Blue collar lessons for white coat piece workers

During my college summer breaks, I worked as a plumbing apprentice on a unionized housing development construction lot. Little did I know how much I learned that is applicable to my jungle gym career.

A shortage of plumbers in the U.S. threatens to not only delay your leaky sink repair; it’s also costing the economy billions, according to Bloomberg. Put simply, there are not enough new plumbers to replace those heading into retirement. Over the next decade, the number of open jobs for plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters will average about 42,600 each year, per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Contributing to the shortage is the perception that plumbing is a dirty job with long hours. Fixing the problem will take time. “This is a generational issue,” according to one industry expert.

I learned that when our toilet is leaking, I should call a plumber to fix it. As the old joke goes, she is likely to have been an internist in her former career

Now that graduate students, residents, and fellows are unionizing in increasing numbers, the culture of sick care academia is changing.

The head of public relations at a major Chinese tech firm gained hundreds of thousands of followers overnight after posting a series of viral videos laying out her unapologetically tyrannical management style.

The videos also earned her a pink slip from her employer after they set off an explosion of criticism among Gen Z Chinese fed up with the intense work culture that prevails in their country’s tech industry.?

“I’m not your mother-in-law. I’m not your mom,” Qu Jing, a vice president at Chinese search giant Baidu, said in one widely excoriated clip, referring to a colleague who was struggling with a recent breakup. “I only care about your results.”

When it comes to academic medicine, it's just academic.

Here are some blue-collar tips for white coat academicians:

1. If you have a problem with your residents or fellows, contact the shop steward
2. Expect the valet parking to include a food truck so workers can take their required breaks
3. Workers are expected to comply with mandated working hours and production expectations. Violating supervisors will be referred to the Office of Professionalism
4. All units will be required to post Department of Labor required posters explaining employee rights in English, Spanish and other represented languages, including in lavatories
5. Promotion and tenure criteria will now include workforce management measurements
6. All faculty will be required to successfully complete a Managing the Union House staff Workforce module in the next 30 days. Failure to do so will result in limitation of your privileges until you do so
7. According to the labor agreement, all unionized house staff are entitled to attend union meetings for an hour each month during regular working hours. If it happens when they are in the OR, please find someone else to hold the retractors.
8. All attendings are expected to comply with mandated regulations concerning behavior during labor actions or strikes
9. Attendings who support labor actions or staff picket lines will be docked their salaries. Any behavior that results in violation of hospital safety rules and regulations will result in disciplinary actions, including dismissal from their academic units. Worse yet, your parking privileges will be revoked.
10. If you are a plumber, don't even think about hanging sheet rock
11. The color coded care rules will still apply with the following additions:

If you follow education policy at all, you’ve probably heard about the looming “Fiscal Cliff.” As pandemic-era federal support runs out, school districts that used temporary funding to create permanent initiatives are going to fall over it.

But American K-12 education appears to be in the midst of an immediate and menacing development: A teacher morale crash.

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Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack