have that alternative.

"It stops me from going to the doctor, and I'm a sick person," said Priscilla Barnes, who has worked at the center since 1982. "I have high blood pressure and have glaucoma."

And Stewart Sherlock, a cook who has worked at the center for close to three years, is caring for a wife with diabetes.

"We need the contract because right now my wife, she is very ill. Our medical, it is cut off," he said.

Even patients in the home showed solidarity with the workers outside. Several watched from ground-floor windows, peering around security guards to wave and cheer on the caregivers who have been tending to them.

One man in a wheelchair held a sign to the window: "Please don't fire our nurses," it read. "They take good care of me!"

"They are suffering, we patients and residents are suffering also," another resident, William Perkins, said through the screen of a window at the health center. "They look out for us. In a manner of speaking, we are their children."

Waving to protesters hefting signs and chanting a few yards away, Mr. Perkins explained, "It's more or less a family thing."

Local politicians are also involved. At a vigil held outside the center the day before the general strike began, City Councilman Oliver Koppell made an appearance to support the workers.

"This is a bad owner, an owner who is not meeting her responsibilities to her employees," he said later last week.

A federal mediator was available to both parties the night before the strike, but Mr. Cohen, center owner Helen Sieger's attorney, said his client declined to meet.

Mr. Koppell said he met at the center on Feb. 19 with a man who described himself as the center's administrator. The administrator told Mr. Koppell that he wanted to settle the contract dispute, but was not aware a mediator was available.

"The response of the management was peculiar," said Mr. Koppell. "If there is a mediator they should participate with the mediator."

State Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, who met with Ms. Sieger on Monday, said she "may not be so interested in resolving the differences."

"It's pretty clear to me that if she wants to resolve this, she needs to be a little bit more flexible," Mr. Dinowitz said.

The last contract for workers at the center, expired in 2005. Relations between Ms. Sieger and SEIU leadership have steadily soured ever since.

SEIU1199 announced in November that health coverage for its members working at the center had ended because the center owed about $2.4 million to the union's benefits fund. Combined with payments due to other funds, an SEIU attorney said, the center is now in arrears to the union for $2.9 million.

Before May 2007, the home was paying into the benefits fund at the rate it had under the old contract, which was significantly lower than the union's required rate, said the attorney, Erwin Bluestein. Since May 2007, he said, the center has not been paying at all.

The $2.4 million figure reflects that, Mr. Bluestein said.

Mr. Cohen said that the center is only willing to pay the higher rates on a "go-forward" basis, and will not agree to pay the difference between what they had paid and what the union expected.

Local politicians, workers and even residents - who have contacted The Riverdale Press to complain about the strikers' noise and bright lights Ms. Sieger now keeps running at night - want the two sides to reach an agreement as soon as possible.

"This is something which could conceivably go on for a while and I certainly don't want to see that," said Mr. Dinowitz.

This is part of the February 28, 2008 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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