About 60 employees and union representatives gathered outside Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson, N.Y., March 23 for a vigil, according to a Register-Star report.
The gathering comes amid ongoing contract negotiations with management. Hospital workers, represented by 1199 Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers East, have been working under a contract that expired Dec. 31, 2015, according to the report.
Workers at the hospital are seeking better wages. They are also anxious about the upcoming affiliation between the hospital and Albany (N.Y.) Medical Center, and want to ensure jobs were not subcontracted out to nonunion workers, Mindy H. Berman, the union's communications director, told the Register-Star.
Columbia Memorial Health President and CEO Jay P. Cahalan has contended personnel will not switch between Albany Medical and Columbia Memorial, according to the report.
The hospital provided the Register-Star with the following statement on the ongoing negotiations:
"Our dialogue with the union has been consistently productive and we feel we are making good progress. We are confident that the result will be a contract that is fair to our employees and responsive to the complex demands of providing quality healthcare services."
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