St. Barnabas Residents Celebrate the Results of the Vote - The count was 119-2 in favor of CIR

The National Labor Relations Board has certified CIR as the exclusive bargaining agent for the resident physicians at St. Barnabas Hospital. Click here to see the certification notice.

According to the notice, the housestaff represented by CIR will include all interns, residents and fellows, including chief residents, employed by St. Barnabas Hospital.

Residents are excited to have a stronger voice in the hospital through CIR.

“The approval of union status will not only strengthen our ability to make improvements, but ultimately will allow us to better serve our patients and our community,” said Dr. Wanda Espinoza, an Emergency Medicine resident. “It’s a win-win for residents and also for our patients, and therefore the hospital through which we provide our services.”

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) General Counsel reported Friday, June 11, 2010 that residents overwhelmingly voted in favor of joining the Committee of Interns and Residents:

A tally of ballots cast by interns and residents at St. Barnabas Hospital in New York
today found 119 in favor of joining the Committee of Interns and Residents, Local 1957,
SEIU, and two against. An additional 47 ballots were challenged.
The election was held in June, 2009, but the ballots were impounded rather than counted
when St. Barnabas filed an appeal of the election to the National Labor Relations Board
in Washington. The employer argued that interns and residents are not entitled to union
representation because they are not statutory employees, based on a 2004 Board ruling on
graduate teaching assistants. The Board denied review on June 3, setting the stage for
today’s vote count.

On June 8, Assemblyman Michael Benjamin released a public statement urging the hospital to respect the NLRB’s ruling that the resident physicians are statutory employees with the right to unionize.

“I have supported the resident physicians seeking to organize as a union from the beginning. You only need to look at the hours they work and how much they mean to the patients they treat, to realize they’re employees with full employee rights,” Assemblyman Benjamin said.

Read the press statement here.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a major decision June 3, holding that hospital interns and resident physicians have the right to organize and form a union. Although residents were granted the right to organize in 1999 under Boston Medical Center (330 NLRB 152) when the NLRB ruled that medical interns and residents are statutory employees, St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, New York contested that right, arguing that its frontline healthcare providers were “students” and not entitled to the rights of traditional employees.

For the last two years, St. Barnabas Hospital’s 280 residents have fought for the right to form a union. On January 13, 2009 the overwhelming majority- 89%- petitioned the hospital administration to join the Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR)/ SEIU Healthcare as their exclusive bargaining agent, but the hospital refused to recognize the union.

On May 22, 2009, Region 2 of the NLRB ruled that physicians have the right to form a union and should proceed with a secret ballot election within 30 days. The residents participated in an NLRB authorized election on June 18, 2009, but the hospital appealed the decision, and the votes were impounded before they could be counted.

In its June 3rd, 2010 decision, the NLRB denies St. Barnabas Hospital’s request to review the decision made by Region 2 of the NLRB, paving the way for the residents’ ballots to be counted nearly a year to the day after they were cast. The one-page decision references the 1999 Boston Medical Center decision, declaring in it “the Board held that medical interns and residents, or house staff, are statutory employees with a right to organize under the Act.  That decision, which remains the law, is directly on point.”

“This is the first time in over a decade that the question of whether resident physicians who provide patient care day in and day out in our nation’s teaching hospitals are students or employees has been addressed by the NLRB,” said Dr. Farbod Raiszadeh, President of the Committee of Interns and Residents/SEIU Healthcare.  “Their answer is as clear and unambiguous today as it was in 1999 when they decided in our union’s favor for the Boston Medical Center decision.  Residents physicians are employees who deserve to have a voice in the workplace through full collective bargaining rights.”



St. Barnabas staff were excited to see that the hospital put two more sorely-needed EKG machines on the floors in April. 

Resident physicians at the hospital have been raising concerns about outdated and broken equipment (including EKG machines) for over a year.  In June 2009 the Tremont Tribune ran an article highlighting the residents’ concerns about equipment and understaffing.

Residents plan to keep pushing for measures to improve patient care and work conditions in the hospital. They hope there will be many more improvements to come once they have a voice as part of the Committee of Interns and Residents.