Dr. John Wust does not come off as a labor agitator. A longtime obstetrician-gynecologist from Louisiana with a penchant for bow ties, Dr. Wust spent the first 15 years of his career as a partner in a small business — that is, running his own practice with colleagues.
Long after he took a position at Allina Health, a large nonprofit health care system based in Minnesota, in 2009, he did not see himself as the kind of employee who might benefit from collective bargaining.
But that changed in the months leading up to March, when his group of more than 100 doctors at an Allina hospital near Minneapolis voted to unionize. Dr. Wust, who has spoken with colleagues about the potential benefits of a union, said doctors were at a loss on how to ease their unsustainable workload because they had less input at the hospital than ever before.
“The way the system is going, I didn’t see any other solution legally available to us,” Dr. Wust said.
Actually, the executives should probably also unionise, it will help normalise negotiations and spread best practices that lead to a better work environment for all.
Executives are already part of a union. Boards approve the executive hiring of a company, but those boards are made up of executives from other companies. And those companies have boards that include executives from other companies. Hiring and firing of executives are handled by a collective of executives across many companies. It’s a union that protects itself.
If they can stop looking out for themselves first!
Would be kind of interesting to see what kind of negotiations would arise from having labor, management, and executives all represented by unions!
edited to add missing word
If executive unions could enforced a max amount of hours worked for executives and other similar quality of life requirements. Maybe there would be fewer sociopaths and more humans in executive positions.
Check out the Nordics, that’s how they do it over there.
Management jobs are rarely union, since they’re the ones making the rules.
Correct, but they would often benefit from having collective bargaining against the board of directors or other owners.
And organising themselves as a union would also show them that unions aren’t evil and shift focus from exploitation to cooperation. Besides, many unions would have much use of being able to speak for the whole industry in matters of legislation, either as lobby or expert.
I don’t know if that will achieve what you want it to. Remember, the AMPTP is a union and it was able to get concessions from the WGA and SAG-AFTRA which are not good for the workers.