Good day, membership! Our session on 2/3/2025 was cancelled due to scheduling conflicts on the leadership side. Then our bargaining date got moved from Monday to Tuesday. This session was devoted to leadership responding to our proposals from our previous session on 1/30/2025.
In summary, it was a good session. We got clarification around our members’ ability to attend these sessions without paying back the time. Leadership seems interested in working out issues with us which was heartening. We’ve gotten to shouting distance of each other on a lot of issues. They agreed to TA aka temporarily agree on a few articles. There are still some areas that we need to hear their responses on as well as places where we need to give them our counters.
In more detail, leadership TA’d language around arbitration, equal employment opportunity, health and safety, savings and separability, working outside the bargaining unit, and complete agreement. This makes 6 out of 22 articles agreed upon which is progress. Of note, 6 of those articles are clearly economic. The 10 we need to get through before we tackle economics are doable. The economic proposals are definitely going to take the most time.
We are going to spend our time next week going through the counters. As they say, the devil is in the details and we are trying to get this right. We did get clarification from them regarding how they would calculate pay in a severance package. However, the calculations don’t take into account our supplemental doctors, so we will be looking at language back to them on this.
Not surprisingly, there are places where we likely are going to have a fight. One area is that leadership wants the contract to be for three years. We want two years for this first contract. We don’t want unintended consequences to hurt us for more than they have to. A one year contract just is not feasible given how long it takes to negotiate one and a three year contract feels way too long. We will keep asking for this.
We’re also pushing back on some language in the preamble that could limit the union’s ability to engage with the public. Leadership is naturally downplaying the language, but the ambiguity in the language could definitely be used against us down the road. We will be holding firm to get clear language into the contract.
If you have questions, please let us know. Our email is legacypcpunion@gmail.com. We also have a web site hosted by ONA where these updates will go. That URL is https://www.oregonrn.org/page/LPC-PNWHMA
Lastly, we know there’s some big stuff happening up in Washington that is making a lot of people really unhappy. We plan to tell Legacy that the changes proposed require bargaining with the union. Updates on that as they become available.
Thanks for reading.
Kar-yee