Fired Up and Ready to Fight

This most recent fight to save Downstate has been part of a much longer struggle for my colleagues and me to be treated fairly—and I know struggle. I’m from Trinidad, and before I came to the United States I worked for a company called Metal Box Trinidad Limited and was a member of the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union. Protesting our working conditions and wages, we saw bitter struggle, even sleeping outside in tents to show our commitment and that we knew what our labor was worth. That’s the knowledge and the fire that I have brought to this fight for healthcare in central Brooklyn.

I first worked at SUNY Downstate in 1995 as an employee of a moving company. Then I joined the hospital staff in 1997 as a cleaner. In the decades since, I’ve had many roles. I have been in the IT department for many years and was promoted to IT supervisor in 2016, but I’m still fighting to get paid as a supervisor. And I’m doing the work of two or three people on a regular basis. Instead of hiring enough staff, the hospital gave me a phone to carry around. If someone calls the IT office and no one is available, it comes to my phone. I’m supposed to take the call, wherever I am in the building. But how can I help someone who is calling from home when I’m on another assignment?

Beyond insufficient staff, another ongoing IT issue is our need to upgrade our electronic health record system. All of the health facilities around us use Epic, which allows hospitals to centralize patient information across multiple sites. But we don’t have it—and even if we did, we don’t have the IT staff to support it. That makes everyone’s work more difficult and makes it harder to provide the best care to our patients.

Administrators have made bad financial decisions over the years, and the employees have paid the price. Before SUNY acquired Victory Memorial Hospital in 2008 and University Hospital of Brooklyn at Long Island College Hospital in 2011, our hospital was more profitable, but around 2012 administrators started telling us that they were losing money. We have been told repeatedly that there’s not enough money to pay us fairly; every time, we have had to put our foot down and march around the hospital so they would hear us. There have also been other kinds of financial mismanagement, including the former chairman of emergency medicine stealing more than $1.4 million from the hospital.¹ We have a lot of reasons not to trust management when they tell us what the hospital can and can’t afford while we’re working so hard to keep the hospital going for our community.

When they said in 2024 they were closing the hospital, we weren’t going to sit there and take it. We were fired up and ready to fight. We rallied in the cold and traveled to Albany for public hearings to stand up for our hospital. Downstate is not only our workplace, it’s an essential part of this community. Central Brooklyn was my first home in the United States, and Downstate is still the hospital where I receive care. The SUNY chancellor tried to say that Downstate’s patients could just shift to Kings County Hospital across the street, but Kings County is already overwhelmed. I recently went there because I had a hip problem and they had a specific kind of equipment that could help, but I waited in the emergency room for 24 hours without being seen. Finally, I went home. When I still had pain a couple of days later, I came to Downstate and was taken care of in a few hours.

This community is behind SUNY Downstate. Even though we won the funding we need, we know the struggle is ongoing. We’re going to be relentless until they renovate the hospital properly. Brooklyn needs Downstate. It’s not just about a fancy new building—it’s about our survival.

Anthony Holder is an IT supervisor who has worked at SUNY Downstate for more than 25 years. He is also a United University Professions Downstate Medical Center Chapter delegate. 

Endnote

1. L. Stack, “SUNY Downstate Hospital Official Sentenced for Stealing $1.4 Million,” New York Times, August 6, 2025, nytimes.com/2025/08/06/nyregion/suny-downstate-hospital-official-theft.html.

[Photo credit: Mike Lisi / United University Professions]