Gives Us All Greater Strength

The lives of our patients, our nursing home residents, our home care consumers, our families and the future of our professions demand that we respond to the challenges we face by building our own national organization.

Our employers are increasingly national corporations. Healthcare today is dominated by ever larger providers and insurance and drug companies. They are national, and we have to be national to match their size and effectiveness and make sure the needs of patients and caregivers are met.

The federal government and national politics dictate healthcare financing and regulation that has an impact on everything we do. We need national strength to influence the decisions made at the federal level, before they undermine our efforts to raise standards locally.

Today, we have pockets of SEIU strength in a largely nonunion healthcare industry. There are huge areas of the country where workers and patients have no voice and no hope of improvement. As long as nine of 10 healthcare workers have no union, we are constantly in danger of losing what we have accomplished for ourselves and our patients, nursing home residents, and home care consumers.

By weaving our 40 separate locals into one cloth, we magnify the strength of each unique thread and strengthen the whole. A national union will draw on the best we have to offer— members, leaders and staff—to focus on our common problems and take advantage of our common opportunities. It will be a model of member democracy built through strong local organization and transparent decision-making, and it will recognize the need to develop and empower member leaders.

It will allow us to speak with one, strong voice and consistently win, whether it’s negotiating strong contracts that focus on good jobs and quality patient care, coordinating our bargaining with common employers, uniting more healthcare workers in SEIU to give all of us more strength, supporting political and legislative campaigns, seeking new accountability to improve care, or opposing bad policies that undermine our jobs and the care we deliver.