Richmond Update: Public Forum May 12

On Wednesday, March 9, our union staged a protest led by Richmond Clinic employees, to draw attention to racism, bigotry and a culture of silencing being cultivated by managers at the clinic. In the subsequent days, our union reached out to HR with a list of demands that employees had worked on in order to begin fixing the problems. HR responded with more of the same approach that led us to this situation: HR would come in and help the current management change the culture they had established. 

That approach continues to produce empty results, with management simply referring issues back to HR, or telling employees that “HR won’t let me talk about that.” Because of this, in early April our union quietly invited Dr. Jacobs and the OHSU executive leadership team, as well as members of the OHSU board of directors, to hear directly from Richmond employees. We did this because we often hear that OHSU leaders didn’t know the scope of a problem or that HR hadn’t relayed the severity to the executives. We had hoped that hearing from Richmond workers directly would prompt leadership to step up the efforts to fix the issues at the clinic. Instead, Dr. Jacobs and OHSU leadership declined and released a public statement about what was happening at Richmond. 

This response was disappointing, to say the least. However, it is also revealing. For all the talk about changing OHSU’s culture in a post-Covington world and the efforts to turn OHSU into an anti-racist organization, when offered the chance to actually take part in that work, OHSU’s executive leadership team refused to meet employees facing racism at work. Instead, OHSU leadership has directed the Richmond employees to continue to work with HR, despite these employees saying “THIS ISN’T WORKING.”

As employees continued to bring concerns to OHSU leadership and HR about the ineffective (or non-existent) interventions to address these issues, in mid-April OHSU’s director of employee relations, Shaniqua Crawford, sent an email directly stating that Richmond Clinic employees and our union were creating a “false narrative” about OHSU inadequately addressing the concerns about racism, favoritism, discrimination and other harmful practices from clinic management. This email was received by many as invalidating and gaslighting, laced with defensiveness rather than hearing employees’ concerns or engaging meaningfully to address them. 

The false-narrative claim, along with the tone of the rest of the email was offensive to clinic staff who have — for years — brought concerns to Richmond management, HR, AAEO and Integrity. For an HR leader to tell them that their reports and stated dissatisfaction with OHSU’s response are not factual is insulting. There are no alternative facts here. Those who have been and continue to be harmed by OHSU’s actions and inaction are the ones who get to decide whether the response is satisfactory. Ms. Crawford’s email painted employees (and the unions who represent them) as the adversary, when in reality these employees just want to feel safe, valued and respected at work and provide the best possible care for OHSU’s patients. 

To make matters worse, just hours after Ms. Crawford sent her message, an email from an anonymous Gmail account released a portion of the Pia Bloom report to the entire Richmond work group. This portion of the report singled out an employee who has been a target of racist behavior. Not surprisingly, it “cleared” the managers, legally speaking, of creating a hostile work environment. It must be noted that the only Richmond employees who had access to the Pia Bloom report are managers, some of whom have been accused of racism at the workplace. HR states that OHSU is investigating this email; however, the extent of this seems to entail emailing people (including union representatives) who don’t have access to the report to ask them if they released the report. 

In light of all of this, Richmond employees are moving forward with a forum to tell their stories on Thursday, May 12, at 6 p.m. Instead of the small, private forum with OHSU leaders that we asked for earlier, this forum is being held for a public audience, to include elected officials and journalists. 

We will send our members an invitation this week to join this forum virtually to show our Richmond coworkers the support that OHSU’s “leaders” thus far have not. OHSU’s executives and Richmond managers can attempt to ignore employees and attack their credibility, but they cannot silence brave employees who are willing to share their stories. 

Ross Grami7 Comments