Once accustomed to a status outside the usual management-labor hierarchy, many health professionals now feel as put upon as any clock-punching worker.

Dr. John Wust does not come off as a labor agitator. A longtime obstetrician-gynecologist from Louisiana with a penchant for bow ties, Dr. Wust spent the first 15 years of his career as a partner in a small business — that is, running his own practice with colleagues.

Long after he took a position at Allina Health, a large nonprofit health care system based in Minnesota, in 2009, he did not see himself as the kind of employee who might benefit from collective bargaining.

But that changed in the months leading up to March, when his group of more than 100 doctors at an Allina hospital near Minneapolis voted to unionize. Dr. Wust, who has spoken with colleagues about the potential benefits of a union, said doctors were at a loss on how to ease their unsustainable workload because they had less input at the hospital than ever before.

“The way the system is going, I didn’t see any other solution legally available to us,” Dr. Wust said.

  • Aesculapius@kbin.social
    216·
    1 year ago

    Physician here.
    Medicine is one of the few professions in which capital is tied to labor (at least of the licensed independent clinicians). Hospitals, clinics, etc., can’t run any test, provide any service, perform any surgery, without a physician (or other licenses clinicians) order.

    Health systems rely on their physicians to drive clinical practice. Physicians are the experts after all. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, but at its core, it is a partnership. This partnership certainly has it’s ups and downs. But this is what happens when the health system forgets that it is a partnership.

    • SoylentBlake@lemm.ee
      242·
      1 year ago

      Buddy, that’s every job where someone earns a paycheck.

      If someone pays you a paycheck, you are labor. If you depend on that paycheck, they are capital, you are the proletariat.

      We’ve been in the midst of a capital strike for 4 decades now, rebranded as neoliberalism, where capital only reinvests capital if it absolutely must, and then just the minimum. Every personal passion, every altruistic drive, or careers that give a sense of meaning will that same meaning held hostage and weaponized to silent dissent.

      Complacency is complicity. The rallying cries have been handed down thru all of history

      As long as one free man is jailed … First they came for …

      Society, writ large, is a partnership. Highly specialized fields of study only exist because the cost to bring them in existence can be spread out amongst the bottom of the pyramid. If you’re worked hard, learned hard and lucky enough you might be able to be at the top of it.

      But you’re just a part of the machine, not the driver or designer of it. The proper attitude at heights is gratitude and humility, being honored to have the chance to follow your passions, because how many below you, for whatever reason, had theirs compromised, stolen or confiscated. The brain outside the body isn’t even worth its caloric density.

      I’m proud you’re fighting back and I’ll stand in a protest line with you - even if that means state violence, and it often does. The police are mercenaries for the wealthy, whom you’re at odds with, that means the police are not your allies here (some random cool sheriff notwithstanding).

      We are all people here. We all have value independent of what capitalism rewards. No one is inherently better than anyone else. We are all just trying to live and be decent people. Don’t forget that.

      • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        I think their point was that in many fields, if people strike then the employer can somewhat easily find scabs to do the work in place of those striking, because everyone needs money to live. But in the medical field, along with a couple others, strikes can be even more effective because the employers legally can’t fill roles with just anyone who will do the work- they need someone with a MASSIVE amount of education and certification, which gives doctors even more bargaining power that they can be leveraging if they work together

        • SoylentBlake@lemm.ee
          11·
          1 year ago

          Thanks! I like lemmy! It reminds me of old reddit. Like 2010 reddit. Done right it feels like individual forums all within the same building. Done wrong, well, feels like reddit now. Or Facebook. Saccharine and sterile, emotionless money grab. As inviting as a room with drop ceilings and flickering fluorescent lighting, all the intuitive ambiance of chemotherapy.

          So if that was meant as a knock, I don’t see how.

      • SCB@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        The police are mercenaries for the wealthy, whom you’re at odds with

        Ah yes everyone knows doctors are poor.

        • SoylentBlake@lemm.ee
          21·
          1 year ago

          In comparison to the shareholders who own the hospitals?

          Yes, yes they are, it’s not even close.