Beware of OHSU Spin
On Wednesday, March 9, Local 328 held a rally at the Richmond Clinic to protest ongoing racism and systemic workplace-culture issues from clinic management. More than 100 workers and community members came out to show support and say enough is enough. The details of the issues at Richmond have been widely documented on this blog, as well as in a recent Portland Mercury article and local news segments on KATU and KPTV. These accounts describe a culture that is wildly out of step with what is expected in a modern workplace. Workers have referred to it as “racist,” “a silencing culture” and “a nightmare”. The problems are so deeply felt that our union had sympathetic middle managers at Richmond ask us how they could show support. In fact, OHSU’s own internal report, prepared by consultant Pia Bloom in 2020, called the Richmond environment “unhealthy, unpredictable and toxic.”
It's hard to square what our union and our members know about the situation at Richmond with how OHSU characterized it on OHSU Now two days prior to the rally:
“For more than a year, Richmond Clinic leadership and employees, in partnership with Human Resources, have been working through workplace culture issues. The team began by bringing in an outside consultant to evaluate and make recommendations for improvements. The consultants helped the Richmond Clinic team create a workplan that immediately addressed some safety concerns, and then looked at deeper cultural changes, such as providing a number of trainings and building a safer, more secure feedback loop, to address concerns employees expressed regarding discrimination and racism. Other concerns being addressed include favoritism, employee safety, employee engagement/satisfaction/retention and leadership/management performance.
Although progress has been made, this work is ongoing. True cultural change and building back trust is difficult and takes time. Even as this work has progressed, there have been failures. A photo of leadership was recently shared that was hurtful and offensive to members of the team. The leaders’ pose in the photo was cultural appropriation. OHSU executive leaders are aware and want to assure you that, while we may not share confidential personnel details, appropriate processes, trainings and conversations are happening. Human Resources, at a number of levels, is actively involved in helping to ensure the workplan moves forward and further missteps are avoided.”
In our opinion, the post downplayed the problems at Richmond. It omitted our union’s involvement in pushing for change, including the fact that the internal cultural assessments were only done because HR was forced to by Local 328, and it omitted the fact that — for more than a year — HR has deflected and gaslighted workers in defense of failed management. It’s not a far logical jump to conclude that OHSU likely published this post for two reasons: to suppress attendance at the rally and to inoculate employees against upcoming negative publicity about its failures at Richmond.
However, our purpose here isn’t to point out all of OHSU’s egregious missteps at Richmond. Instead, we want to alert employees to the spin, disinformation and incomplete information that OHSU may put out during bargaining to suppress members’ activities. We do this because it has happened before. OHSU will likely present you with its own set of facts about bargaining that leave out context or spin information to fit management’s narrative, or that simply aren’t truthful, in order to weaken our union’s bargaining campaign.
Does that sound extreme? Let’s remember that we have a multi-billion-dollar contract, with financial implications that will ripple for potentially decades. Let’s remember that in the face of sexual-assault claims, multiple mandatory reporters allowed the “TikTok Doc” to continue to work and potentially continue to endanger colleagues, thus preserving OHSU’s reputation and delaying the financial impact of doing the right thing. Let’s remember that OHSU shut off comments on OHSU Now, thus shutting off your ability to make your voice heard. And, of course, let’s remember that in our 2019 negotiations, two members of OHSU’s bargaining team, including the vice president of human resources, conducted a trolling and misinformation campaign on our social-media pages.
While we don’t expect anyone on OHSU’s bargaining team to go rogue again, due to the ensuing fallout, we do expect to see what we saw with the OHSU Now post about the Richmond Clinic: manipulating information in a way that suppresses your union’s work, your activism and your contract. OHSU leadership knows that in order to keep its labor costs as low as possible, it must win the information campaign during negotiations. This kind of win requires you to feel complacent, defeated, hopeless or apathetic, so be prepared if the employer’s communications make you feel this way.
The next time you see an OHSU Now post like the one above, or one talking about how the employer’s finances are suffering, look at it with skeptical eyes, knowing that it’s part of a larger game. We discuss our union’s philosophy on bargaining communications in this blog post from 2019 — we recognize that both parties aim to be persuasive in our communications, but we will always strive to fairly represent OHSU’s proposals, and will do our best to make sure you understand the proposals and what’s at stake.
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