Resident physicians are unionizing around the country. Most recently, residents at University of Vermont Medical Center , Stanford Medical Center, and Keck School of Medicine of USC all voted to join the Committee of Interns and Residents , which is part of the larger Service Employees International Union . These wins come despite ongoing pushback from the hospital bosses. This resistance is coming because hospitals know unionized resident physicians will be harder to exploit.
Still, though, only about one seventh of the over 145,000 resident physicians in the United States today are unionized. But 100 percent of residents should have a union. As we have, residents are cheap labor in an exploitative, for-profit healthcare system. In many ways, residency training itself serves to condition physicians to act as tools for a capitalist healthcare system constantly looking to cut staff and cut costs to increase profits.
We undoubtedly need more resident unions, and as the number of resident unions grows, the most combative sectors of resident physicians need to explore how to push further beyond demands of workplace improvements and towards questioning the exploitative dynamic of residency itself and more largely the dynamics of the for profit healthcare system. For example, as we have, residents often work 80-100 hours per week during their training.
Resident mobilizations should go beyond the limits of medical residency. Resident physicians should fight together in their workplaces to challenge the exploitative healthcare system as a whole and push their unions to actually be fighting organs to fight for a better healthcare system. We see some glimmers of this in some of the current resident unionizing efforts where workers want to push for broader improvements at the workplace.
Good idea. Currently, US health care is strictly for the wealthy only.
They need to challenge health care insurance plans that let unlicensed people determine care already given was unnecessary (therefore not covered) because the patient survived because of the care they got.
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