By Doug Cunningham

Chicago area nurses represented by the National Nurses Organizing Committee/ California Nurses Association have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike at the Cook County Bureau of Health Services. Talks are scheduled for today to continue to try to reach agreement on a fair contract for the nurses. No actual strike date has been set. Ninety seven percent of the roughly 1800 RN's at three hospitals, more than 20 community clinics, the Cook County jail in Chicago, four public health offices and the juvenile detention center voted to authorize the strike. Safe staffing levels and patient care protections are the central issues.

The labor-management partnership of health care giant Kaiser-Permanente and its unions has reached the largest private-sector contract agreement of the year, covering 82,000 employees nationwide and providing significant increases in wages and benefits.

Kaiser-Permanente Senior vice president Leslie Margolin:

[Margolin] "This agreement is good for Kaiser-Permanente workers, it's good for our patients and our members, it's good for our purchaser groups, and it's good for the communities that we serve."

The agreement is receiving overwhelming support from union members voting this week, and the contract is expected to take effect Saturday. Peter deCicco, Executive Director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, says the labor-management partnership at Kaiser-Permanente is a huge improvement over the cost-cutting seen in most labor struggles:

The seven-year struggle by SEIU1199 to organize Yale New Haven Hospital's 1,800 service workers has heated up in recent months. Both sides claim to support the right of workers to organize and have been trading salvos on local television and in newspapers. Melinda Tuhus reports from New Haven:

More than half the hospital's nurse's aides, housekeepers, custodians and secretaries have signed a union card. And the hospital says it supports their right to unionize, according to spokesman Vin Petrini.

[Petrini]: We support their right to do that through the National labor Relations Board.