43
Plan to pay ex-CEO $9,000/week angers union leaders
Photo
Walter "Buzz" Pishkur
By Don Shilling
YOUNGSTOWN — After years of persuading members to accept contract concessions, union leaders are outraged at Forum Health’s proposal to pay up to $9,000 a week to its former chief executive.
“We’re just stunned. We’re flabbergasted,” said Tom Connelly, who represents about 400 nurses at Trumbull Memorial Hospital.
The financially strapped health-care system is proposing that Walter “Buzz” Pishkur, who resigned last month, stay on as a consultant and be paid through May 31 unless the health system is sold.
“Mr. Pishkur said that everyone needed to take a hit, and then he walks out of here with $288,000 in unearned money,” said Connelly, president of Local 2026 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
Forum officials could not be reached, but a motion filed in bankruptcy court said Pishkur would earn the pay by providing his knowledge and experience to his replacement.
The motion also said the consultant agreement would reinforce Pishkur’s past employment contract that prohibits him from working for a competitor.
Forum is asking that Pishkur’s pay be considered at a hearing Tuesday in federal bankruptcy court in Youngstown.
Connelly said he was surprised that Forum’s board of directors thinks the system has the money to pay Pishkur as a consultant.
In the past few years, nurses at TMH have accepted a frozen pension plan, elimination of a company match for a retirement savings plan, increases in what they pay for health-care premiums and a wage freeze.
Deborah Bindas, a staff representative for AFSCME Ohio Council 8, said the proposed compensation for Pishkur “is a stunning example of the gross incompetence that drove Forum into the ground to begin with.”
She said the move will hurt the health system’s credibility in future negotiations.
“This action will be marked in the minds of all for the next time the system gets in a jam and wants to call us partners. If this were April 1, I’d think it was a joke,” she said.
AFSCME represents 1,200 workers at TMH and Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital in Howland.
Anthony Caldwell, a spokesman for Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, called the level of Pishkur’s pay absurd. The payments for Pishkur’s expertise make no sense because he was unable to avoid a bankruptcy filing while he was chief executive, Caldwell said.
Local 1199 represents more than 1,000 technical and professional workers at Northside Medical Center and TMH.
Pishkur resigned as part of a deal that Forum reached with its lenders, who dropped their insistence that a trustee be appointed to oversee the health-care system. The two sides are working together on a reorganization plan.