June 2, 2021

One of Sylvester Stallone’s early movie roles was as a union organizer for FIST—a clever acronym for the fictitious Federation of Interstate Truckers. Meant as a rough allusion to the real-life Teamsters, the film portrays the early years of unionization in America, including all that went with it: violence by the owners, violence by the unions, and hard-nosed negotiations. In the end, Sly’s character morphs from a once idealistic champion of the little man to a jaded and corrupt labor baron.

It is sad when relations between fellow humans devolve into strife, leading to hard feelings and demoralization. While violence rarely erupts in today’s business world, there are still those occasions when owner and employee are at odds. Sometimes, the employee resentment—whether reasonable or not—can transform into serious action. In recent days, we have seen such action on the part of employees bubble over in American hospitals. Let’s look at two notable examples.

Striking a Pose

Back in March of this year, the nurses of St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts walked off the job in an effort to bring attention to what they claim are unsafe staffing policies by the facility. Specifically, the nurses report seeing a rise in patient falls, preventable bed sores, and delays in medication administration and treatments—all due, they say, to a lack of sufficient staffing.

As they enter their 10th week of the strike, the nurses are being faced with a harsh reality. Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, which owns the hospital, has recently announced their intention to replace these striking workers with new hires. Indeed, Tenet has begun posting positions for RNs on job forum websites as a means to replace the nurses or force them back to work.

Fully expecting this move, the St. Vincent nurses continue their picketing, believing their cause is just. They are not alone. The strike has been widely hailed throughout the nursing community and the country, which may be one reason the nurses are holding the line. However, hopes of renewing dialog with the health system were dashed this past Friday when Tenet refused the nurses’ offer to get back to the negotiating table. At an earlier meeting with their members on Thursday, the nurses unanimously rejected the hospital’s latest offer, as it once again failed to provide the staffing improvements and other protections nurses felt they needed to safely care for patients, according to a source for the nurse negotiating team.

Notably, the nurses have received significant support among high-powered politicians and community advocates, such as the entire Worcester City Council, the Worcester state legislative delegation, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Edward Markey, Congressman Jim McGovern, Congresswoman Lori Trahan, and Attorney General Maura Healy. This is not an insignificant development, and hospital administrators and boards of directors would be well advised to take into account the potentiality of similar actions occurring in other hospitals where the pandemic has created difficult conditions for clinical staff. According to one source, nurses have filed more than 600 official “unsafe staffing” reports in the last year alone.

Donning the Suit

Another concern that has the growing potential for creating dissatisfaction in the healthcare workplace revolves around the mandating of the mRNA or viral vector jab (commonly referred to as the COVID vaccine). As an example of this, it has been reported that 117 employees have filed suit against Houston Methodist—a system that includes an academic medical center and six community hospitals—in response to it requiring all of its employees receive the COVID injection.

According to ABC News, the legal action, which was filed May 28, alleges the hospital is “illegally requiring its employees to be injected with an experimental vaccine as a condition of employment.” The plaintiffs allege that the Texas-based health system is violating Texas public policy and the 1947 Nuremberg Code, a medical ethics convention promulgated in response to Nazi medical experiments on humans where consent had not been granted.

Houston Methodist President and CEO Marc Boom, MD, issued a statement in which he declared, in part:

It is unfortunate that the few remaining employees who refuse to get vaccinated and put our patients first are responding in this way. It is legal for healthcare institutions to mandate vaccines, as we have done with the flu vaccine since 2009. The COVID-19 vaccines have proven through rigorous trials to be very safe and very effective and are not experimental. More than 165 million people in the U.S. alone have received vaccines against COVID-19, and this has resulted in the lowest numbers of infections in our country and in the Houston region in more than a year. We proudly stand by our employees and our mission to protect our patients.
Whether you agree with Dr. Bloom’s assertions or with those who have warned against taking the COVID jab, the issue is that the potential for legal action against hospitals that mandate the injection is real and perhaps growing. It will be interesting to see the results of such suits in the days ahead.

To sum up, hospital employees can be pushed into taking action that could potentially cause embarrassment, bad publicity, or an interruption in care. The reasonable approach on the part of hospital management would seem to be to do all they can to anticipate these potential pushbacks and to develop policies that take employees’ most critical concerns (e.g., patient safety, clinical burnout, personal health choices) into serious consideration. Owner and employee will not always end up in ultimate agreement, but both need each other, and there’s nothing wrong with sitting down to get the other person’s point of view.

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