Early career doctors at Elmhurst Hospital prepare to strike over uneven wages

More than 160 resident physicians at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens are preparing to go on strike for five days starting on Monday if they don’t reach a new contract agreement before then. This is the second time doctors-in-training with the union CIR SEIU have threatened to strike at Queens-based hospitals this month over wage increases.

Elmhurst is part of the NYC Health + Hospitals network, and public employees are technically not allowed to go on strike in New York state. But CIR said this law doesn’t apply to the residents at Elmhurst because its doctor training program is operated by Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, which acts as their employer.

The residents at Elmhurst, which operates 545 beds, said they get paid significantly less than their peers in a similar program at Mount Sinai’s main campus in Manhattan and are demanding pay parity. They’ve now been trying to reach an agreement with Mount Sinai for about a year. They delivered a letter on Thursday to the hospital’s CEO — Helen Arteaga Landaverde — asking her to come to the bargaining table.

First-year residents at Elmhurst now earn $68,355, nearly $7,000 less than first-year residents at Mount Sinai Hospital, according to data provided by CIR SEIU. The pay gap is more than $11,000 for seventh-year residents. In July, Mount Sinai Hospital residents will receive a 6% pay bump, widening the disparity even further.

“It feels like the Elmhurst community and the resident doctors at Elmhurst who take care of the patients don't matter to Mount Sinai or to our city,” said Dr. Irfa Khan, a second-year psychiatry resident at Elmhurst.

Neither Mount Sinai, NYC Health + Hospitals nor CIR SEIU responded to a request for comment on the current salary offer that’s on the table for Elmhurst residents in the new contract.

Although NYC Health + Hospitals doesn’t employ the Elmhurst residents directly, the city gives Mount Sinai money to fund the program, and it is ultimately up to city officials to decide whether to boost residents’ salaries, said Dr. Michael Leitman, the dean of graduate medical education at the Icahn School of Medicine.

Khan and her resident colleagues are urging CEO Landaverde to use her sway to influence negotiations and help them avoid a walkout.

“Please tell the management negotiator that Elmhurst can and will agree to our demand for parity,” members of the residents’ bargaining committee wrote in Thursday’s letter, which was shared with Gothamist.

NYC Health + Hospitals did not respond to a request for comment on Landaverde’s position on the demand for parity. But the head of the hospital network, Dr. Mitchell Katz, weighed in when he was pressed on the issue during a City Council oversight hearing on hospitals earlier this week on Tuesday.

“Everybody should be treated the same,” Katz said. “I don’t see a reason why one hospital would be different than another.”

Leitman said the difference in pay stems from the fact that residents at Elmhurst had their salaries determined in their last collective bargaining agreement, which was inked in July 2018. Since then, Mount Sinai Hospital residents, who are not unionized, have received multiple raises.

Despite the fact that the residency programs are officially linked to different facilities, residents at Elmhurst sometimes do rotations at Mount Sinai Hospital and vice versa.

“We work with the same attending [physicians], we see the same patients, we have the same patient load,” Khan said. “The only difference is our pay.”

This is the latest in a spate of labor actions among unionized health care workers in the city this year. Residents at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center and Flushing Hospital Medical Center, both of which are owned by Medisys Health Network, narrowly avoided a strike this past Monday, reaching a last-minute agreement the night before they were supposed to walk off the job.

Those residents were able to get an 18% pay increase over three years – similar to the salary bumps nurses won at many of the city’s hospitals earlier this year.

Mount Sinai Hospital notably allowed its nurses to strike for three days in January before acceding to their demands, which largely centered around staffing.

“I am worried about [a resident strike] because we’ve been through a strike,” Leitman said. “I was in the front seat for tremendous disruptions.”

Ahead of the nurses strike, Mount Sinai postponed elective surgeries and redirected some patients away from its main campus. But Leitman added that he did not anticipate significant changes in service if Elmhurst residents walk out. He said the areas that would be affected include the Departments of Psychiatry, Internal Medicine and Pediatrics.

NYC Health + Hospitals spokesperson Christopher Miller said in a statement that the health system is hopeful that a strike will be avoided but is preparing a contingency plan just in case.

“Our dedicated staff are ready to take on extra shifts, and we will be able to mobilize clinicians from other health system hospitals if necessary,” Miller stated. “Patient safety and access to care for our community is our top priority.”