This really sucks to hear.  The background here is that the 1199 local in new england has had a corporate campaign against the yale hospital forfuckinever, to try to beat them into an election agreement.  But the corporate campaign went on for years and didn't get the company to crack, so the local simply had to continue it on and on, because the only way corporate campaigns work is if the business community knows that once we start one we will never ever stop until we win.  Then last year, breakthrough, they got the fuckers to finally knuckle under to an election agreement.  Friends of mine have been there since then, working on the organizing end to win the election, but the word has been that yale still found ways to fight even while bound by the agreement, and that it was close, but we might not win this one.  So I guess now the reason we're pulling back is we don't have the votes.  The whole edifice of getting organizing rights through corporate campaigns, which is basically our main strategy for the next ten years, can fall apart if a few companies beat us, because it'll embolden so many more to keep fighting and not give in.  So this is real bad news, for even more than the 1800 service unit workers.  Sigh.  However, that new england 1199 is an -amazing- fighting local, so I'm sure they'll win this thing eventually, just to show the motherfuckers what's up. That local used to be mostly based in very low-wage workers in nursing homes in connecticut, and has a real distinctive character to it.  Their unofficialy motto is my favorite unofficial union motto in the country, in just four words: "FUCK YOU, PAY ME." <div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Dec 15, 2006, at 10:57 AM, Mark Rickling wrote: > New Haven <a href="http://Independent.org"> Independent.org</a> > 13 Dec. 2006 > Union Election Off; Arbitrator Says Hospital Broke Law > Paul Bass > > An arbitrator agreed with postponing next week's long-awaited union > election among Yale-New Haven Hospital's 1,800 blue-collar workers > because the hospital engaged in "serious violations of federal law" by > pressuring workers to vote no. Mayor John DeStefano, steamed, called > for a campaign to remove some of Yale-New Haven's special tax breaks. I'm not surprised to hear this. Yale is a viciously anti-union institution, and has been for a long time, even by the standards of the US bourgeoisie. And Yale-New Haven Hospital is notoriously piggish: the WSJ had a story some years ago about how they went after a low-wage Yale dining hall employee who couldn't pay her hospital bills in the most merciless fashion. They tried to seize her house, when many hospitals would have written it off. Doug </blockquote></div>