A West Campus Exit Interview
— guest post by S. Noll —
On Thursday, Aug. 25, OHSU hosted a town-hall meeting with Dr. Danny Jacobs and other OHSU leaders, with the intention of sharing their plans for tackling OHSU’s current financial hardships and addressing employee concerns. I doubt I’m alone in saying that they fell well short of expectations.
As a West Campus employee, I’ve seen staffing levels in every area of our campus plummet, as workers leave right and left for better offers — at major competitors such as Providence and Legacy and at private research entities — for starting wages that are sometimes $4.00/hour or more higher than OHSU’s. There are now so many vacant positions that it feels like everyone is working the jobs of two people. We have individuals working extensive mandatory overtime and regularly skipping lunches and breaks. Veterinary staff are spraying out shelters while barely keeping up with the acute medical needs (to say nothing of proactive or preventive care) of the animals on our campus. As an OHSU patient, I’ve also seen my health care compromised as hold times on phone lines stretch to as much as an hour and appointment wait times are months and months long. Some doctors have confessed to me that they are feeling just as unsupported by the institution and confused by OHSU leadership’s priorities as we are at the West Campus.
Therefore, it came as quite a shock to me to hear that a major pillar of OHSU’s financial strategy moving forward is to eliminate as many vacant positions as possible and focus its hiring on the most lucrative areas of the business (er, hospital), such as pharmacy and imaging. Oh, and “safety,” which I’m glad they gave a nod to. Given OHSU’s apparent lack of concern until very recently about the devolved conditions at ONPRC — arguably well past any reasonable safety standard — I have trouble believing that OHSU’s leaders’ idea of what constitutes safe staffing matches that of those of us who work in these conditions day in and day out. While Peter Barr-Gillespie assured me after the town hall that animal-care positions would not be eliminated, I shudder to think of other departments faced with the prospect of their current staffing shortages becoming permanent. Can a hospital and research institution really function with a staff that’s intentionally spread too thin and working for wages too low to attract new hires? Are harried employees who are forced to work their weekends with reduced breaks and lunches going to do quality work? Short staffing leads to overworking and stress, which leads to mistakes being made. That’s an injured patient or animal (or lawsuit) waiting to happen.
Adding insult to injury were the platitudes expressed by several individuals onstage at the town hall, such as “An important thing you can do is not to lose the faith” and “I have faith in you and together we can pull this off” and “I encourage all of you to think about how you can help other OHSU folks.” Please don’t patronize us. We’re already putting 120% into our work every day, and WE’RE BURNT OUT. We’ve been burnt out. For years. Everybody still working at ONPRC is here because we care more about the monkeys than we do about ourselves, and are willing to sacrifice ourselves for the animals — working in physically strenuous conditions, in biohazardous conditions, for ridiculously long hours, alternately collapsing in tears and propping up fellow employees emotionally. OHSU is happy to exploit that dedication to keep the Primate Center limping along on a skeleton crew. But sheer emotional drive can only carry you so far, and the workers not actively looking for other jobs are the ones with some kind of external support that enables them to subsidize their work at ONPRC.
Several coworkers, including at least one with a master’s degree in a fairly high-level research position, have second jobs. One long-standing member of the research staff, a skilled worker who regularly advised other labs, recently quit after discovering that daycare would cost more than his salary. Another colleague made tens of thousands of dollars more per year reselling clothes online than she did as a lab manager, but worked her OHSU job as a passion project for a year before quitting. Others get financial support from their parents or rely on a spouse with a better job or live with multiple housemates. Those without that support rely on the free food management regularly brings from the Oregon Food Bank. We have literally nothing left to give, physically or emotionally. So no, we’re not the ones who need to “have faith” or pitch in and work together to salvage things. We’ve already worked ourselves to or past our breaking points.
When I asked whether Dr. Jacobs himself had any plans to put his personal money where his mouth is and sacrifice some of OHSU’s executive compensation to help take care of OHSU’s other employees, he responded by saying that the executive staff had gone without incentive pay since 2019 and that he had personally made a contribution to the OHSU Foundation (which an audience member pointed out was also a tax break). However, an OHSU press release about Dr. Jacob’s compensation from his initial hire states that his incentive pay “will range from 0 percent if objectives not met, target of 35 percent of base pay and a maximum of 43.275 percent in accordance with OHSU Incentive Plan.” OHSU is clearly not meeting its objectives, so it seems he is magnanimously foregoing money he wouldn’t have received in the first place. Either way, a more meaningful gesture in these difficult financial times would be reinstating the voluntary 40% decrease to his ~$1.5 million salary that he took briefly at the start of the pandemic.
Dr. Jacobs, are you proud to have your name at the head of an institution that pays its employees so poorly that it has to subsidize their wages with canned beans and instant mashed potatoes from a food bank? Do you think this reflects well on OHSU as an institution and its stated intent of being “people first”? If it’s not too self-indulgent of me to rip off my own picket slogan: campus food banks aren’t a “benefit” — they’re a sign that we’re being paid literal starvation wages in some cases. People are right now being driven out of jobs they love and wish they could stay at — in droves —and there’s not much time to fix things. We need systemic change — not a one-time payment, not a temporary emergency increase in wages, not a thank-you email — but genuine systemic change that will make working at OHSU a sustainable career choice, and we need it immediately.
Today is my last day at OHSU.