Thousands of medical residents can unionize

Academe, Jan/Feb 2000 by Maloney, Wendi

TWO DECISIONS IN NOVEMBER, ONE by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the other by the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), opened the door for tens of thousands of medical residents and interns to unionize.

The NLRB ruled that interns and residents at Boston Medical Center, the main training site for the Boston University medical school, are employees, not students, making them eligible to form unions. The decision will affect about fifty thousand interns and residents in the private sector, according to Bruce Elwell, an organizer with the Committee of Interns and Residents, which represents members in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York.

A few weeks before the NLRB decision, California's PERB came to the same conclusion: that medical interns and residents are employees rather than students. The PERB ruling will affect 3,300 doctors-in-training at five University of California teaching hospitals, who can now vote on unionization. UC officials say they will not appeal the ruling.

The two labor board rulings follow a vote in June by the American Medical Association (AMA) to authorize doctors' unions. In recent years, members of the AMA, which encompasses more than a third of the nation's practicing physicians, have raised concerns about loss of control over professional prerogatives, such as the ability to decide on patient care. They attribute many of the problems to constraints imposed by managed care. The November-December issue of Academe, titled "Managed Care and the Health-Care Crisis," covers the topic in detail.-WM