Syracuse, NY -- Dr. Dennis J. Nave is as equally at home on the picket line as he is wearing a lab coat and treating patients.
Nave, 55, is president of the Greater Syracuse Labor Council, which represents 40,000 workers in 62 area unions. The AFL-CIO believes that he may be the only doctor in the country who is also president of a labor council.
Joining a union gives doctors a collective voice to negotiate change and fees with insurance companies, Nave said.
“We’re not looking in any way to gouge the public. We’re looking to be advocates for our patients,” he said.
“It’s very frustrating as a physician to practice medicine when you have all these roadblocks and you want to provide this care for people,” he said.
Union membership overall dipped slightly in 2009 to 15.3 million, or 12.3 percent of the workforce. That’s down from 12.4 percent the previous year.
Membership among doctors, dentists, optometrists, pharmacists and surgeons grew 3.6 percent to 962,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Union growth among health care professionals has been spawned by the desire to wrest control of patient care from insurance companies, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of Labor Education Research at Cornell University.
“They’ve now become real employees. They don’t believe that they have the thing that matters the most to them, which is the quality of care,” she said.
Union membership across the country is much more diverse than in the past, stretching across many occupations from childcare workers in daycare centers to engineers at Boeing. Workers in factories or construction, traditional union strongholds, now represent a third of all union workers, Bronfenbrenner said.
Nave is as passionate about being a union leader as he is in being a doctor, and the conference room at his medical practice shows it.
A banner for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 1149 hangs on the wall. The room is also decorated with a jumble of anatomical models and posters of hearts, muscles and skin conditions.
Nave is the youngest of three children in a family of Italian descent. He was born on Court Street and grew up a block away.
He and his wife raised their five children in off James Street. With the children grown, the couple recently downsized to a smaller house in DeWitt.
Nave graduated from Syracuse City Schools, Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate Medical University. His medical offices are on Court Street.
He sprinkles his conversation with stories of unions pushing for equal pay for workers regardless of skin color or union members working overtime seven days a week in the 1950s to make enough polio vaccine in two weeks to vaccinate the entire American population.
“I think unions are a part of the history and part of the fabric of America. They were the early entrepreneurs of social justice,” Nave said.
One of Nave’s grandmothers was a union member in the garment industry in New Jersey, and his father was a member of the union at the Millbrook Bakery in Syracuse.
One of Nave’s earliest memories is of attending a cigar-smoke-filled meeting at the Greater Syracuse Labor Council in the old Labor Temple Building on Franklin Street.
“ I don’t know what they were talking about, but I know they were talking freely about it,” he said.
As a child he worked in his grandparents’ grocery store on State Street in what is now Little Italy. From the age of 16, he worked every holiday and summer vacation to earn money for college.
While in college, his father got him a job at the bakery earning $4.25 an hour, good money for a college kid. The job was in the union, and he paid union dues.
One summer, though, that good wage was put in jeopardy when the workers threatened to strike and the company planned to staff the plant with managers.
One day a Teamster came into the plant’s lunchroom, Nave said.
“I know you folks are all concerned about a strike,” the Teamster said. “And somebody else is going to be making the bread and the donuts and the bread crumbs, but just remember. It’s going to sit there on the loading dock. The Teamsters aren’t going to cross your picket lines to ship that.”
The contract was resolved without a strike. Nave kept his job. He said it showed him the power of unions joining together for a cause.
In 2002, fed up with what they saw as the heavy-handedness of insurers, Nave and other doctors in Family Medicine Associates joined the Federation of Physicians and Dentists. In 2006, the local affiliated itself with Teamsters Local 1149, which also represents workers at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Lysander. That June, Nave spoke to 7,000 Teamsters at their convention.
The doctors’ union, now called Central New York Physician Teamster Alliance, represents about 300 local doctors.
Central New York’s union leaders said Nave impressed them. He asks pointed questions at labor meetings, and is willing to listen to what they had to say.
In 2007, Nave became the spokesman for the labor movement in Syracuse when union leaders elected him president of the Greater Syracuse Labor Council.
"He's very active," said Richard Knowles, subdistrict director of the United Steelworkers of America.
“He’ll come to a picket line. He’ll go to a memorial. He’ll show up at a rally. He’s not one that hides behind the title or shows that he’s too good or better than anybody else. He’s in the thick of things,” Knowles said.
Nave's expertise has been helpful to unions organizing health care workers and in contract negotiations with hospitals, said Mark Spadafore, of the Service Employees International Union 1199 Health Education Project.
“When you have a doctor there saying you need to do this, it’s very powerful,” Spadafore said.
He also offers his expertise on health care costs to other unions during negotiations.
Nave said his concerns go beyond health care to the quality of life for everyone in the community.
“It breaks your heart to see people struggling. I don’t think that should be that way in the United States of America,” he said.
--You can contact Charley Hannagan at 470-2161 or channagan@syracuse.com