Just my guess: the old employer is pursuing a tortious interference claim against the new employer. The judge granted an injunction against the new employer based on the claim but dressed it up in rhetoric about the health care crisis. Circuit court judges in Wisconsin are elected – it is NOT in this judge’s interest to leave a significant portion of his voting public without access to trauma care. So he issues the injunction and essentially tells the parties to work this shit out so I don’t have to go on record ruling for or against either one of you.
It’s fine that you don’t know the answer. I don’t expect you would. The only point I’m trying to make is that there has to be a legal cause of action. Like, the bare elements of some legally protected right being or due to be violated has to have been spelled out in a pleading, I don’t expect anyone here knows what that asserted right is, I am simply highlighting that the article (and at this moment it seems to be the “best” source we have) is deficient in necessary details.
Right now this doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. Right now it even looks like slavery to some (although it looks like considerably less so when you consider that perhaps the employees are allowed to quit, just not to start working at the new employer).
The take away I would hope people get out of this is simply that judges don’t generally get to just make stuff up. Or at least they’re not supposed to. Mysterious as it may be at this moment, there has to be some legal basis beyond just “Down with workers’ rights! Capitalism forever!” Part of that legal basis has to be not simply that a judge can grant a temporary injunction, but specifically that a judge has to have heard from at least one party putting forward what on its face appears to be a legally sufficient cause to grant a temporary inunction. Be it breach of contract, tortious interference, or some statutory provision. To us, that is all illusory at the moment, but I strongly suspect the reason is because of bad reporting, not because no such *sufficient cause exists.
In short, this is what bad reporting looks like.
*ETA: Rather, that should be “sufficiently alleged”. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be true that if it’s true they would be entitled to legal remedy.
As I hunt around Google, I think this is probably right.
From a statement from the new hospital seeking the new employees:
The crux of the underlying dispute seems to hinge on how these people were hired. The employees are saying that one person organically got a job, which led coworkers to also apply, whereas the aggrieved hospital is saying that their staff was poached.
Absent some sort of employment contract, I’d think that’s pretty weak. But it offers a plausible basis to go to court.
And it’s made even worse by the fact that, at least for the first few employees, the employer had almost a month’s warning that the employees were leaving, and they made a positive statement that they weren’t going to make a competing offer. It seems to me that the employer has a perfectly acceptable means of addressing their staffing issues (match the offer), that the employees also seemed to initially prefer (they asked for the offer to be matched). What the employer is really asking the courts to do is protect them from the consequences of their own shortsightedness.
They knew their competitors were offering better benefits to the exact same types of employees, and chose not to do anything about that. Well, sorry, bozos, but this is how the free market works.
So, it seems that ‘right to work’ was bad because you can’t always fire somebody who needs to be fired.
Now, ‘at will’ is bad because employees you need may actually want to be somewhere else.
Anyone want to guess that if the situation was different, IE the hospital just told all these workers that they were getting a raise and new benefits and then fired them. Would the court grant an injunction for the employees in that case?
I’m even just trying to imagine the pure inverse. ThedaCare fires an employee. The employee goes to court and says “Your honor, there’s a health care crisis! Surely they cannot fire me because people’s health will be jeopardized.” Would an injunction be issued? Not a chance in my mind.
So what makes the employers so special (other than we live in a capitalist dystopia)?
employer A has got to be looking a little better right now
To the contrary.
It says a lot about our present economic system that the judge ordered the employees to keep working their old jobs but didn’t order the employer to pay them the wages and benefits they could get at a different job.
Keep in mind, the answer to the question “What justification does the judge have?” might be “None”. Judges aren’t allowed to make decisions without justification, but people do things they’re not allowed to all the time.
Yup. This feels like using the courts to keep wages down.
He did not order this.
Do the patients who may die due to staffing shortages have any rights?
I think that that would be the reasoning behind the judge’s decision. If patients died due to this mass resignation, then he could be held responsible (not legally, but politically and morally).
Whether or not there actually will be harm to patients if these employees quit doesn’t matter for this round, that’s something to be worked out a later hearing. At this point, the judge is doing what can be done to reduce the risk that these patients are not left without care.
I tried to find the text of the lawsuit by checking the court clerk’s website. It is referenced, but not something I can access.
But, I do think it’s worth noting that the lawsuit was filed on the 20th, a hearing which resulted in the temporary was issued on the 21st, and the final hearing (which might result in a denial of the injunction) is going to be on the 24th.
I can’t emphasize enough the lightening speed that the court is applying to this issue. For all we know, the judge might ream the hospital for this request once Monday rolls around.
He ordered that they cannot work for a different employer. That’s strong coercive pressure for them to keep working at their present employer.
The bank sending you a foreclosure notice is a “strong coercive pressure” to be employed, but it’s not an order to keep working at your old job.
He didn’t even order that they couldn’t work for a different employer, just not this employer.
We don’t know the financials involved either. If ThedaCare treats low income patients on MediCare, and Ascension only takes patients who have excellent insurance or can self pay, then they may not be able to just give out raises to be competitive with the new employer in town. People always like to assume that employers have infinite resources at their disposal, and that they don’t give out raises and benefits entirely out of greed, but that’s simply not true. Employers are also affected by economics, and they can’t give out more than they make. Healthcare is even more susceptible in this, as unlike food service, you often can’t just raise your prices to meet your increased costs.
If these employees leaving means that low income people can no longer get treatment for strokes or trauma, then that is something that is in the public interest for a judge to at least hit the pause button to make sure that there aren’t a whole bunch of dead bodies at the end of the day.
I would think this action would speed up the resignations at the hospital. No sense working for a company where a judge could step in and prevent you from taking another job. Especially now days when healthcare workers are in such high demand. It’s one thing if it’s a high-level, well-compensated employee with trade secrets going to a competitor, but it’s absurd that a basic healthcare worker would be prevented from going to another employer. I would expect this hospital to see mass resignations of the most capable people in the future as they get out when they can.
These people applied for a job with a different employer (Ascension) and their current employer (ThedaCare) protested this. I see no reason to assume ThedaCare would be okay with the employees quitting if they found jobs at some business other than Ascension.
I’m saying this judge has decided the issue was the employees quitting ThedaCare. You seem to be arguing that the issue is the employees going to work for Ascension. That seems unlikely. If it was true, the judge would be saying that ThedaCare has a say in who Ascension hires.
I doubt it. Otherwise we’d see more suits against medical staff, teachers, bus drivers, grocery stockers, truck drivers, and other workers who try to retire.
That’s what I’ve been pondering.
Hypothetical: I’m an evil billionaire and have decided to enact a revenge plot against the CEO of DopeTech Healthcare by poaching as many employees as I can and arranging for them to all leave on the same day. I’ve been successful enough that the hospital will not be able to continue normal operations for quite some time. It’s not certain that any critical patients will die, but it’s absolutely a possibility. I’ve had a lot of success grabbing nightshift nurses - a critical role already in high demand. There simply won’t be enough bodies to cover all shifts.
So DopeTech’s CEO goes to a judge and says “Hey! Johnny Bravo is putting a bunch of patients at risk just because I dunked his head in the toilet every Thursday morning from 3rd to 11th grade!”
Certainly I will bear the moral responsibility for any patients who die, but is there a legal remedy? Does the government have an interest in protecting citizens from my evil plot, or does the free market rule here?
The judge has gone in the opposite direction from this goal. These employees were going to go to work for Ascension, where they would have provided the same medical services they provided at ThedaCare. This might have hurt ThedaCare, but it wouldn’t have left patients without treatment.
The judge has now ordered that the employees can’t work at Ascension. Which means if they don’t choose to work at ThedaCare, they won’t be providing medical services to any patients. (It also means the employees won’t have jobs, which would presumably be a hardship on them.)
The judge’s order will most likely reduce the amount of treatment patients will be receiving in that community. So his order can’t be based on medical need.