Doctors at L.A. County-run facilities postpone strike planned for next week
Doctors and dentists who work at hospitals and other health facilities run by Los Angeles County are postponing a strike that had been scheduled to begin next week, their union announced Friday.
Members of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists had been preparing to go on strike from Wednesday to Jan. 1 amid complaints that inadequate benefits made it difficult to hire and retain medical staff. The UAPD has more than 1,100 members in the bargaining units that has been planning to walk out, the bulk of them employed at the county’s Department of Health Services.
The union said Friday that it had reached an agreement with the county to postpone the strike so that outside experts could review the tax implications surrounding possible changes to employee benefits, which have been the sticking point in negotiations after more than two years of bargaining.
Union officials said those outside assessments are expected to be back by February, setting the stage for further bargaining over benefits and delaying any possible strike until at least the middle of February.
“The parties will continue to negotiate other critical matters and the UAPD remains committed to securing a package that facilitates the recruitment and retention of physicians, psychiatrists, and veterinarians, and dentists,” the union said in a statement Friday.
MLK Community Hospital, a crucial safety-net facility serving the South Los Angeles area, may run out of money to pay its bills as soon as next year, hospital leaders are warning.
As part of the agreement, the union said that the county was no longer pursuing a court injunction against the planned strike, which would have affected safety-net hospitals operated by the county such as Olive View-UCLA Medical Center as well as clinics and other facilities, like the medical examiner’s office.
L.A. County said in a statement Friday that the two sides had reached an agreement “to further explore employee benefits for UAPD members.”
“L.A. County remains committed to reaching agreement on a fair and fiscally responsible contract that balances the needs of our valued medical workforce with the needs of vulnerable residents who rely on the County safety net,” the statement said. “We are also determined to reach terms that allow us to more effectively recruit medical professionals to expand our services in critical areas and provide additional support to our current workforce.”
The UAPD has argued that benefits for its members fall short of what is offered to medical professionals working for other employers in the region, hampering recruitment and retention. Among other things, UAPD members complained that workers don’t get enough paid time off to recover from childbirth and bond with their babies, spurring some doctors to work extra hours while pregnant in order to extend their maternity leaves.
Such shortcomings are a major reason why job vacancies for medical professionals have hit alarming levels in some county facilities, the union said. For instance, the UAPD said there was a 70% vacancy rate for psychiatrists working in county jails.
The Department of Health Services has countered that the employees represented by the union already have an “extensive benefits package” — the same one in place for more than 35,000 other county workers — and that giving all of them a more costly package would prevent the county from concentrating its incentives on the hardest-to-recruit workers.
The county filed a complaint last week with the L.A. County Employee Relations Commission that claimed the walkout would be an “economic strike” aimed at gaining leverage at the bargaining table before the two sides had reached an official impasse or exhausted the steps following one. That would make the action “presumptively unlawful,” it said in its complaint.
The county also argued in its complaint that the strike posed an imminent threat to public health and safety.
The renowned teaching hospital Harbor-UCLA Medical Center is placed on probation amid lawsuits filed by prominent doctors alleging harassment and retaliation.
The UAPD disputed the county claims ahead of the Friday announcement. In its own complaint with the county commission, the union accused the county of “bad faith bargaining” and alleged that an official at one of the county-run hospitals had “cornered” union members to ask if they were going to strike.
“The county caused this scheduled strike by failing to take their bargaining obligation seriously,” UAPD counsel Ardalan “Ardy” Raghian said in a statement Tuesday.
The last contract between the union and the county expired in 2021. As the Dec. 27 strike date approached, the county and the UAPD had been negotiating over which critical employees would remain on the job during a walkout to ensure that essential services remain available.
The L.A. County Board of Supervisors had also authorized the health services department to enter into personnel contracts so that it could remain staffed during the strike, as well as to negotiate higher-than-usual payments if patients needed to be transferred to other facilities.
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