AI Bargaining Update
Your union’s bargaining team, along with the teams from the other 4 AFSCME locals, met yesterday with OHSU’s team to continue negotiations around OHSU’s rollout of artificial intelligence tools and how they might affect our jobs. Prior to the meeting, OHSU provided us with a trove of information about current AI projects, and a large part of the meeting was spent asking questions about these documents and the corresponding projects.
Beyond this, we spent the rest of the meeting discussing two important dimensions of what will become our AI agreement. The first was establishing a clear but flexible definition of artificial intelligence. We seek to define the terms of this agreement in to be clear and precise, while also ensuring that we can apply the agreement to new developments that will undoubtedly come about as this technology continues to evolve. We believe we are close to agreement in this area.
The other primary focus was the Artificial Intelligence Governance Committee (AIGC). The AIGC is tasked with reviewing proposed AI projects at OHSU to determine which should go forward and which should not. At present, only Local 328 has a representative on this committee. OHSU's proposal at present is that that individual should also represent the Research Workers and Postdocs, and that there should remain only one union representative on this committee. We find this unacceptable. There are five AFSCME Locals at OHSU, and while our interests often overlap, the needs and priorities of each can also differ. The notion that one person can adequately represent the interests of three locals, encompassing roughly 11,000 members is ridiculous. Excluding two locals (the House Officers Union and Graduate Researchers United) entirely is insulting to over 1,000 members this would disenfranchise. We proposed that all five locals should have at least one voting representative each on this important committee.
Management did not have immediate responses to either of our proposals. We’ll be meeting with them again in two weeks. In the meantime, we will deep-dive into the documents OHSU provided us and thinking about how to move forward with future proposals.
If you have not yet taken our AI survey, we’d like to hear from you about your interests and concerns as we look toward our next session. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions, and be on the lookout for more opportunities to get involved soon.