Regulation Without Representation

Abstract

A few weeks ago, the quadrennial exercise in collective bargaining began in earnest at my home institution. At the table sat housestaff members and paid officials of the Residents Union on one side and labor negotiators and the Deans for Graduate Medical Education of the three medical schools in our university system on the other. The setting has a particular piquancy for me because as the Associate Dean for Graduate Medical Education of New Jersey Medical School, my job is to represent management. Yet I recollect very well when as a senior resident I was also the President of the Committee of Interns and Residents. Then I represented my trainee constituents in the turbulent 1970s in New York City where collective bargaining was more of a free for all than it is today.