Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the BMC Decision

The December 1999 issue of CIR News announces the National Labor Relations Board ruling in favor of the residents at Boston Medical Center.

If you ask residents if they are students or employees, most will point to their long hours, job responsibilities, and paycheck and choose “employee” without a second thought.

Yet for decades, this question has been the basis for legal challenges from hospitals to the right of interns and residents to join a union.

December 2009 marks the tenth anniversary of a landmark decision granting employee rights to housestaff training in the nation’s private teaching hospitals. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled in favor of CIR residents at Boston Medical Center, effectively overturning the 23-year-old Cedar Sinai decision which held that residents were primarily students without the right to form a union. Housestaff in most public hospitals, which are governed by state labor law, have had the right to unionize for decades, but the BMC decision dramatically changed the situation for housestaff in private-sector hospitals.

 

Then-CIR President Dr. Ladi Haroona hailed the decision, saying it simply acknowledged the reality of resident life. “It is obvious on its face that if you receive a regular paycheck, complete with payroll deductions to the federal government, and you spend upwards of 85 percent of your time performing those duties for which you are paid, that you are primarily an employee.”

What changed in the years following the BMC decision? Nearly 2,000 residents joined CIR and won first contracts at St.Vincent’s, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt, Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn Hospital, Brookdale University Hospital, and Our Lady of Mercy (now Montefiore North) in New York, and Oakland Children’s Hospital in California.

However, the election of President George W. Bush in 2000 led to a number of anti-union appointees to the NLRB. In this hostile climate, CIR did not want to give the NLRB the excuse to re-open the case and strip away employee status from resident physicians. Instead, CIR focused primarily on organizing public-sector hospitals.

But now, with the election of President Barack Obama, the organizing pendulum has begun to swing back to the private sector. For residents at St. Barnabas Medical Center in the Bronx, the BMC decision extends the hope that their own organizing campaign will be successful. “These residents want to join CIR,” notes current CIR President Dr. L. Toni Lewis, “but their votes have been impounded, as the hospital challenges their employee rights once again. The BMC Decision is as important to residents today as it was in 1999. We will prevail.”