1199: A Family Portrait - Photographs of Hospital Workers

Georgeen Comerford. New York: District 1199 Cultural Center, [1977]. 9 x 8 in. Perfect bound in wraps. Offset. [44] pp.

Produced by 1199: The National Health Care Workers’ Union, this excellent catalog documents the working lives of staff at three hospitals in New York City: Montefiore Medical Center, Beth Abraham Hospital (a nursing home), and St. John’s Queens Hospital.

The photographer, Georgeen Comerford, grew up in the Bronx, went to undergraduate at the Cooper Union and got an MFA from Brooklyn College. Today, she is a professor at Brooklyn College. The exhibition was organized in part to support the union’s funding battle against Mayor Koch and to encourage viewers to “no longer look upon hospital jobs as expendable budget items.”

Local 1199 was founded in 1932 thanks to the efforts of Jewish Communists in New York to organize drugstore workers in the model of an industrial union. The union was integral to organizing Black pharmacists in Harlem in the late 1930s and ‘40s; they also organized a strike in seven local hospitals in 1959 and successfully won collective bargaining rights. 1199 was forced out of the national CIO in 1949 by anti-Communists but expanded into a national organization in 1973 after being asked to aid South Carolina nurses. 1199 was also the first union to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam, according to historian Leon Fink. Amazingly, the group was led by one Leon Julius Davis from 1934 until 1982.

A scarce example of labor photography in 1970s New York, from one of the most important and progressive unions to organize healthcare workers.