Residents and fellows at one of New York's biggest hospitals are unionizing. Doctors-in-training at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx overwhelmingly voted to join the Committee of Interns and Residents, or CIR/SEIU, by an 82% supermajority earlier this week.
CIR/SEIU is the country’s largest union for hospital residents, interns and fellows – often collectively called house staff. It represents about 24,000 workers nationwide.
Montefiore has been a hotbed of union activity over the last year. Workers with the New York State Nurses Association at Montefiore went on strike for three days in January, ultimately winning better pay and improved staffing ratios. Physician assistants at the hospital also successfully formed a union in November. Though Montefiore residents announced their intent to unionize in November 2022, the hospital chose not to voluntarily recognize the residents' union weeks later.
Like other medical workers across New York City, Montefiore residents and fellows cite concerns over understaffing and long hours, and are calling for better compensation. Residents also claim they spend an inordinate amount of time on tasks like patient transport, placing IVs and drawing blood.
"That means that we can't be operating at our full capacity as doctors," said Dr. Rex Tai, a second-year internal medicine resident at Montefiore who is involved with the union drive.
But Tai said the union must still decide what it wants to fight for as it looks to start bargaining with hospital management.
"Now that we've actually won the union, it is time for us to go back to our base and ask what are the most salient issues that they'd like for us to fight for," he said.
Residents are bound to their workplaces in ways that other doctors are not. For example, they are matched with programs – which gives them less leeway when negotiating a contract – and often work odd hours when more senior physicians are away.
Unions are not new within the Montefiore system. Residents at Montefiore’s Wakefield Campus unionized decades ago, when it still operated as Our Lady of Mercy Hospital. On top of that, Montefiore Medical Center residents originally unionized with the Committee of Interns and Residents in the 1970s. And in 1959, Montefiore was the first New York City hospital to officially recognize 1199 SEIU, the country’s largest health care union.
But residents at Montefiore say that the latest union drive among trainee doctors began in earnest after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tai said that hallmarks of that time, like medical workers wearing garbage bags as makeshift PPE due to equipment shortages, galvanized many colleagues to unionize.
Watching changes at the hospital after nurses successfully negotiated a new contract proved the power of unions to one Montefiore resident.
"Montefiore has improved and started to meet some of their promises that they made with the nursing union after they went on strike," said Dr. Mustfa Manzur, a first-year resident in the emergency medicine department. "In our emergency room, I feel like it's almost night and day."
Montefiore officials said in a statement that they respect the right of interns, residents and fellows to unionize.
"Now that the election process is complete, we will enter the bargaining process in good faith," they said.
According to data from the American Medical Association, Montefiore has one of the most popular residency programs in New York state.
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Dr. Mustfa Manzur's name.
