2 June 2021
How does zippia.com know that 65 percent of the
employees at Kalispell’s hospital are Democrats?
zippia.com, an online service for job seekers, provides amazingly detailed information on employers — including, at least for Kalispell Regional Healthcare/Logan Health, their political affiliations.
Taken 30 May 2021 from a point approximately two miles west of the hospital. This is not an innocent name change. I'll have more on the subject later this week.
Last night, while researching the nurses’ strike at KRN/Logan, I found this at Zippia (highlights added):
KALISPELL REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER OVERVIEW
Kalispell Regional Medical Center is a 138-bed hospital, located at 310 Sunnyview Lane in Kalispell, Montana. The hospital is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities
The staff at Kalispell Regional Medical Center come from unusually diverse demographic backgrounds. The organization is 66.0% female and 24.4% ethnic minorities. Despite its diversity in other areas, Kalispell Regional Medical Center employees are noticeably lacking in political diversity. It has an unusually high proportion of employees who are members of the Democratic Party, at 65.5%. Employees seem to enjoy working in an otherwise diverse workplace that is dominated by members of the Democratic Party.
Kalispell Regional Medical Center has great employee retention with staff members usually staying with the organization for 3.7 years. The average employee at Kalispell Regional Medical Center makes $41,607 per year. In comparison, some of its highest paying competitors, like Minnie Hamilton Health System, La Porte Hospital, and Decatur Memorial Hospital, pay $52,887, $51,213, and $50,709, respectively.
A large health care organization with 1,800 employees and an annual revenue of $273.6M, Kalispell Regional Medical Center is headquartered in Montana.
Zippia does not provide political affiliation for all hospitals. So, why for Kalispell’s? And, how? In states where voters register by political party, estimating the political composition of a hospital’s workforce would be a simple matter of matching the official voter registration list against a list, which could be obtained from a number of giant commercial databases, of the hospital’s employees. But Montana does not register voters by political party.
Did Zippia cross-reference public information on political contributions? Possibly, but who believes that 65 percent of KRH/Logan’s employees contributed to Democrats? If Zippia knows the political contribution rate for a population, it could estimate that population’s political makeup, but not to the precision of one-tenth percent.
Matching job titles and pay against other information available in commercial databases provides another way of estimating political affiliation; but again, not with one-tenth percent precision.
Even if Zippia has a valid, reasonably accurate and precise, way of identifying the political affiliations of an employer’s workforce, what is the point of doing so? Is it just coincidental that during the Kalispell nurses’s strike Zippia is alleging that KRH/Logan’s workforce is “…noticeably lacking in political diversity”?
Zippia is not going to give me a straight answer on this; probably not even an answer. A member of Montana’s news media, especially a reporter skilled in data analysis, might get to the bottom of this mystery.
Postscript, 3 June 2021. Much to my surprise, there’s been almost no interest in this report. I suspect that a party, or parties, with an interest in Flathead politics, may be involved in what strikes me as skullduggery. But I seem to be the only person taking this seriously.