1000 Workers Losing Jobs at Jackson Memorial

The Jackson Memorial, a major South Florida hospital has informed that in order to save millions of dollars, it’s going to lay off thousands of workers.

Admirable mentality. With Japan as an example of what skilled human workers can do to raise a nation’s economy without adequate land mass or resources, our decision makers think economic growth is a result of human resource culling and throttling – or they seem to think something quite similar to that if one sees the number of firefighters, law enforcement officers, teachers, and hospital workers given the boot every day, all in the name of saving and reinforcing the economy.

Well, back to the news, as the story goes, the President and CEO of Jackson Health System Carlos Migoya officially announced the cuts on Tuesday at a press conference. He said, “This is not about a profit and loss, this is about efficiency … What we’re looking to do at this point is right-sizing the organization, so we have the right number of employees for the kind of volumes that we have.”

Already 195 positions have been eliminated (one would like to say ‘compromised’ in the language of Frederick Forsythe), and 920 are in the pipeline amounting to 1,115 jobs. This would mean that Jackson Memorial had been overstaffed by 10% all along.

Jackson’s representatives confirmed that the cuts would create a savings of $69 million including the savings in benefits.

Employees in the list include clinical employees as well as general employees and nurses. Doctors at JMH were disheartened. Trauma surgeon Dr. Howard Lieberman said “It’s a bad situation they’re in…We’ve been losing money for years now, and we try to take care of everyone, insurance, no insurance. It doesn’t matter how sick you are, who you are, we take care of everyone here, and something has to give.”

Speaking on the layoffs, Dr. Morgan Peterson said, “We see it every day, if there’s not enough nurses to care for the people in the hospital it’s very noticeable.”

“The way we’re working, I know the division I’m part of, we work non-stop, around the clock and we’ll keep on working as hard as we can to provide ongoing service,” added Dr. Liberman.

As respiratory therapist Marie Jules expressed, employees now have become used to layoffs, “Jackson is not the end of the world for me, and if they lay me off, I’ll find another job.”

SEIU union president Martha Baker said on the issue:”We are appalled with today’s announcement of massive layoffs at Jackson. This is what you get when you hire a billionaire banker and then cut him loose to take a chainsaw to healthcare in Miami-Dade County. It’s unbelievable that he wouldn’t consult the nurses, doctors, and healthcare professionals – who have sacrificed out of their pockets to keep Jackson afloat – about how his plan to ‘right size’ the system might harm patient care. We have no idea how Mr. Migoya thinks patient care can be maintained with such drastic cuts of frontline caregivers.”