At today’s bargaining, the Employer presented us with a new “Comprehensive Proposal.” This was merely a rehash of their previous exhaustive list of our proposals that they are rejecting, and their proposals that they are holding on, with two exceptions:
- They added their rejection of the proposals we made at the last bargaining session
- They made a proposal “agreeing” to eliminate Involuntary after hours coverage in the ED, but not until October, 2029 and only if they can, at the Employer’s sole discretion, choose how to cover these shifts, including with non-union personnel
After management presented their proposal, we shared with them a listing of all the open issues that clearly indicated that we have made the last substantive proposal on almost every issue. Management’s response was that we want to change too much. In reality, many of the modest proposals we are making are just to bring us into parity with other union contracts, including our Kaiser contract in SoCal. Kaiser may have made fewer proposals, but these are takeaways that would be much more impactful, like eliminating IPC time and protections against mass subcontracting..
Finally, we reviewed one more time with them our proposal on workload and patient care, this time highlighting how several provisions of our proposal align with requirements imposed on Kaiser by the U.S. Department of Labor when issuing a recent $31 million fine.
For example, the Settlement Agreement with the DOL contains the following:
Kaiser shall develop a process to ensure that intake appointments are not assigned to an MH/SUD Clinician when accepting new patients would prevent the Clinician from providing follow up appointments to their existing patients within legal time frames.
This aligns with the following provision in our proposal:
Whenever a provider has no open return appointments on his/her/their schedule available within ten business days, that provider will be allowed to convert intake and/or secondary transfer appointments to return appointments.
By contrast, KP’s proposals contain provisions that would limit clinicians in their ability to exercise their clinical judgment in making treatment decisions.
