Harlem Hospital Doctors Threaten to Strike
Doctors at Harlem Hospital are threatening to strike over issues arising from the city’s decision to loosen the hospital’s ties with Columbia University, union officials said Monday.
Leaders of the physicians’ union at the hospital, Doctors Council S.E.I.U., said negotiations broke down on Friday. They said that more than 75 percent of the 200 doctors at the hospital had authorized the union to call a strike, and that a meeting would be held Thursday to set the date. The doctors’ current contract expires at the end of the month.
For decades, Columbia’s medical school hired doctors from Harlem Hospital under a contract with the city, but this year the city began re-evaluating some of its affiliations to save money and reassert control of the management of the municipal hospitals.
Harlem Hospital will retain its academic affiliation with Columbia, meaning that doctors can still have faculty appointments and teach Columbia’s medical students. But the doctors will no longer be Columbia employees.
They will be employed by a private corporation chosen by the city, Physician Affiliate Group of New York, which also manages doctors at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx.
Union leaders said doctors were angry at the prospect of losing some pension benefits provided by Columbia as well as college tuition discounts for their children: 100 percent of tuition at Columbia and half of tuition at other colleges.
Ana Marengo, a spokeswoman for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the public hospitals, said officials thought Physician Affiliate Group offered “a fair package that includes comparable pension benefits.” She said the tuition benefit would be maintained at the current level for one year and then phased out. “High-cost tuition reimbursement for physicians’ children is a benefit that cannot be sustained,” she said.
She said that the city had assured current Harlem Hospital doctors of continued employment; the union said it had not seen the guarantee in writing.
“Most of us are here to serve, we’re not here to get,” Dr. Carol McLean-Long, a union leader at the hospital, said. “But you have to have something to offer them if you cannot offer them money.”
And doctors said the academic affiliation was worth much less now that they were no longer receiving the same benefits as other university employees.
“The affiliation is in name only,” said one attending physician, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution by hospital management.
Highly trained specialists, he said, had little incentive to stay at Harlem when they could get better benefits or earn more by working for Columbia University Medical Center or in private practice.
Dr. Matthews K. Hurley, an internist and union leader, said the Columbia benefits allowed Harlem Hospital to recruit competitive physicians and researchers despite relatively low salaries. He said that at least 30 senior doctors have opted to resign or retire rather than continue working under a private corporation that “doesn’t have the track record” or prestige of an Ivy League institution.
Ms. Marengo, of the city, disputed the assertion that the Columbia issue accounted for the retirements. She said that a strike would be “unnecessarily disruptive,” but that the city would make arrangements to “keep essential services running at Harlem Hospital,” sending in doctors from other city hospitals or hiring new ones.
The last strike by the doctors’ union was in 1991 and lasted 36 hours, after the city proposed eliminating several departments at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn. The community joined doctors in picketing the hospital, and the city dropped its plan.