The Department of Justice has filed a statement of interest siding with UPMC workers in an ongoing antitrust lawsuit alleging the Pittsburgh-based health system prevented workers from exiting or improving their working conditions, suppressed their wages and benefits, and increased their workloads.
The department's antitrust division on Sept. 30 responded to UPMC's motion to dismiss the proposed class action case, saying the motion "raises significant questions of interest to the United States pertaining to the continued application of the antitrust laws to labor markets."
The original lawsuit, filed in January, alleges UPMC implemented an anticompetitive scheme to gain monopoly power over hospital services and monopsony power over hospital workers (including skilled healthcare workers).
From 1996 to 2018, UPMC made about 28 acquisitions of competitor healthcare service providers, but the deals were done to expand the health system's market power and "at the same time that UPMC was acquiring these facilities, it was also reducing the availability of healthcare services within the relevant market," the lawsuit states.
It claims that from 1996 to 2019, UPMC closed four hospitals and downsized three others, eliminating 353 beds and 1,367 full-time and 433 part-time healthcare service jobs.
Additionally, the lawsuit claims UPMC used anticompetitive restraints such as noncompete clauses and "do-not-rehire blacklists" to keep workers from exiting; suppressing wages to sub-competitive levels while also reducing staffing and increasing workloads; and suppressing workers' rights to keep them from unionizing.
The allegations, if true, "suggest a breakdown in the competitive process harmful to tens of thousands of healthcare workers and hundreds of thousands of patients," the Justice Department's filing said.
The Justice Department's filing said UPMC's motion to dismiss "misstates and misapplies" legal standards for antitrust labor-market-monopsonization claims and "fails to address" the proper standards for evaluating relevant markets and monopsony power.
A UPMC spokesperson shared the following statement with Becker's: "UPMC is among the best places to work in all the regions we serve throughout Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland due to above-industry-average wages and employee benefits, which are designed to support the 100,000 people employed throughout the UPMC health system and their families. As we have made clear in our motion to dismiss, the plaintiffs' allegations are factually incorrect and legally unfounded."
UPMC is a 40-hospital system with 100,000 staff members total, according to its website.