About 30 hospitalists in Bellingham and Sedro-Woolley won the right to unionize as both PeaceHealth and Sound Physicians employees, after votes cast by the clinicians were counted on Tuesday, June 11.
These clinicians specialize in the general care of hospitalized patients at St. Joseph Medical Center and United General Medical Center, but are directly employed by Sound Physicians, a for-profit national labor management company. It’s an arrangement that the hospitalists said led them to unionize as it curtails their abilities to advocate for patients’ needs in the hospital and creates an environment that is fueling burnout.
The clinicians accepted the proposal to join the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (UAPD) with 76% of the employees voting in favor. The National Labor Relations Board is expected to certify the result in seven days.
The providers are the first within the Sound Physician network to have successfully unionized.
“We want to be at the bargaining table as soon as humanly possible,” said Joe Crane, an organizing coordinator for UAPD. “We want to start talking about the issues: about patient care, about patient load, about discharge times.”
Rachel May, a unionizing nurse practitioner at St. Joseph, said she hoped that setting some limits at the bedside would create a ripple effect, ultimately helping to “fix problems with our health care system instead of increasingly burdening bedside caregivers.”
Leading up to the vote, the clinicians were bombarded with emails and Sound Physician-led meetings encouraging them to vote against unionizing, said Meg Lelonek, a physician who has been working in various roles at St. Joseph since 2014.
This included a visit from John Birkmeyer, medical group president with Sound Physicians, as well as a labor management strategist, who sat in on the meetings taking notes, Lelonek said.
One such email from Birkmeyer to employees on May 13 concluded by saying: “I honestly believe that a decision to unionize is a step backward for your practice. I ask you again to consider voting ‘no’ and re-evaluating a year from now, after you’ve seen the full effects of the practice management changes.”
However, there were times that the situation felt unprofessional and even adversarial to Lelonek.
“It felt really aggressive and oppressive,” she said. “Also, it felt challenging to patient care … because these were all happening in the middle of our day while we were taking care of patients.”
In early May, the National Labor Relations Board ruled in favor of the employees in their effort to create a joint-employer union petition, legally connecting their labor management agency and the hospital they work at — forcing all key players to the table during negotiations.
However, Sound Physicians formally disputed the ruling on May 22.
The company alleged that the National Labor Relations Board regional director’s “decision on substantial factual issues is clearly erroneous” and that the errors impacted the employer’s rights.
The detailed, 38-page document asked for the decision to be reversed and PeaceHealth dismissed from the unionization petition.
While that filing perhaps sets the tone moving forward, it had no direct impact on the voting process.
However, Birkmeyer took a different tact after the vote count Tuesday.
“We respect our colleagues’ right to organize and engage in collective bargaining, though we feel this decision unnecessarily introduces an outside intermediary and will reduce the autonomy of the group,” Birkmeyer said in a statement to Cascadia Daily News.
“Regardless, we are confident that our hospital medicine team will continue to deliver exemplary care to patients at PeaceHealth St. Joseph’s and United.”
Lelonek said PeaceHealth had alluded that it plans to challenge the joint employer status. PeaceHealth did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We’re hoping that we can move into negotiations and hoping we can move into the next step of the process, but it may mean more legal battles for us and for our team,” Lelonek said.
If the employers contest the results within the current seven-day window, UAPD is prepared to go to battle for the clinicians.
“We have won and we are going to continue winning, no matter what they throw at us,” Crane said. “At the end of the day, these clinicians, they’re not going to take it anymore. They’re organizing and fighting back.”
Isaac Stone Simonelli is CDN’s enterprise/investigations reporter; reach him at isaacsimonelli@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 127.
