Local man takes helm of health care workers’ union

Tyrek Lee, who grew up in Roxbury and Dorchester, is the new executive vice president of SEIU 1199, the union’s highest-ranking official in Massachusetts.

Tyrek Lee’s life in the union movement began as a member in 2002 with a job as a telephone operator at Boston Medical Center. Over the next 13 years, he worked his way up through the ranks to head one of the state’s fastest-growing locals, assuming the position of Executive Vice President of SEIU 1199 last week.

Lee filled a vacancy left by Veronica Turner, who has assumed the role as senior executive vice president for health systems with the New York-based Service Employees International Union local. Lee takes the helm as the union is in the midst of a period of extraordinary growth, having increased its membership from 12,000 when he joined to more than 52,000 members today.

Local 1199 and other SEIU unions also are at the forefront of local initiatives to raise wages of the state’s lowest-paid workers, helping to spearhead the Raise Up Massachusetts ballot petition to increase the state income tax on Massachusetts residents earning more than $1 million a year and the Fight for $15 campaign.

Lee, who has worked on campaigns as the union’s political organizer, helped build the 1199’s political arm, SEIU Community Action, a voter mobilization network active in Boston, Worcester, Lawrence, Springfield and other Massachusetts cities where 1199 represents workers.

“We’re creating and activating a voting bloc around the issues we’re concerned about,” he said.

Lee’s first union job came in 2005, when he was hired as a political organizer, two weeks before he received his high school diploma. In that role, he engaged 1199 members in the union’s political campaigns and corralled legislators into supporting the union’s priorities. In 2007, Lee worked as the union’s business agent, helping to iron out contract negotiations with the various hospitals and community health centers that employ its members.

Lee also continued to work on union campaigns, working as a field organizer on 1199’s campaign to allow personal care attendants to organize. The home health workers are hired by the people for whom they provide care and are paid by the state. Lee and other union organizers had to persuade the Legislature to allow the PCAs to have collective bargaining rights and to convince the PCAs themselves that joining 1199 would be to their advantage.

The campaign was successful. The union got 22,000 new members. The PCAs are now getting wage increases. While they make $10.38 an hour today, by 2018 their income will increase to $15 an hour.

“It’s been a long road for PCAs,” Lee says. “They have always worked in isolation. The most important thing is to give them a collective voice. Their work needs to be respected.”

Lee’s work at 1199 has earned him respect, inside and outside the union. He is a vice president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, a member of the SEIU State Council — the group that coordinates work between the various SEIU locals, and a delegate to the Greater Boston Labor Council.

While SEIU split from the AFL-CIO in 2005, along with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Farm Workers, in Massachusetts the unions are more supportive of each other’s efforts. Drawing from the ranks of service workers, the SEIU locals tend to have memberships that are more heavily immigrant, black and Latino than its sister unions in the Greater Boston Labor Council. But while the unions do not always agree on which political candidates to endorse, they do work in support of each other’s labor struggles.

Lee cites an IBEW action where workers were protesting for higher wages from Verizon. Along with building trades union members, SEIU workers targeted individual Verizon retail stores.

“We made it a joint action,” he said. “We protested in front of the stores, went into the stores and did flash mobs.”

Lee says 1199 also works cooperatively with the community hospitals where its members work, pressuring the Legislature for more support.

“We’re focused on protecting community hospitals and making reimbursement more equitable,” he said. “You have community hospitals in gateway cities providing the same services that larger hospitals provide but getting paid less.”

And 1199 and other SEIU locals also support local social justice movements, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. On Martin Luther King day, Lee and other SEIU members joined marchers protesting police brutality and violence against Muslims. They made sure demonstrators also protested in favor of raising the wages of low-income workers, steering the demonstration into a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise where protesters spoke out in favor of a $15 minimum wage.

“We see a convergence of all the movements — Black Lives Matter, immigration reform,” Lee said. “All the movements are coming to a crossroads. SEIU will be at the crossroads. We’d be fools to just advocate for nothing more than health care.”