Bargaining Update for 4/29/2025
This was the first session where we were focused entirely on counter-proposals. This means that rather than writing things from scratch or editing the existing contract, we were looking at the things OHSU has passed to us to see what we can respond to quickly and what we need to spend more time working on.
Going forward, updates are going to be more lopsided as language will be in one court or the other. Our team spent the day organizing all of the language we need to respond to and planning our next steps.
OHSU Proposals:
OHSU responded to our Article 2 proposal that we passed on April 22nd.Their proposal agreed with a lot of the principles of ours, but there were disagreements. While we’re still far apart on some of the individual issues, this is a larger step towards our position than we’ve often seen at this stage of the process.
OHSU agrees with the concept of future-proofing the steward hours and roles, even if we’re not on the same page with the specifics. For instance, we requested 5 senior leads and they’ve proposed 3. We also wanted to tie the number of lead stewards to the total membership and they’d prefer to keep this at a fixed number (though they did agree to go from 11 to 12).
They’re interested in keeping the contract language where there’s a total number of steward hours divided among our stewards, but they want to increase it based on the size of the current membership and have it grow every year. Currently, they estimate that the original language was 30 minutes per member, per year. They proposed keeping that structure.
They were okay with expanding officer hours, but less than we’d proposed. They understand the need for our President to be a full time position, but do want to have a shift per week where they report to the regular position. Their justification is that it’s difficult to hold a job if they’re never reporting to the office and there were concerns about someone in that role who may have licensure requirements they need to keep up.
With the expansion of officer hours, they didn’t want to expand the number of hours that they would be paying for. Essentially, we can have more hours if our union pays for them.
Rejected expansion of Chief Steward hours. It’s grown significantly over the last 2 contracts and they don’t want to see it further expand.
They are not interested in time spent doing New Employee Orientation not counting towards steward hours.
They claimed that travelers and agency workers are not centrally tracked, so they can’t report on their numbers. We’ll be pushing back on this.
They’re willing to add to the number of people that are out on lost time, but pushed back on the other additions to that language.
They felt the union officer leave and additional officers language was too open-ended.
In many ways, this is when bargaining really gets exciting. This is when we find out how far apart we are and start building the path to each other. If you want to be sure that OHSU has to do most of that movement, then be sure you’re a member and talk to your coworkers about our union. The more engaged we are, the stronger we are at the table.
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