Outpatient clinicians at Banner Health voted Wednesday to join the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, the first time physicians in Arizona will be represented by a labor union.
Of the more than 200 physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners who cast ballots, 149 voted for the union and 66 against. The clinicians work in primary care at 31 Banner clinics across the Phoenix Valley and together see more than 500,000 patients a year.
Why it matters in Queen Creek
Banner Health is the town's second-largest employer, with about 800 employees, according to the Town of Queen Creek's economic development office. Only Queen Creek Unified School District employs more people here.
Banner also operates an outpatient primary-care clinic in town, the Banner Health Center at 21772 S. Ellsworth Loop Road, the kind of clinic covered by the vote. The union and Banner have not published which 31 clinics make up the bargaining unit, so whether clinicians at the Queen Creek location took part is not known.
The physician who began the organizing effort, Dr. Justin Watkins, practices family medicine in neighboring Gilbert.
What the clinicians say
Clinicians told Courthouse News they are burned out, overworked and underpaid, and that they routinely take hours of charting home each night to keep up with caseloads. They said operations staff rather than clinicians now set how long a provider can spend with a patient, in some cases 15 minutes.
The clinicians said the deciding factor came last year, when Banner adopted a policy under which administrators can reduce a physician's base pay by as much as $15,000 a year if the company misses certain revenue goals. Before that, they said, only patient-care measures could reduce a doctor's pay.
"Because of our lack of autonomy and because of our patient burden, we are in a situation where it is very difficult to provide the quality of care to our patients that we want to and we are accustomed to," Watkins said.
Watkins began organizing with the union in June 2025. Around the same time, another physician at his clinic filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.
A clinician named Syerra Lea said managers threatened her job after she raised concerns about a scheduling error, and said she was forced out four days after giving notice once they learned she supported the union.
