1199 AND THE BLACK WORKER
It seems fitting to close this series on the black worker with Drug and Hospital Employees Local 1199, Martin Luther King’s favorite union, and a dramatic example of the potential power in an alliance between the civil rights and labor movements. Started by Jewish drug store clerks in Harlem and the Bronx in 1958, Local 1199 undertook to organize workers in New York’s voluntary hospitals, a group conventional labor savants considered to be unorganizable. The workers were nearly all uneducated blacks and Puerto Ricans whose wages were so low that they needed supplemental welfare relief in order to survive. Moreover, they were barred by state law from collective bargaining, and were not covered by the minimum wage or unemployment compensation laws. Nevertheless, Local 1199 effectively organized these workers because the black community gave the union its strongest support, and its drives were endorsed by the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Black activists as diverse as Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, and King lent their personal prestige to assist 1199. In fact, it was from a picket line of the Newark hospital strikers that King left for Oslo, Sweden, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
No strike for union recognition more cogently demonstrated the alliance between 1199 and the civil rights movement than the struggle to organize the nearly all-black Charleston hospital workers in 1969. Initially the hospital administrators treated the union with contempt, and fired their local leaders. Companies such as J. P. Stevens feared that they too would become the targets of unionizing drives if 1199 succeeded, so they gave their complete support to the hospitals. Local and state political leaders also worked closely with hospital officials, and the police and national guardsmen handled the mostly black women brutally, arresting hundreds of the desperately poor strikers. Even during the strike’s darkest hours, however, the workers never faltered, for civil rights activists transformed the struggle into one for human rights and dignity. SCLC field staffers, including Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young, remained in Charleston with 1199 officers, and Coretta Scott King inspired the strikers to go on, while Walter Reuther and George Meany donated thousands to the cause. By the end of April the city had become the scene of mass meetings, daily marches, rallies in churches and union halls, boycotts, and mass arrests. To many it seemed more like the early days of the civil rights movement than a fight for union recognition. Victory finally came through the intervention of the federal government, and Andrew Young summed up the importance of the effort: “We won this strike because of a wonderful marriage—the marriage of SCLC and Local 1199.”
Finally, no assessment of 1199 would be complete if it confined itself to bread and ignored the roses. In fact, “Bread and Roses” are inseparable features of 1199’s activities, and its unique and imaginative cultural program is called just that. In a union where so many workers were uneducated, theater, poetry, music, and other art forms practiced by the workers themselves, became an essential part of the union’s educational campaign. But it is much more for Bread and Roses also offers its members inspiration, and the opportunity for personal development. The modern labor movement could take a few lessons from 1199 if it wishes to become more than a movement for bread alone.