Another point of view on contract demands

In Grant Miller’s letter last week, he described himself, accurately, as confused. Let us see if we can unpack and resolve some of the confusions, point by point.

1. An “anonymous letter” is a claim or an expression of opinion that has no signature and thus no validation; a document received from an anonymous source is still that document, independent of who delivered it, and carries its own authenticity. Many of the most important news stories in modern history have depended on anonymously provided documents. Such documents are not “anonymous letters.”

2. The confidentiality agreement pertained to the negotiation process. The actual final contract presented was the end product of those negotiations, not a part of them. It could scarcely be a confidential document, as it is necessarily a public record, unlike the exchanges of thoughts and positions that went into framing its final shape, which exchanges were entirely between the parties.

3. A newspaper presenting candidate profiles does so to portray to the public those things about a candidate that distinguish him or her; it is not a pass/fail civics exam with standardized questions. Just as an obvious point, incumbents and non-incumbents in any election can scarcely be asked the same things. The questions need to be tailored to the individual to best characterize that individual. So much is elementary journalism.

4. As to the red-type “demands,” you are again confused over the difference between process and product. What went on between the parties during their negotiations was relevant to those parties and to the end document, but to no one else. Only what came out at the end mattered, and what came out at the end was obviously satisfactory to the board (or at least a majority of it) and district management, else – to be obvious – it would not in fact have come out at the end. (The question of how you, neither an elected commissioner nor a part of district management, came to be in possession of a confidential interim working document is an issue that can be left for another day.)

If we are to look at supposedly outrageous demands, the logical focus is the board’s demands as set out in that final product, the last contract offered. The first such demand was much more work for much less pay; most people would call such a demand “unreasonable.” That demand was clearly designed to try to force the doctors to refuse it, to make them seem the bad guys in this unfortunate tragi-comedy. (Remember, the board had, well before the negotiations approached any final phase, already contracted with that enormously expensive “temp docs” firm: their intention to dump the doctors could not be clearer.) But much to their surprise and dismay, the doctors – obviously foreseeing the community-wide calamity that must follow if they parted ways with the district – reluctantly accepted that onerous demand for the sake of the greater public good.

At that point, the deal was supposedly done in principle, and in all but trivial detail in practice. So the board went back to the supposed routine boilerplate that was all that appeared to remain, and inserted a yet more outrageous demand: that they or the CEO be able at any time, for any reason or no reason at all, to fire the doctors and – this is the killer – then require them either to abandon the practice of medicine, or else to move far away from the town in which they had been born and raised, and had lived and practiced in for many years.

Such a demand is, of course, the exact opposite of whatever “reasonable” means. It was never intended as a serious offer: its entire purpose was to go well over and beyond the already unreasonable demands of much more work for much less money, so as to make it a “poison pill,” something that absolutely, positively no one could accept. And when the doctors could not and did not, the board and CEO, with their same elephantine obviousness, described the doctors’ actions as “choosing to leave,” which was the board’s goal from the beginning. (One must add again that “the board” means a majority of the board, not necessarily every member.)

So there, Mr. Miller, is the resolution to your confusion: agreeing to accept much less money for far more work is not making “unreasonable demands;” wanting to be able to throw people out of their profession or even their home town at any time on a whim, that is making an unreasonable demand. One hopes that your confusions are now resolved.

Eric and Lynn Walker, Ritzville