Why fed-up doctors at Banner Health are trying to form a union

Dr. Syerra Lea swung open the door of her office at Banner’s Gilbert Health Center. Inside, she found the clinic’s physician executive and human relations director waiting for her. “Have a seat,” one of the managers said. 

They’d received Lea’s 90-day notice. Leadership was ending her clinical duties that Friday morning, a full 86 days before her set final day. 

Lea had worked as a family care physician at the company’s Gilbert location for 12 years. And just like that, Banner Health’s managers forced her to turn over her laptop and badge and had her escorted out of the building. Leadership barred her from finishing patient workups and following up on diagnoses. Someone would collect the rest of her things. She could pick them up another day. 

“I didn’t say goodbye to my patients,” Lea said through tears in an interview with Phoenix New Times. “Essentially, they said, ‘Okay, should she continue to see patients? Or should we send her home for fear that she’ll spread the union?’ And they chose to send me home.” 

A week prior, Lea filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against her employer, alleging that Banner Health retaliated against her for bringing up a scheduling conflict in a clinic group chat — a seemingly trivial matter that managers escalated. To represent her in the complaint, she enlisted an attorney with the Union for American Physicians and Dentists. She suspected Banner might see the complaint and fire her. So as she started her job hunt, she gave Banner her 90-day notice, a standard in the industry.

Sure enough, management axed her. But not outright. A company cannot legally fire an employee for filing an unfair labor practice charge, and retaliating against a worker is illegal. Instead, the company barred her from the building while maintaining her pay and insurance until her 90 days were up in early August.

Lea suspects that her affiliation with UAPD set Banner Health off. Before she filed her labor complaint, Lea said, the company didn’t know something big was happening behind the scenes: Fed up with management, Banner Health’s doctors were organizing a potential union.

‘It’s all profit-driven’

If they succeed, Banner’s physicians will have formed Arizona’s only physicians’ union — and at the state’s largest private employer, no less. Working with UAPD, physicians and dentists nationwide have formed more than 30 bargaining units across more than 100 healthcare settings.

UAPD represents more than 7,000 physicians across the country. Six UAPD bargaining units in California have formed through the state’s university system, among county and non-profit employees and an anesthesiologists’ corporation. Two UAPD bargaining units are in New Mexico: La Familia Health and Rehoboth McKinley Christian Health Care Services. No other physicians are organized in a Banner Health setting.

In 2024, the Phoenix-based Banner Health brought in a revenue of $10.8 billion, with $9.31 billion in expenses across operations in six states. It counts more than 30 physician clinics across the Valley, including in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler, Queen Creek, Maricopa, Sun City, Buckeye and Peoria. Nearly 270 Banner physicians and other practitioners are eligible to join and vote in the formation of the union: nurse practitioners, physician assistants, family medicine physicians, internal medicine physicians and pediatricians.

The doctors say they’re organizing for better pay and to address a host of issues with their hospitals. They say administrators have placed profit above patient care and inundated doctors with administrative duties that force them to work long hours away from their patients. The doctors feel micromanaged, exhausted and disrespected.

They say the final straw came last year, when Banner Health introduced a new policy: Administrators could dock physicians’ base pay by as much as $15,000 a year if the company didn’t meet certain revenue goals. Previously, only patient-care metrics could get a doctor’s pay cut.

“When they announced these metrics, we were like, ‘So, we don’t care how healthy our patients are anymore? This is just profit?” Lea said. “It’s all profit-driven, which is very bizarre to us.” 

In February 2025, after that policy was announced, Dr. Justin Watkins, another family medicine doctor at Gilbert Health Clinic, reached out to the Union of American Physicians and Dentists to discuss legal options. He and Lea say they want to turn the company’s priorities back toward patient care.

“I’m also, of course, fighting for a pay raise,” Watkins says in a video he posted to Instagram. “We have not had a significant pay raise in many years now. There needs to be more transparency in how Banner calculates our pay, our bonuses, and how we’re able to earn our livings here with Banner.”

Lea, Watkins, and other physicians ramped up their organizing efforts and called an election after more than 30% of Banner Health physicians signed union authorization cards. In late July, NLRB officials mailed ballots to the Valley’s Banner Health physicians in the Phoenix metro area. Those doctors have until Aug. 26 to vote and mail back their ballots, which officials will count on Sept. 2.

If the majority of Banner Health’s nearly 270 physicians vote in favor of unionizing, it will give them the power to collectively bargain with one of the country’s largest nonprofit health systems. Physicians can work toward a contract to receive more protections and pay, be part of clinic-level issues and get support in completing chronic administrative tasks. Arizona is a right-to-work state, meaning that employees cannot be forced to join a union or pay dues as a condition of keeping their job. Non-dues-paying members still benefit from the improved conditions, benefits and pay that a bargaining union secures.

“These clinicians are the people that are going to be sitting at the table with their employer,” Gomez said. “They’re the people that started this. The people that are leading this.” 

Banner Health did not respond to New Times’ request to comment, but they’ve pushed back against the unionizing effort online. The company created a site on their website that asks physicians to “vote NO so Banner can remain strong as One Team.” The site also criticizes the effort by writing that “unions cannot guarantee anything” and “contract negotiations take time with no guaranteed outcome.” 

“Just looked at my schedule in 2026,” Lea said in the clinic’s physician group chat. “Every Saturday starting January 3rd is open, and my schedules are full. Someone should probably look at all the providers’ schedules because I suspect we all are working every Saturday starting January 3rd and have patients scheduled.” 

After another physician responded that their schedule had the same issue, Lea sent a follow-up message. “Could we make sure that patients get rescheduled timely?” she asked. “Whenever patients need to be rescheduled due to scheduling errors, I hear a lot of complaints that they were not notified until the week of, and then there are no appointments for 3 months.” 

A few days later, Lea received a message from her manager’s boss requesting a meeting. There, leaders told her they saw her message as implying that “your manager is incompetent and it was inappropriate.” In Lea’s manager evaluation, which she shared with New Times, Banner Health leadership characterized Lea’s message as “uncomfortable” and said it “misaligned with Banner’s values.”

Managers told her she needed to bring concerns directly to her manager or director, or else risk corrective action, which could lead to her firing. Lea believes her director escalated the incident against Lea because she often spoke up about issues related to patient care.

“It definitely shook me, rattled me,” she said. “I felt like I was being targeted, probably because I speak up.”

After graduating from medical school, Lea started her residency at Banner Health’s medical center in downtown Phoenix. Later, she joined her longtime practice in Gilbert.

“Banner is all I’ve known for my whole medical career,” Lea said. “It was very difficult for me because I was ready to retire with Banner. I was very committed to the patients that I was taking care of, and my colleagues.”

On August 3, she started a new job at a company called CenterWell, which is a Medicare company contracted with Humana, providing senior primary care, or geriatrics. Still, because Banner kept her on payroll through August, she’ll be able to vote in the union election.

“I got messages from surgeons, from neurologists, from specialists all over the Valley that had heard about it and were asking, ‘Are you okay? Oh my gosh, how did this happen?” she said. “People were pretty shocked to hear that this could happen to someone who was working for Banner for 15 years and never caused any kind of problems or had any issues.” 

Lea wasn’t able to have the in-person, sentimental send-off she wanted after 15 years with the company. On Aug. 5, UAPD posted a video of Lea speaking about her suit and support for the union. Support from dozens of patients rolled into the comments.

“Absolutely the best doctor I’ve had, so caring and understanding,” a user named Christina wrote. “Thank you, Dr. Lea, for being an amazing doctor and speaking out.”