Ascension’s response to Thedacare’s motion for restraining order [pdf]
wpr.org
wpr.org
This filing makes it very clear how this is entirely ThedaCare's fault, how ThedaCare blindsided both Ascension and the Court with their lawsuit, that ThedaCare has many other options to care for patients without leaving them out in the cold so there's no public interest grounds for the temporary injunction, and that they also have no legal grounds for blocking this recruitment.
This also seems to underscore the notion that a fish rots from the head: apparently ThedaCare's top management were in on this terrible decision. I know I wouldn't want to work there after reading this, so I won't be surprised if they get more resignations soon.
That said, the judge apparently vacated the order blocking the seven employees from starting work at Ascension:
https://www.wpr.org/thedacare-loses-court-fight-keep-health-...
The most damning elements, such as Thedacare having revoked the former employees' accounts, not scheduling them and having refused to renegotiate the employment terms would be so easy to disprove that it's hard to see how they could be entirely made up.
Some of the details in there can also be cross-checked with other things, like that posting on r/nursing.
So you present a very good point that we can't take anyone's reply as gospel truth, but in this case, we do have significant corroboration for the points made in this.
The points I can actually verify are more than enough for me to say that ThedaCare is full of crap and deserves to go out of business. I know that I won't be patronizing them, given any reasonable choice in the matter.
I wonder where the disconnect was? Department director/manager panicking and underplaying the situation to their bosses? Or upper management paralyzed by the thought of paying one department better and everyone else hearing about that?
You can punish the litigants and disbar lawyers later, but you can't bring people back from the dead
Their new issue is that no judge will ever give them an ounce of leeway in the future.
I don’t know why a lawyer would trade their professional reputation in exchange for a lawsuit they know will lose, but good on thedacare for finding that idiot.
The legal community isn’t that large, and fucking over a judge to score a meaningless win is a really fucking stupid idea. They’ve thrown their credibility out the window, and I doubt those lawyers will ever make a claim in that district without every single syllable being heavily scrutinized. That judge won’t forget about this, and neither will his colleagues. That’s besides the damage they did to their brand - suing your nearby competitor because they’ll give your staff massive pay increases is a master stroke of terrible marketing.
If I was a ThedaCare investor I’d absolutely be reading up on what the fiduciary duty of corporate officers are, because at a plain reading it seems they’re attempting to drive down the valuation.
ThedaCare is a not-for-profit, so they are probably more worried about profit than valuation
Yes, it appears that it may have cost some of those workers a day of working at Ascension, but that's one of many things that ThedaCare should be on the hook to pay for at this point.
I've read enough to see that ThedaCare's lawsuit is baseless and I fully expect it to get thrown out. ThedaCare is the one who should pay damages here.
AKA standard > 2010 MBA tactics. It's a bit strange they think this way, at least to me. All this short term thinking isn't a net positive.
It did not compel the seven former employees to continue working at Thedacare; instead, it blocked Ascension from hiring them until after Thedacare had hired their replacements.
See: https://www.wbay.com/2022/01/20/thedacare-seeks-court-order-...
If that was the case, then why was the injunction granted in the first place? Was it due to some suspicion of anticompetitive behaviour? It doesn't seem that it was an attempt at helping the public keep their access to important medical care, which was the tune that Thedacare was playing for the press.
"Nothing that happens in the remainder of this case, regardless of the Court’s decision on this motion, can force those employees to return to ThedaCare to labor against their will. So the only equitable remedy available to the Court is an injunction prohibiting these employees from serving trauma patients at Ascension."
There was zero threat to access to medical care (which, still, is not the problem of those employees) - both hospitals shared the same radiologists, and some other staff. The same care was available to patients, just at a different hospital, a mere few miles away (and indeed, there's significant evidence to show that even Thedacare's ability to provide interventional radiology wasn't compromised, in that they did not transfer a single patient out of that hospital for IR care elsewhere in the entire timeframe).
They sort of had to issue it in the first place because Thedacare made a claim that grave harm could happen to the community. It turns out it was bullshit, but they had to hear them out to decide. (Note that I'm being charitable, not defending the principle of the thing.)
That is insane. They were blocked from working at Ascension, but in addition, as employees of Ascension, two would have been required to keep working at an employer they had resigned from, until Thedacare had deigned to find replacements (and who knows how long that would take, as they have comprehensively destroyed a lot of their recruitability - significantly below market salaries, a competitor nearby who is willing to pay more, a willingness to make their employees pawns in a bigger game for corporate revenue, etc.).
> McGinnis had issued a temporary restraining order Friday that required Ascension to do one of two things: Either make available to ThedaCare one invasive radiology technician and one registered nurse from the departing team or cease hiring any of the employees until ThedaCare has hired adequate staff to replace them.
Source: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/judge-lifts-order-ba...
And confirmed by the court documents themselves:
> IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that Defendant Ascension NE Wisconsin, Inc. shall either: 1. Make available to ThedaCare one invasive radiology technician and one registered nurse of the individuals resigning their employment with ThedaCare to join Ascension (Amber Kohler, Andrew Kohler, Samantha Baltus, Timothy Breister, Kailey Young, Michael Preissner, and Paul Winter)
It went on to say essentially, "if you do keep them in your employment, they are available to ThedaCare, or you don't hire them".
So they literally made the decision to not try to keep their staff because of $. Then made the decision to spend money in the lawsuit. But they also spent money going to the media which backfired on them. Afterall, everyone can see they were lying.
Management clearly not performing to satisfactory levels.
'Penny-wise and pound-foolish' doesn't really carry the gravitas required to express the true enormity of leadership's stupidity on this one.
Very true. Mind you, this is the metric for Executive performance.
A nurse's metrics on performance would be treating and helping patients right. This is how the executives are measured. They are 100% certainly going to flamingly fail here.
I don't see how there is any justice here unless the CEO and the board go to prison.
That is insanity. The lawyer working for this crazy company ThedaCare needs to be disbarred, responsible for taking this insane position/argument and wasting everyone's time and money.
I don't know if it's the case in the US, but here in the UK if you bring a frivolous law suit it's very likely that you will not only lose but the cost of losing is that you have to pay all of the court costs, which includes paying the bills of the legal team of the person or company you sued. It's a very good way of deterring silly law suits. I would hope the same mechanism is available to the court in the US, and that Thedacare end up paying for their own lawyers, but Ascensions's lawyers too.
It is most assuredly NOT the way of things normally in the US. It's possible to sue for legal costs in some circumstances, but it's absolutely not a built-in feature of the legal system.
Seems like a good summary of what "free" markets actually look like in practice and with what entitlement the people operate who benefit from them.
I guess the real mistake ThedaCare made was not monopolizing the local market. If all local medical services were handled under ThedaCare's roof, they wouldn't have to worry about this sort of competitive pressure. Sure they'd still need to worry about people leaving the local area for a new job, but that's enough to help suppress wages.
I'm sure that hospital system consolidation will continue make such legal embarrassment unnecessary in the future.
Nothing about the healthcare market is a free market. Want to know how much your procedure is going to cost before you're expected to pay for it? No, price discovery/transparency is not a thing. Want to shop for the best price? Not possible. Want to switch healthcare providers? You'll need to change your job, and if you're not lucky enough to have employer sponsored/controlled healthcare, you'll have to wait until the new year.
You're a healthcare worker who's being mistreated/underpaid by your employer and you want to quit and get a better job on the "open" job market? The government won't let you do that.
Did those regulations pertain to this labor dispute? If not then I think this is a strawman.
> a government abusing its regulatory authority to prevent workers from freely participating in the labor market.
and
> The government won't let you do that.
It wasn't the government that gave that ruling. Since as bewaretheirs says in their comment elsewhere that ruling was vacated it was not even any law made by government that you can blame.
> Want to know how much your procedure is going to cost before you're expected to pay for it? No, price discovery/transparency is not a thing.
And that intransparency is something mandated by government? I'm asking, I don't know, it surprises me from what I know from just following discussions. The government prevents hospitals and MDs from disclosing their prices?
The US is not a free market, and very few people who run companies believe it should be (they say they do, but they don't in practise). Most business leaders want their company to have a government-protected monopoly. That's why there's so much lobbying.
Now they get to feel the full force of modern klepto-capitalism wrapped around their necks as bills come due.
Land of the free.
EDIT: It seems they've been allowed to take the new job as of yesterday.
Here's the filing https://www.wpr.org/sites/default/files/ascensionbriefjan24....
Edit: I should have started with at least a source:
[1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/thedacare-vs-ascension-...
I mean the hospital feels that way.
People that came here and set up entire states to do opposite things of the directly neighboring state felt that way.
The lawyer moonlighting as a poet who started that meme while actual soldiers were fighting felt that way.
It was never a quote for the - lol - proleteriat and the lyrics delayed its use as a slogan and anthem for over a hundred years.
https://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/2022/01/24/thedacare...
You are welcome!
Not everyone is rich enough that they can lose a week's wages - to say nothing of the legal costs involved.
ThedaCare's TRO was dissolved once it became clear that it wasn't going to protect any patients from ThedaCare's stupidity and they've already had to pay some damages to the affected employees per my understanding.
Longer version at NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/us/thedacare-lawsuit-wisc...
The case brought by ThedaCare sought to prevent Ascension from HIRING these people. There's no portion of their claim that attempted to keep the 7 working at ThedaCare; they were just trying to keep them from working at Ascension.
There's no provision in WI law that would have allowed ThedaCare to argue these people couldn't leave their jobs. Now, it IS plainly obvious that they were hoping that, by closing this option, they'd continue to work for ThedaCare, but this is ridiculous thinking. Were I one of the 7, I'd work literally ANYWHERE ELSE before given ThedaCare another minute of my time after they pulled this.
The TRO filed by ThedaCare also included a clause that required Ascension to "make available" two of the seven at any time to ThedaCare, to continue providing care at ThedaCare, "until ThedaCare had replaced them", which I feel is going to be a long, slow process, given how thoroughly and comprehensively ThedaCare has trashed its already poor reputation in the nursing community.
That's literally indentured servitude. Those employees were being told not only that they couldn't work at an employer of their choosing, but that their resignation was moot - that a lawsuit, that to be clear, named them in no way, shape or form, was able to have as an outcome, be it a TRO, or final order, determining what employer they would work for.
If an order, taken within the context of how the world works, leads to the employees being forced to work at ThedaCare, then it is an order forcing them to work at ThedaCare.
They got a (dubious!) injunction that did not last a single business day. That the judge granted said injunctions is INSANE on the face of it, but to say they "sued successfully" is incorrect.
The entire thing is a good read.