Militant Health Care Union Leader Sal Rosselli Retires

[Omaha Steve]

This union is not afraid to strike, and the employers know it. Photos: NUHW

https://labornotes.org/blogs/2024/07/militant-health-care-union-leader-sal-rosselli-retires

July 23, 2024 / Cal Winslow

I get a kick watching Sal Rosselli at Labor Notes, always meeting, talking, on a panel, on the move, working, full of energy, out of the limelight, but known by many, health care workers especially. Sal talking about organizing hospitals, including, I suspect, his dream of a national “industrial” health care workers union.

Sal has been a regular at Labor Notes, beginning back in the nineties. Then, he was president of SEIU Local 250, the largest health care union in California; more recently he was a founder of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW).

This past spring, however, Sal was not there as the president of NUHW, the “model union”; he’d just stepped aside after a life as a one of California’s best-known labor leaders. Not retired, he insists, still working full time for the union, “doing what I’ve always done,” he says, “working full-time leading our hospital division, among other things…We’ve got four major contract campaigns coming up, including with the hospital giants, Kaiser Permanente and Providence.” Sophia Mendoza, newly elected, a 20-year veteran of labor’s civil wars in Southern California, also a regular at Labor Notes, is stepping up.
EARLY YEARS

Sal Rosselli was born and raised in Albany, New York, in the sort of Catholic family that sends sons into the clergy. Not Sal; he did enroll in Niagara University, a Catholic university, but after two years was expelled—why? For campaigning to get the Reserve Officers Training Corps off the campus. Sal went from there to the Bowery in lower Manhattan where he worked with Dorothy Day, the legendary Catholic journalist and anarchist who edited the Catholic Worker.

FULL story at link above.

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