Mediation Update for 9/16/2025
The mediator was not available today, but we still gathered with every intention to meet with OHSU. However, OHSU did not have language to pass to us today and we only have a handful of items in our court.
We did have a sidebar about the Step and Grade proposal that was very productive that helped both teams see where our differences lie and gave us a clearer picture of how we will resolve them. While there are many contentious issues that are still being worked on, this has been a refreshingly collaborative process that will benefit our membership and make OHSU’s administrative burden lighter.
Our team is frustrated that we didn’t receive any language this week and are eager to see the mediator return next week. We’ve passed them hundreds of pages of proposals over the last few weeks and the simple reality is that they have almost the entire contract in their court. We can acknowledge the reality that we created a lot of work for them while still being disappointed that we weren’t able to make real progress today.
One of the tasks we were able to complete instead was finalizing our list of current tentative agreements so that we can share the exact language with our membership. This is the language with all revisions included, so it can be difficult to read if you haven’t been following each pass. Future updates will include summaries of what these changes mean and some general clean up to make them easier to read. That list of tentative agreements can be found here.
Our bargaining survey is still open through this Friday, September 19th. All dues-paying members are strongly encouraged to take the survey and share it with your coworkers. We’ve already gotten a lot of responses, but we would love to see our entire membership participate. You can find the bargaining survey here.
We will also have more details soon about planned actions during the OHSU Board of Directors meeting on Friday, September 26th and a joint rally with Research Workers United (RWU) on Thursday, October 2nd.
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