Temple Hospital resident physicians have become Philly’s second group of doctors to unionize this week
The vote was 425-11 in favor of a union of resident physicians and fellows at Temple University Hospital.
Resident physicians and fellows at Temple University Hospital have voted to unionize, becoming the second group of Philly-area physicians this week to join the Committee of Interns and Residents.
The vote, taken on Thursday, was 425-11 in favor of a union, a spokesperson from CIR, which is a division of the Service Employees International Union, wrote in a statement.
Sarah Bart, a Temple resident, called the vote “a win for Philly” in a statement from CIR.
“It’s time to put patients back at the center of our health-care system,” she wrote. “We won our union, now we are preparing our campaign for a fair contract that puts resources in patient care and supports physicians’ and patients’ well-being.”
Two other groups of Temple residents based at Fox Chase Cancer Center and Chestnut Hill Hospital will also hold separate votes in the coming week.
Temple has “a long and extensive history working with many different unions,” the nonprofit health system said in a statement.
“We are committed to working with CIR within our ability to maintain financial stability to provide our patients and community with the high-quality care that they expect and deserve today and in the years ahead,” the statement read.
In November, residents from Temple joined their counterparts at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Jefferson’s Einstein Healthcare Network, and the Delaware-based ChristianaCare health system to announce plans to unionize.
Since December, residents at each health system have held individual union votes. CHOP residents and fellows voted against joining a union by 17 votes late last month, but Einstein physicians voted 356-35 on Wednesday to unionize.
ChristianaCare held the first of two voting windows on Thursday and will hold a second next week.
Residents at the cadre of unionizing hospitals said they’d been inspired by a wave of labor organizing among physicians around the country. Residents at Penn Medicine and the Rutgers University health system reached their first contracts with their employers last year. And ChristianaCare attending physicians are also unionized.
Resident physicians, who are completing the final phase of their medical training, typically work grueling schedules — up to 80-hour weeks — for relatively low pay, about $61,000 a year. In announcing plans to unionize, residents in Philadelphia cited those long hours and what they described as understaffing at their hospitals that affects patient care.