By a crushing vote of 892-110, Penn Medicine's residents voted to unionize yesterday in a continuation of the waves striking medicine and university campuses in the US.
It's not a surprise to see these margins, and particularly not with Penn Medicine. WHYY profiled the union effort in March and found a fairly dire situation for on-call workers:
Access to child care is one of many issues residents cite for their decision to form a union. Others include the upcoming loss of parking benefits that would lead to an extra $200 monthly cost for residents who decided where they would live with the benefit in mind; and dirty call rooms, which are rooms where residents stay if they have to work overnight. Dr. Madison Sharp, a third-year resident in obstetrics and gynecology, recalls not even having a call room to sleep in during a 24-hour rotation.
(Penn Medicine, it is noted, recently opened a billion dollar hospital.)
That said: it could take time to negotiate a fair contract based on the negotiations of other recently-formed physician's unions. The University of Vermont Medical Center's residents unionized last year, and while their new union began bargaining with the center in April of 2022 it does not appear they have yet finished those negotiations. Nonetheless, Penn residents are hoping to overturn many of the issues facing them in their first contract.