By Stephen Franklin

Tribune Staff Writer

March 2, 1999

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) announced a new alliance on unio9n doctors and a $1 million-a-year organizing drive on Monday, marking another step in the accelerating effort to turn the nation’s physicians into card-carrying union members.

"What is new here is organizing doctors on a larger scale, and that is just what we intend to do," said Andy Stern, the president of the SEIU, who has been trying to turn his 1.3 million-member group into the preeminent voice for health-care workers.

The new group, the National Doctors Alliance, marks the merger of the 2,500-member New York-based Doctors Council and two SEIU divisions, the Committee of Interns and Residents and the United Salaried Physicians and Dentists.

Together, the two groups had about 12,500 members.

Organized physicians account for a tiny share of the more than 680,000 physicians in the U.S. It is estimated that from 35,000 to 45,000 physicians are union members, belonging to a handful of unions. Most are also salaried employees.

Similar organizing spurts among physicians have taken off and floundered in the last few decades. But with the growth of managed care and constant upheaval in the medical world, unions and physicians have rediscovered their mutual interests.

In a prepared statement, Dr. Nancy W. Dickey, president of the Chicago-based American Medical Association, said that a new organizing drive among physicians "is not wholly unexpected."

"Physicians and their patients find themselves in a very stressful environment," she said. But she repeated the AMA’s opposition to a "traditional union" setting for the doctors.

The solution offered recently by the AMA. has been for guide-like professional groups that would bargain for physicians but not lead them into strikes.

At a Washington, D.C., press conference, Dr. Barry Liebowitz, a pediatrician and president of the Doctors Council, questioned whether the AMA should set the policy on doctors organizing, saying the group has lost touch with the nation’s physicians.

Liebowitz, whose group briefly struck a New York hospital in 1991 to prevent staff layoffs and service cutbacks, also said there are cases where strikes are "responsible."

But, he added, strikes are not a "priority."

"I promise you this, patients will be protected," he said.

While independent physicians have run into legal problems forming unions in the face of government charges that they are violating antitrust laws. Salaried physicians have come up against stiff opposition from hospital and HMO administrator.

The changing employment makeup of the medical profession favors union organizing, suggested Grace Budrys, a DePaul University sociologist.

"Close to 77 percent of the physicians who became doctors in the last five years are salaried, There is a potential there," she said. Nearly half of the nations’s doctors currently are on salary.

Likewise, she said, the "growing momentum" creates an atmosphere in which physicians who might once have been reluctant to ever consider a union "will have questions" and possibly join a union.

When the Committee of Interns and Residents joined the SEIU in June 1997, the union had made a similar vow to spend $1 million organizing new physicians. Explaining that the drive never fully got off the ground, Stern said on Monday that $1 million in new funds would be devoted to organizing coast to coast.

Just last week the SEIU scored a major victory, signing up an unprecedented 75,000 new home health-care workers in California.

Desperate for new members in growing industries, the nation’s unions have turned the health-care industry into one of the hottest targets for their organizing drives.