Inside the Hospital Workers’ Union  In a mid-Manhattan
neighborhood filled with drunks and prostitutes, with pool halls
and cheap pubs where the steam tables serve up oxtail stew at
nine in the morning and men off the night shift stop for an
early morning beer before bed, the part of town where every
bookshop is pornographic and every movie obscene—there,
surrounded by the victims of ecological, political, and economic
nightmare, stands a new fourteen-story building, emblazoned with
a work-glorifying mosaic and capped by the words of Frederick
Douglass: If There Is no Struggle There Can be No Progress. The
building is the new home of Local 1199 Drug and Hospital Union,
an organization widely known (not least through its own efforts)
as a sort of phoenix of the American labor movement, a
miraculous organism in the graveyard of organized labor: a live
trade union.  In the terms in which America measures power,
Local 1199 is not a mighty thing. Its members cannot cripple the
economy or affect international trade