Thousands of resident doctors in Philadelphia want to unionize

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Thousands of resident doctors across five major hospital systems in the Philadelphia region want to unionize.

Residents from Jefferson Health, Einstein Healthcare Network, Temple Health, ChristianaCare and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia rallied in front of the former site of Hahnemann Hospital Thursday night to say that they want union contracts with benefits. Among their requests are safer staffing levels, better sick leave policies, and limits on working hours, which can sometimes be more than 24 hours a shift. They say the current working conditions make it hard for them to provide good patient care.

This move comes amid other union efforts at hospitals in the region and around the country. In October, residents at Penn Medicine ratified a union contract, making them the first group to unionize their residency program in Pennsylvania. In July, doctors at ChristianaCare in Delaware voted to form a union. Other resident doctors across the country are organizing to form unions as well.

The residents in the Philadelphia region are organizing with the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR/SEIU), the same organization that resident doctors at Penn Medicine joined. The organization has doubled in size over the past three years to represent more than 34,000 medical residents and fellows across the country, said Dr. Taylor Walker, a family medicine doctor in Boston and the organization’s president.

“The unspoken truth is that we residents and fellows serve as cheap labor for the hospital,” Walker said at the rally. “They can pay us pennies on the dollar because they know that we cannot do the job that we have trained for over a decade to do unless we finish residency. And that means they feel entitled to treat us however they want because your future and your career depends on you suffering and making it through. But what these hospitals don’t understand is that because they do not function without residents and fellows, they have handed you guys, they have handed us all of the power.”

WHYY News contacted all the health systems in question and, by time of publication, Jefferson Health wrote back with a statement saying that their residency program has competitive wages and benefits and exceptional medical training, and that “while we respect our residents’ right to explore unionization, we believe that a direct working relationship between our health system’s team members and our leaders results in the most empowered and productive teams.”

ChristianaCare wrote that they provide an “unmatched learning experience” for residents, are proud of them for taking expert care of patients, recognize their right to vote on a union, and “are committed to providing accurate information to help our residents make an informed decision.”

Residents said that because they do much of the work at hospitals, current working conditions mean that patient care suffers.

Dr. Natalie LaBossier, a pediatric resident at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, spoke at the rally about not having the time to get to know her patients and their families well.

“I thought of all the parents I didn’t call as often as I wanted to. All the bedsides I had to rush away from because I was bogged down by tasks not within my scope. All the times I wish I could stay to learn how to do an important procedure or to have a life-altering conversation with a child and their family but couldn’t because the time between my shifts wasn’t even enough to get a full night’s sleep,” LaBossier said. “Even more frightening, I thought about all the near misses, the errors made by trainees who were sleep-deprived, caring for too many patients for far too long. I thought of the times when the decisions I’d made at hour 22 of work became a blur. This is not the medicine I imagined practicing when I chose to be a pediatrician. ”

The residents are inspired by the union contract that their counterparts at Penn Medicine secured, said Dr. Ilan Ben-Ami, an emergency room resident at Temple Hospital.

“Just seeing that they succeeded … is a really important encouragement and a big boost,” he said. “They found a way to work with the hospital to improve conditions. And if they can do it, then I think any hospital can find a way to improve conditions.”

He said that residents and his supervisors share the same goal of providing the best patient care, so he is hopeful that they can work together on a union contract.

State and local elected officials joined the residents at the rally, including City Council members Jamie Gauthier, Isaiah Thomas, Rue Landau, Nicolas O’Rourke, Mark Squilla; and state representative Rick Krajewski, who represents parts of West Philadelphia.

“The resident physicians who steward our world-class institutions deserve world-class wages and world-class contracts,” said Gauthier, echoing what she said earlier this year in support of the union campaign from Penn Medicine residents.

The resident organizers had been working on forming a union for a while but moved faster following the election of President-elect Donald Trump. They hope to hold a union election before Jan. 20, when President-elect Trump could appoint a new general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, who could be less friendly to unions.