Today in bargaining, Kaiser management had a response to only one of the dozen proposals we had given them on Monday and made one new proposal of their own.
Management’s counter to our proposal to make seniority the main determinative factor in awarding positions was actually worse than current contract language.. Not only did they clearly state that they want to maintain the ability for managers to select, from among both internal and external candidates, the person they subjectively decide is the “best” candidate, they also proposed shortening the time frame for internal postings and interviewing external candidates simultaneously with internal candidates, making seniority even less of a factor. In this same part of the contract, they proposed expanding from 30 to 90 days the “evaluation period” in which they can send a successful bidder back to a “comparable” job in their former department.
Kaiser’s new proposal is to have a different and potentially longer probationary period for hourly employees than for exempt employees. Instead of the current six months, non-exempt employees would not pass probation until they worked 1000 hours or six months, whichever comes later.
We presented three new proposals:
- To add two unpaid days of bereavement leave, on top of the three paid days, to be in compliance with state law that now requires employers to offer a minimum of five days of bereavement leave.
- To allow up to $1000 of the annual $3000 tuition reimbursement to be used for travel and related expenses to attend educational conferences, in line with other Northern California union employees and our Psych-Social unit in SoCal.
- To ensure that weekend, holiday and after hours coverage for the ED is provided almost entirely by dedicated staff hired for those positions, to eliminate all involuntary “call”, to allow for remote coverage of ED shifts, and to pay all employees hour for hour for all ED coverage.
For this last proposal, we shared our experiences of how bad things can be for both patients and providers when there is not adequate dedicated staff in the ED, while also citing locations like North Valley and the East Bay, with their robust dedicated ED teams, as examples of how Kaiser does things well.
At the end of the day, we reminded the management team of their stated desire to complete contract bargaining before September 30th and encouraged them to have responses to the proposals we have already given them, so we can move forward and start discussing more difficult subjects, like workload, staffing and patient care issues.
