NEWBURGH – Optum workers throughout the Hudson Valley here, Town of Wallkill, Fishkill, West Nyack, Yorktown Heights, Carmel and Brewster stepped out in the rainy, overcast weather Monday to demand a fair contract and better working conditions.
Optum Health, the nation’s largest employer of physicians under United Health Group, took over Caremount in 2023, and many workers voted to join 1199EIU. In 2025, 1,100 at Crystal Run also voted to join the union.
A first contract is being sought, and workers are seeking benefits such as fair wages, secure pension plans, safe staffing conditions and affordable health care.
“This community organization gives back the community every day,” said Ken O’Brien, a Radiographic technologist in Newburgh.
“We have unionized here. We have found that we are going to have a voice as to what happens to what was Crystal Run Healthcare, this community organization that gives back to the community every day I love providing care to my neighbors and my friends and my family and my coworkers and this has been bought out and this is how it is being dismantled by corporate interests and we want what we are entitled to,” he told Mid-Hudson News. “We built this practice. We want a contract.”
O’Brien and handful of others raised their signs to passing motorists across from Walmart on Route 300 on the corner of Crystal Run’s facility. Some motorists honked their horns in support while others just pushed through on this busy, crowded boulevard.
Congressman Pat Ryan, state senators James Skoufis and Pete Harckham and assemblymen Jonathan Jacobson and Matt Slater were expected to join the picketers at some of the various locations.
O’Brien and the others were simply seeking fair wages and benefits from an employer they feel is just looking at the bottom line.
We sought comment from Optum headquarters and received none by the time we published this story.
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