Paul Clark, PhD, Health Care Labor & Employment Relations Professor and Researcher

The Risky Health Care Business

What he does: Dr. Clark is a Professor of Labor and Employment Relations at Penn State University where he regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on employment relations. His research has focused on employment relations in U.S. healthcare, with interests including unions, union organizing, collective bargaining, labor-management partnerships, and labor-management relations in healthcare. His research has appeared in the leading scholarly journals in industrial and labor relations, applied psychology, and international labor issues. He is the author or editor of six books about unions and collective bargaining; and has worked on training programs and research projects for over fifty national unions, and many local and regional unions.

On risk: "Workers don't bring in a union to wreak havoc and make a hospital or a clinic work less well. They want to have a greater voice in how care is delivered. Administrators have a tough time with that, because they've largely been taught that they're in charge. They're the ones that make decisions, but by giving up a little bit of that control, there really can be great benefits … Management still has to decide, or gets to decide, what its positions will be in bargaining. If they don't come to agreement, however, then unions do have the right to strike. A strike is a pretty traumatic thing, and that's part of the collective bargaining process that doesn't exist when unions aren't present in a workplace … Collaboration on a large scale can work. There are other smaller hospitals and smaller medical centers I've worked with, and we do see really, really positive results from that, because workers see their role as not just doing what they're told, but always looking at how they can make the workplace better. And they know that if they see something that can be improved on, there are mechanisms to talk about what's going right, what isn't, what ideas do people have, and then there's a mechanism where they work together as equals to try to decide whether to implement things, and then they measure them afterwards to see if they've had positive results."