The PhillyLabor.com Business To Labor Network is Hosting An exclusive Meet and Greet with Henry Nicholas, President of the 15,000 member (NUHHCE) National Union of Hospital and Healthcare Employees Local 1199c
Event Details
When: Tuesday, May 13, 2014 from 6pm-8pm.
Where: The local 1199c union offices at 1319 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107
About Henry Nicholas, President, (NUHHCE)
Henry Nicholas was born in Fayette, Mississippi, in 1936. He graduated from Robert Louis Stevenson High School in New York City and from the New York Institute of Criminology. He also attended Brooklyn Polytechnic University as well as serving in the United States Navy as an Aviation Mechanic. In 1957 Nicholas was hired as a health care worker at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, and in 1959 he led the campaign to organize his co-workers into what was then Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital Employees Union. That year Nicholas also played a key role in the big 1199 strike which eventually led to union contracts for thousands of New York City hospital employees.
From 1959 to 1961 Nicholas was active as a volunteer rank-and-file organizer for Local 1199 and in 1961 he was hired as a full-time organizer by the Local. In 1964 he was named Director of Organization for New York and in 1969, when the union set up the 1199 National Organizing Committee, Nicholas was named its Assistant Director. In that role, Nicholas led hospital-worker organizing campaigns in Pittsburgh, Ohio and Detroit, and also led the 113-day hospital strike in Charleston, South Carolina, which drew national attention as a major landmark in the struggle for Black civil rights. Also active in that campaign were civil rights leaders Ralph David Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Andrew Young, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during the Carter administration and former mayor of Atlanta.
In 1973, the success of the national hospital organizing drive led to the creation of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, and Nicholas was elected as its first Secretary-Treasurer. Nicholas arrived in Philadelphia to organize hospital workers and within two years had won contracts for over 5000 employees of the city’s major health care institutions. He was also a major force in the struggle to enact Act 195, the Pennsylvania Public Employee Relations Act, which for the first time gave the right to union representation to Pennsylvania hospital workers.
By April of 1974, the success of the Philadelphia organizing drive was such that District 1199C, the Philadelphia local of the National Union, was officially chartered with Nicholas as its President. The District’s jurisdiction extends throughout the Philadelphia metropolitan area and to five counties in Southern New Jersey. Under Nicholas’ leadership, the Philadelphia local has continued to grow annually and District 1199C now represents more than 15,000 hospital and health care employees in 110 health care institutions in the Delaware Valley area. The growth of the Philadelphia local has also provided the financial resources for the creation of a nationally-recognized training and upgrading program for health care employees, and the District 1199C Legal Services Plan, which provided free legal services for the Union’s Philadelphia members.
Source – http://www.nuhhce.org/page5.
