Good day, membership.
We met again on Monday to hear the counters from leadership to our proposals as well provide counters on our part regarding the preamble and the Labor Management Committee (LMC). Leadership wants us to have two separate LMC’s for the doctors and the APP’s. We’re not sure why as having one LMC for both would be more efficient.
As for their counters, in general there wasn’t anything we didn’t really expect. I will say leadership seems to be pushing to get things done quickly. While ideal we are committed to negotiating the best contract that we and will take our time as needed. Leadership also reminded us of the upcoming OHSU takeover that still hasn’t been approved and we may find them more challenging. There is no reason to believe this. In general the story they tell us is that other groups are agreeing to what they want in terms of length of contract, probationary period, seniority, etc, and that they don’t see a reason to do something different for us. We are going to talk with other bargaining groups to see if this is actually true.
Leadership returned with a counter on lactation that was a lot more vague than what we had. They say this will better align with what state law is. We will look at this closer. We did have a general discussion at the end of bargaining about the economics. Of course leadership would like us to just agree to what we have. However, we all know that the cap, the payback possibility, and the PTO situation are not tenable and require change. The discussion did give us insight into what leadership’s priorities are.
On that subject, would people be interested in doing a webinar on how we actually get paid and what our true-up statement actually mean? It would also be a time for you to tell us what your economic priorities are. Please email us at legacypcpunion@gmail.com and let us know.
We went through the proposals to see how far apart we are during our Tuesday meeting. Looking at the whole, we have made some really good progress. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, but taking a step back does put things in perspective.
So that is where we are. We have another bargaining session on March 20th. There will be an update after that meeting.
Thanks for reading.
Kar-yee