Impasse Declared in County Talks With Physicians Union

Negotiations between newly unionized Los Angeles County doctors and county officials reached an impasse this week, and the physicians said they may undertake job actions at public health clinics because of a contract dispute.

The battle is the doctors’ first significant conflict with management since more than 800 of them became the largest group of U.S. physicians to unionize in nearly two decades. The doctors voted last year to join the Union of American Physicians and Dentists.

Coupled with a pending strike by another county union, which represents many non-physician medical workers, the impasse, formally declared Wednesday, means the county’s vast medical system is a potential target for labor strife this fall.

“This is something we regret a lot,” said Dr. Angela Wang, who works at Rancho Los Amigos Medical Center in Downey and is a member of the doctors union’s bargaining team. “Who would suffer the most? Patients. . . . But we are going to fight for our rights.”

Declaration of the impasse in the 10-month-long negotiations allows a mediator to come in and try to hammer out a deal. But union officials vow job actions if an agreement cannot be reached.

Doctors say they would stage targeted walkouts only at county health clinics and would not interfere with the operations of the county’s six hospitals. And the other union, Service Employees International Union, Local 660, likewise would only engage in “rolling walkouts” rather than lengthy job actions after its contract expires Sept. 30.

Health officials say they do not anticipate serious problems in a sprawling system intended to care for the county’s nearly 3 million uninsured residents.

“The health department has a fundamental responsibility to the people we serve, and we will find a way to meet that responsibility,” said spokesman John Wallace.

Local 660 is seeking bigger raises for its largely blue-collar membership, arguing that the booming economy leaves the county free to make up for pay cuts during the recession. But the better-paid county doctors are most concerned about holding onto the money they already have.

A key issue is the lucrative benefits package long enjoyed by county doctors and other non-unionized county employees known as “flex” or “mega-flex,” in which workers are given money to purchase insurance and get to roll any extra cash into their paychecks and pension.

Now that they are unionized, the county is proposing to drop doctors from that plan and give them the standard benefits package that its other organized employees have. Officials with the doctors union say that could mean a pay cut of as much as $20,000.

“It’s a matter of policy,” said Donna Singh, the county’s acting chief of employee relations. “What they’re trying to do is carve out [a niche] for the physicians and have them treated as if they’re not [union]-represented employees.”

Joe Bader, director of the doctors union’s Los Angeles office, said taking away the benefits package amounts to penalizing people for joining a union.

“It’s a right-to-organize issue; that’s how we see it,” he said.

Singh said there is no punitive action intended. “Our posture has been from the beginning that this will be our” benefits package, she said. “One would assume the union would have conveyed this information to the employees during their organizing campaign.”

Indeed, some doctors campaigned unsuccessfully against the union last year, arguing that organizing would mean the end to the physicians’ lucrative county benefit packages.

Bader said there are other issues that led to the impasse too--especially a difference between the union and county officials on how much say committees of physicians at hospitals will have over patient care.

The union has proposed a 16% pay increase over three years, arguing that its members--the county’s doctors who are not medical residents--are underpaid compared with other public and private sector physicians. The county has proposed an increase of 9% over three years, which is the raise it has offered to all other unions and that already has been accepted by most.

Doctors are already lobbying county supervisors to ease the county position and are contemplating informational pickets. Union officials stress that their members have not struck in the organization’s 27 years and that they hope not to resort to even smaller-scale job actions.

But “we’ll do what we have to,” Bader said.