Boston academic hospitals are preparining strategies to deal with a labor union known for its aggressive tactics, reports the Boston Globe. Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union has targeted Boston because there are few unionized employees at the city’s teaching hospitals. According to the story, a Boston law firm is prepping hospital executives on the union’s strategies, like those used in a seven-year struggle with Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut that stalled a $430 million cancer center, featured hospital executives on billboards, and shared with the media the hospital’s debt collection practices. Last week, Yale-New Haven and the union signed a deal allowing the cancer center to move forward and giving 1,800 hospital workers to right to organize in a secret vote. The union says its tactics were in response to hostile hospital management and that it just wanted a fair election.
