Medicine: Unionized Psychiatrists

Not long ago the psychiatrists of Manhattan’s Bellevue hospital received from the New York Academy of Medicine a questionnaire designed to find out how many of them were doing outside work on the city hospital’s time and how much they made.

Instead of replying individually the 50 psychiatrists sent back a round robin declaring that they practiced privately because Bellevue paid them as little as $30 a week. Because of such low salaries, the round robin complained, not as many were married or had children and decent homes as would like them. Greatest surprise of the reply was its preamble, stating that it had been compiled “at a meeting called by the Association of Hospital & Medical Employes, affiliated with the Committee for Industrial Organization.” Thus for the first time it became publicly known that the physicians of an important division in the nation’s third biggest hospital* had taken out union cards, a situation unparalleled in U. S. medical history and a matter of grave concern to most of the ethics-conscious profession.

‘

* Bigger: Los Angeles County with 3,306 beds and Cook County (Chicago) with 3,300 beds.