Nearly a thousand residents and fellows in four Brown-affiliated hospitals across the Brown University Health and Care New England health systems unionized last January amid concerns about working conditions and compensation. The residents and fellows are represented by the Committee for Interns and Residents, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union.
But as of Tuesday, Care New England — which operates Kent, Butler and Women and Infants hospitals — has tentatively approved approximately a fourth of proposals across its hospitals, except for Kent Hospital, according to Renée Hamel, a spokesperson for CIR.
Fifteen percent of proposals at Kent Hospital have been tentatively agreed upon as of Wednesday afternoon, according to Care New England spokesperson Doreen Scanlon Gavigan.
The speed of the bargaining process at Rhode Island Hospital — which is operated by Brown University Health — has soared in comparison, with tentative agreements on “almost all” non-economic proposals as of Friday, Hamel wrote.
One of the reasons for the disparity, union organizers said, is that Care New England is negotiating separately at each of its three hospitals instead of at a single bargaining table.
“It certainly feels like a concerted effort to try to keep us divided,” said Alex Pardi, a family medicine resident at Kent Hospital and a member of the union bargaining team, in an interview with The Herald. “Our bargaining power, collectively, in their eyes, will be diminished if we're fragmented.”
Gavigan wrote in a statement to The Herald that Kent, Butler and Women and Infant’s hospitals “are separate hospitals with distinct bargaining units.”
“Each operates under unique clinical, operational and financial circumstances,” Gavigan wrote. “Therefore, they cannot be negotiated under one collective contract.”
Pardi said that, despite Care New England’s stance that the programs at each of its three hospitals are unique, the medical service provider “would send the exact same copy-and-pasted replies to all three sites.”
At one bargaining session at Kent Hospital, the Care New England team “sent a proposal that straight up had the name Women and Infants Hospital on everything,” Pardi said. “It just felt so ludicrous and just laughable.”
Gavigan, the Care New England spokesperson, did not directly respond to that claim.
According to Pardi, the purportedly duplicated replies led residents and fellows at Kent, Butler and Women and Infants hospitals to jointly send a petition to Care New England requesting “to try to push for one bargaining table.”
The petition received signatures from over 150 Care New England residents and was delivered in December.
The hospital service provider is not required to jointly negotiate, said William Herbert, a labor expert who is the executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College.
Herbert said that, because the union initially filed to separately represent residents and fellows at each of the four hospitals, “there is no legal obligation” for Care New England to meet at one bargaining table.
“There are arguments that the (CIR) has raised in support of that, but that doesn’t require the employer to agree to it,” Herbert added.
Care New England could voluntarily come to a single bargaining table, according to Herbert. Alternatively, CIR could file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board — a process Herbert said “could result in serious delays” to negotiations.
Raphaela Posner ’18 MD’23, a third-year resident in a program in pediatrics, adult psychiatry and child psychiatry, told The Herald that patient care can be negatively impacted by the long hours that residents work and the size of the paychecks they receive. Posner is based at Rhode Island Hospital but sometimes works across Care New England facilities.
“When I’m in the hospital — if my family member were there — I would hope that the doctor who’s seeing them is able to be present (and) is not thinking about when are they going to get that next check,” Posner said.
Pardi said that his current compensation plan has been “crippling in a lot of ways.”
“When you couple the size of those monthly payments sometimes with the cost of living here, there’s months where I genuinely break even,” he said. Last January, Providence was named the least affordable city in the United States by a Redfin report.
In a statement, Kelly Brennan, a spokesperson for Brown University Health, wrote that the medical service provider “remains confident in the process” of contract negotiations at Rhode Island Hospital and “appreciates the ongoing engagement and support of our staff.”
Posner added that all hospitals in the region — including those operated by Care New England — “are really closely interconnected.”
“We’re really in this together as a health care system and as residents in Rhode Island, regardless of which system we work for,” Posner said. “But there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
James Libresco is a senior staff writer covering staff & student labor. He is a first-year student from Alexandria, Va. studying political science. In his free time, he can be found playing basketball, meditating, or loosing in Among Us.
