National Bargaining Notes- Week 3

It's been a long and productive, and tiring week. This time I was accompanied by stewards Joel Levitt and Brenda Tolbert, who attended as observers. That is an understatement- their ability to attend other subgroups was invaluable. We also worked on summarizing the results of our bargaining survey to give to Dave Regan. More importantly, our chapter had additional representation.
The subgroups presented their recommendations to the Coalition Caucus of the Common Interest Committee, and we reached consensus on all. The big sticking point, front loaded sick leave, was settled with a compromise to receive their annual allotment on the anniversary date instead of in January.
My subgroup on LMP broke out in to three smaller groups, and that worked well. We recommended that a joint committee be chartered to develop and implement a means for building direct accountability for improving the partnership, that trust resources be expanded, and that there be an educational curriculum developed to foster business, union and contract literacy. We felt this is particularly important for middle managers and physicians.
We want timely resolution of disputes and grievances, and methods to share and adopt best practices.
We recommended a universal UBT rating system be established to help increase and reward the number of high performers, and to identify and support under-achieving UBTs.
The final plenary session today consisted of labor and management presenting their final interests.
I will provide a summary of both in my next post.
In Unity,
Therese