In hopes of gaining power and pay, medical residents at an increasing number of Chicago-area hospitals are unionizing. and fellows in the Chicago area have voted to unionize in the last year — at University of Chicago Medicine in May, in January and West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park in November. University of Illinois at Chicago residents and fellows unionized in 2021.
Residents have long had to work many hours for relatively low pay, as they train to become specific types of physicians after medical school. Traditionally, residents have been expected to put their heads down and grind, for years, as they gain on-the-job experience and progress toward more lucrative, prominent careers. But residents say that attitude is shifting, amid changes in the business of health care, frustrations that arose out of the pandemic, and growing unionization across many industries.
“Hospitals rely on us, but we have not been able to rely on them to guarantee fair working conditions,” said Dr. Anis Adnani, chief resident for the University of Illinois at Chicago emergency medicine residency program. “At some point we decided to become self-reliant and demand fair working conditions not only for ourselves, but for what we see every day in terms of taking care of patients.
” Before the union at the University of Illinois at Chicago reached its first contract last year, first-year residents were making a little less than $60,000 a year for up to an average of 80 hours a week of wo.
