Just take a look at the current landscape of union organizing, where the education sector is only one site of the growing solidarity among professional workers. In the health-care industry, doctors are responding to the HMO-driven debasement of professional standards by joining unions in unprecedented numbers. Like education, health care serves a social mission that is incompatible with fashionable, bottom-line management schemes. And like education professionals, doctors are learning that the best way to control their profession and maintain their livelihoods is to join with colleagues in independent, legally-recognized collective bargaining units.
Following are excerpts from a February 4, 1999, New York Times article by Steven Greenhouse about doctors joining unions. The doctors' reasons for organizing make clear a simple truth that Mr. Murphy should remember next time the News-Gazette calls: Unions are for people who work.
"Most of the union activity is among salaried staff doctors at hospitals, both public and private. Unions for these physicians, as well as residents and interns, are negotiating contracts with the hospitals that cover wages, hours and working conditions.
"With more than 90 percent of the nation's physicians having at least one contract with a managed care company, many doctors cite a loss in their decision-making authority and a drop in reimbursements in explaining why they want to join a union. Medical experts expect the trend to gain further momentum because 80 percent of recent medical school graduates are taking salaried jobs with HMOs, clinics or hospitals.
"'It's becoming geometrically accelerated,' said Barry Liebowitz, president of the Doctors Council, a union that represents 3,400 doctors, most of them attending physicians at New York City's municipal hospitals. 'Medicine has gone from a mom-and-pop operation to corporatization, which has left the provider, the doctor, out of medical decision-making.'"
"'The way medicine is going right now and the way patients are being treated by managed care is just terrible, and someone has to stand up for proper health care,' Dr. Moore said. 'I don't see a physicians union particularly like unions of the past, where we're going to strike and carry placards. It's primarily to get the message out that we have to improve health care.'"