IRVINE : Medical Interns Join Union to Back Cause

A statewide organization that includes 150 UCI medical school interns and residents has joined an AFL-CIO-affiliated labor union in hopes of winning better treatment for doctors-in-training.

Newport Beach pediatrician Carole Macaulay, president of the California Assn. of Interns and Residents, said Thursday that the 1,000-member group has joined the Service Employees International Union. She said the formal signing in San Francisco on Wednesday followed statewide balloting in June that overwhelmingly favored joining the union.

Macaulay, who finished her three-year residency at the school and at UCI Medical Center in Orange in June, said the members hope that with the union’s backing, they will be able to improve working conditions at teaching hospitals throughout the state, and perhaps engage in collective bargaining.

Students, interns and residents at UCI Medical Center have staged “sleep-ins” for the last three years to protest what they say are inhumane 100-hour work weeks that include shifts of 36 hours at a stretch. Such hours leave them too exhausted to provide adequate patient care, they have said.

UCI Medical Center officials have said they are trying to hold work hours to a maximum of 80 hours per week. As of August, 14 of the hospital’s departments were in compliance with those guidelines, university officials said. The university, however, continues to oppose state legislation that would mandate limits on residents’ work hours.

Members of the California Assn. of Interns and Residents decided to organize when their efforts failed to improve working conditions at various teaching hospitals throughout the state, including many of the University of California campuses, Macaulay said.

“We realized that we were impotent, that we needed protection,” she said. “We had no power to even find out what our full rights are.”

The Service Employees International is expected to provide the resources they need to get information and bargain for better treatment, Macaulay said.

As a condition of joining the organization, which represents a wide variety of workers in the health care field, the interns and residents insisted on a written provision exempting them from having to join a strike--their own or anyone else’s.

“The word union is somewhat taboo among physicians as you might imagine,” Macaulay said. “No one wanted to be in the position of having to go on strike. . . . SEIU was willing to protect our autonomy.”