Yet another example of our atrocious, inhumane "medical" system. Ever wonder why doctors are arrogant and insensitive? One reason is the training grinder they have gone through.
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https://inthesetimes.com/working/ent...a_real_worker/

Portside Date: October 29, 2013
Author: Sarah Jaffe
Date of Source: Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Working In These Times / In These Times

Resident physicians work long, grueling hours as they finish their medical training. Eighty hours a week or more is typical. During that time, under the supervision of an attending physician, they have major responsibilities - making medical decisions, treating patients and performing surgeries.

Much of their work is done independent of their supervisors, notes John Paul Graff, a second-year resident at the University of California, Irvine. "You've got one internal medicine attending and probably seven residents that are working. That one attending, they're not seeing every single patient, doing every single chart dictation. There's seven residents who are delegated to that."

For that, the residents are typically paid $40,000 to $50,000 a year.
Hospitals get a great deal: Residents are required to do between three and six years of training depending on their speciality, and while they're doing that training, they're a lot cheaper than a hospitalist, who might make $200,000. And the promise of that future fat salary keeps residents hustling through these broke, overworked years.

It's a recipe for exhaustion and exploitation that led Graff and his colleagues to think a union could help. He sees the union as an opportunity for residents to speak to each other, compare problems, and negotiate with the hospital over common issues rather than struggling alone.

The Committee of Interns and Residents at SEIU already represents more than 13,000 medical residents across the country. But two hospital systems - UC Irvine and, across the country, the Mount Sinai Health System in New York - are fighting the unionization effort, arguing that residents aren't really workers. UC Irvine has specifically argued that interns (first year residents) are still students, despite the fact that they receive salaries and benefits, perform many procedures with "indirect supervision"--meaning the attending physician need only be somewhere in the same facility--and work up to 16-hour- long shifts. The university has also argued that doctors on rotation and on fellowships shouldn't be allowed to join the union, submitting in a court brief (provided to In These Times by CIR) that fellows "do not share a community of interest" with other residents because they are in a different training program, and that rotation disqualifies a resident as an employee of UC Irvine because she does some of her residency at an affiliated hospital that is not directly part of the UC system. Similar arguments have been made by the administration at Elmhurst hospital - a city hospital whose residency program is run through the Mount Sinai School of Medicine - though official court briefs are not available yet.

"There's no way I'm still a student under any circumstance," a resident in pediatrics at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens, N.Y. who wished to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from administrators, tells In These Times. "The way they explain it to us, we are like a hybrid: not really a student but not a full doctor, because they say that everything we do has to be signed off by our attending. I feel like that's the same at any other job - that's why you have managers, to supervise the work. We have a lot of autonomy. Of course I have to report to my supervisor, but at the same time we work independently."

Residents also note that in addition to the core duties they perform, a Supreme Court decision held that they are indeed employees responsible for paying Social Security taxes.

The struggle to unionize
The UC Irvine residents filed for union recognition as an independent union in 2011, and voted to affiliate with CIR in June of this year. Some 600 workers would be represented, including fellows, residents at multiple levels of pay and experience, and doctors on rotation who work at several different hospitals while they complete their program.

But the hospital has challenged it, and the case is now before California's Public Employment Relations Board. The ruling could come sometime this month, and if it overturns previous decisions about the employment status of residents, could impact other public sector physicians in the state. ...

Read the rest at the link at the beginning of the article