Congratulations RWU!

After years of organizing efforts, well over a year of bargaining, and a strike notice, our sibling union Research Workers United (RWU) reached a tentative agreement on Friday, February 13th and ratified it today.

Over the last few months, Advanced Practitioners United (APU), our own union, and RWU have all had to push OHSU to the edge of a strike to bring back contracts worth voting on.

Our union congratulates them on their tentative agreement. Each new group of workers who form a union makes all of us stronger. Each time new rights and protections are fought for and won, the next bargaining team’s job is just a little easier. Our victories build on each other’s.

I was there, in a conference room in CHH1 before the pandemic, when Oregon AFSCME staff handed out pizza and talked to research workers about their challenges and how forming a union might help them. At the time, my partner worked in research at OHSU and was one of those people telling her story and encouraging her coworkers to come and tell theirs.

I had the opportunity to join RWU during many of their bargaining sessions until our unions went into mediation and that was no longer feasible. I saw a team that was passionate, forward-thinking, and determined. The idea was that I would share context for our contract language and give them insights into what we’d experienced in our negotiations in the past, but the exchange went both ways. Our bargaining team was stronger for the insights and inspiration they gave me.

The task of creating a new contract from scratch is massive. There are hundreds of articles that haven’t been edited in our contract in decades because they already work. A new union’s first bargaining team doesn’t have any of that to breeze past while they look for problems to solve. They need to establish every single word.

Their team saw it for the challenge it was, but also embraced the opportunity it gave them to create a document that reflected their unique experiences. Every bargaining team borrows as much language as they can from existing contracts, but they weren’t satisfied with simply copying and pasting when they knew there was a chance they could improve upon the work other teams had done before them.

It has been one of the great honors and privileges of my time in the labor movement to watch RWU grow from a core group of determined organizers to a fully-fledged union.