Maine Medical Center in Portland, the state’s largest hospital, is not paying its lowest paid frontline workers hazard pay, despite a law passed by voters last November requiring a $15 minimum wage with time-and-a-half pay during emergencies.
MaineHealth is the largest private employer in Maine, running 16 health centers across the state including Maine Medical Center. The network has opted not to give hazard pay to an estimated 1,600 to 1,700 care team staff who are eligible under the new city law. Among the positions that qualify are receptionists, housekeepers, cooks, home health aides, phlebotomists and medical assistants — the latter working directly with infected patients and making about $12 an hour.
The new pay increase took effect in December while this month is projected in Maine and across the country to be the deadliest yet during the pandemic.
MaineHealth said they are following a directive by the city’s legal counsel who advised Portland Mayor Kate Snyder and the city council that hazard pay provisions in the new voter-mandated minimum wage law didn’t need to be followed by employers until 2022.
“On a practical basis, the costs associated with this provision in the ordinance would greatly strain the resources of our not-for-profit health care organization at a time when the global pandemic has already taken a severe financial toll,” MaineHealth said in a Dec. 2 statement. “It is understood that we are here to provide all in our community excellent patient-centered care at all times. Being forced to provide ‘emergency pay’ to select employees in select locations would greatly undermine this shared mission and value.”
The city’s directive is contested by People First Portland, the volunteer-led organization that led the successful ballot initiative to increase pay. The group insists the language of the proposed minimum wage ordinance that went before voters on Nov. 3 stated that hazard pay would go into effect 30 days after the election. They say at least 42 Portland employers, large and small, have already begun paying their employees hazard pay, including the University of Southern Maine, Hannaford, Trader Joe’s and Reny’s.
“The fact that the Portland mayor and city council are doing nothing to ensure that these workers get the pay the people this city mandated is a gross dereliction of their duty,” said People First Portland volunteer and former Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling. “Election results should be respected by elected officials, whether it is a United States Presidential race or a Portland, Maine municipal referendum.”
Maine Medical Center in Portland.
Disproportionate impacts on women, people of color
Last year, volunteers with People First Portland were part of a larger grassroots push for hazard pay for the lowest paid health care staff and other frontline workers. National labor and health groups have called for federal funding for hazard pay in relief packages as one way to address the racial, gender and income disparities in coronavirus infections.
“Over 80 percent of health care support, service, and direct care workers are women. They are also disproportionately people of color. Like other low-wage jobs where women and people of color are concentrated, many of these positions are plagued by underinvestment and a lack of benefits. Now, these jobs pose an even greater risk to workers’ lives,” the Brookings Institution think tank reported in May 2020.
Brookings found that median wages nationally in health care support, service, and direct care jobs were just $13.48 an hour in 2019. Home care workers earn even less, making a median hourly wage of only $11.57. Twenty percent of care workers live in poverty and more than 40 percent rely on some form of public assistance.
“The extremely low pay that health care support, service, and direct care workers earn has long been woefully inadequate. During a pandemic, it is morally reprehensible,” the Brookings report reads. “Congress should enact hazard pay to ensure that no worker risking his or her life during this crisis is paid less than a family-sustaining wage.”
Millionaire surgeons paid in full during pandemic
Some volunteers with the Portland ballot campaign say the decision by MaineHealth is an example of the economic inequality that has deepened during the pandemic. Doctors and nurses, while vital, represent less than 20 percent of all essential health workers and are not the only ones risking their lives during the pandemic.
While the hospital has refused to provide additional hazard pay to its lowest paid workers, MaineHealth has guaranteed payment to all staff throughout the pandemic. This means that the hospital’s highest paid administrators and surgeons have been paid millions of dollars, despite performing less surgeries.
“It is immoral that MaineHealth is protecting the salaries of millionaire surgeons who are safely sitting at home, and refusing to pay frontline workers, who are risking their lives for all of us, the wages they are owed,” Strimling said.
Surgeons’ pay is typically based on the number of elective surgeries they perform. Elective surgeries make up the bulk of the profit for most hospitals, but as coronavirus cases surge, hospitals around the U.S. have begun canceling or delaying some non-emergency procedures to preserve staff and beds.
To retain their surgeons, five of which made between $1.2 and $1.4 million in the last tax year, MaineHealth has paid their full contracted pay throughout the pandemic.
“Since the start of the pandemic, we have kept ALL our team members whole in pay and benefits, regardless of whether their work has been put on hold or not,” MaineHealth spokesperson John Porter said. “This includes all hourly employees as well as salaried employees, including of course the surgeons who are members of our care team. We are proud that we’ve been able to do this, as we feel it is the right thing to do for our employees during this challenging time.”
Maine hospitals have in recent years paid their chief executives more than the national average. MaineHealth CEO William Caron Jr. made $1.6 million in 2019, according to tax fillings, and netted a $260,000 bonus for the fiscal year July 2017 to June 2018. MaineHealth President Richard Peterson made $1.6 million in 2019.
MaineHealth did not say whether their executives or their board of trustees have volunteered to take a pay cut, as some hospital executives around the country have done this last year to show sympathy with their struggling employees.
Last summer, in the wake of the racial justice protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, Caron sent out a company-wide letter to staff saying MaineHealth was “challenged to do better” in light of the evident racial bias in the country. Some employees then circulated a petition calling on executives to be more specific, asking for structural decisions to address health disparities for Black, Indigenous and other people of color as well as a number of protections for patients and employees.
Hazard pay during the pandemic has become a key demand of racial justice organizers nationwide since last summer. In Oakland, hospital drivers, food service workers, care providers and janitors organized under the hashtag #BlackWorkersMatter.
“We are out on the front lines along with the nurses, the doctors and the rest of them risking our lives and risking our families,” one hospital cleaner said during a march last July. “The obligatory pat on the back is no longer enough.”
Top photo: Cafeteria staff serve meals to hospital personnel at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. | David Ryder, Getty Images
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