POTSDAM -- About 240 LPNs and techs at Canton Potsdam Hospital will picket the hospital at 50 Leroy St. and at the hospital’s Canton campus at 80 E. Main St. today (Friday, Oct. 11) from 3-6 p.m.

The workers are protesting hospital management's refusal to bargain over unaffordable health insurance costs for employees, said a press release from 1199SEIU, United Healthcare Workers East, the union representing them.

“The increases to our family health insurance premiums are unaffordable for most of us, they are even more than the raises we would get,” said Dana Thomas, an MRI technologist at the hospital, in the press release.

“How can we ever get ahead if our entire wage increases have to go directly to our health insurance costs? We don’t want to move backward,” Thomas said.

St. Lawrence Health System, currently in the processes of taking over Massena Hospital and granting them $8 million, has refused to try to reach a compromise with workers in the LPN and tech bargaining unit, the union said in the press release.