A System Designed to Fail
When I first started working at OHSU, my job was to track faculty data in Excel spreadsheets. My team had been tracking hundreds of data points each week, in multiple spreadsheets, for years. It’s been six years since I started and we’re still doing that. I once asked a coworker why we don’t have a database to track all this faculty data; they told me, “Databases aren’t sexy. New buildings are sexy.” OHSU chose not to buy or build the digital infrastructure needed to track this data more efficiently; somewhere along the way, a choice was made to prioritize something other than this database.
One of my DEI committee members, an OHSU employee who has worked in ITG for more than a decade, noted that HR and AAEO not having a central database for complaints doesn’t seem like a "fall through the cracks" situation. The lack of a centralized complaint repository seems purposeful. OHSU’s leadership has approved expenditures for myriad consultants, but not for dealing effectively with employee complaints. It’s not that the complaint data doesn’t exist — it’s that no one has been keeping track of it effectively.
Earlier this year, when OHSU finally released data on its employment practices, it was the first time anyone had examined the data, looked for patterns and reported out. We learned that Black and Hispanic employees were more likely to be terminated than their white coworkers. When a Local 328 staff representative asked OHSU to look back at these terminations, they were given the impression that OHSU didn’t want to look back, only forward.
The Covington report has made it excruciatingly clear to everyone that harassment and discrimination happen at OHSU, although that’s certainly nothing new to employees: the report’s first finding noted that “Community members believe that OHSU fails to take meaningful action to further its values and commitments.” It’s also nothing new to the unions: as a Local 328 steward, I’ve spoken to many other employees of color who’ve faced a hostile work environment and didn’t feel like things could change. And it’s nothing new to the employees involved in the recently filed class-action discrimination lawsuit.
None of this has been a failure of the OHSU system. It was designed this way. It was not designed to protect us.
If the OHSU system were designed to protect employees, OHSU’s leaders would have held a national search to hire a qualified vice president to run the HR department of one of the largest employers in the state. (Instead, they kicked the can down the road for years, then brought in a highly paid consultant with no stake in the organization.)
If the OHSU system were designed to protect employees, OHSU’s leaders wouldn’t have understaffed its HR and AAEO departments.
If the OHSU system were designed to protect employees, OHSU’s reporting avenues would have been simple and streamlined, with real accountability for perpetrators of harassment and discrimination, no matter their role at OHSU.
If the OHSU system were designed to protect employees, there would have been a clear, OHSU-wide strategic plan for DEI initiatives, rather than a hodgepodge of efforts siloed from each other.
While it’s easy to point to the failings of our current leadership, these choices go back decades; OHSU’s leaders have consistently ignored the problems that employees — especially marginalized employees — have faced through the years. Institutions perpetuate the inequalities built into them. Now, OHSU’s leaders have paid $6.5 million to have Eric Holder’s firm tell them what employees could have told them for free if they had bothered to listen. There are concrete recommendations for improvement in the Covington report. And so we wait to see what choices OHSU’s leaders will make now.