King Day event in Oak Park highlights discrimination problems at West Suburban hospital

More than 100 people gathered in front of Resurrection Health Care's West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to protest the hospital's unfair treatment of African-American and Latino employees who work in the housekeeping department.

Employees and community groups who support them marked King Day with a rally calling on West Suburban CEO, Jay Kreuzer to put a halt to racially discriminatory practices at the hospital. Participants in the King Day gathering also delivered petitions to Kreuzer signed by over 1,000 local residents. Ten employees at West Suburban Hospital filed complaints with the Illinois Department of Human Rights after hospital management failed to respond to their charges of discrimination in the Housekeeping Department. The complaints allege unequal pay and treatment, as well as on-the-job segregation and outright harassment. One of the complainants alleges that a supervisor used negative stereotypes in comparing her behavior to “gangbangers.” 

“Doing housekeeping work in a hospital is never easy. But our jobs got much harder three years ago when we got a new manager. Since then Black and Latino workers have faced all kinds of discrimination - from unequal treatment to unfair firing,” said Shelly Harrison, a former West Suburban Hospital employee.

Disturbed by the hospital’s lack of responsiveness to such serious charges, the Oak Park-Austin Health Alliance undertook the petition drive to demonstrate community support for the workers’ rights to non-discriminatory treatment on the job.

“Dr. King’s birthday is a reminder of the importance of forthrightly confronting racial problems in our society,” said Elce Redmond, of the South Austin Coalition. “We were really disturbed to learn that racially derogatory language is being used toward employees by their supervisor. We want West Suburban to know that we find that unacceptable.” The Oak Park-Austin Health Alliance, which spearheaded the rally, also has criticized the hospital’s policy of charging those who lack health insurance much higher prices than insured patients. 

“Resurrection Health Care came in and took over this hospital, and asked to be part of our community,” Oak Park Village Trustee Robert Milstein added. “So far, the hospital hasn’t been a very good neighbor. Charging an uninsured mother as much as three times what an insured mother pays to have a child is not being a good neighbor. Ignoring flagrant racial discrimination is not being a good neighbor. West Suburban Hospital and Resurrection need to immediately address these problems to show they see this community as more than a ‘revenue source.’"