Our Virtual Health bargaining team met with management on November 7, 2024 for our sixth negotiation session to continue work towards a 2024 Collective Bargaining Agreement. While there are still a number of outstanding contract articles we are negotiating, we are also finalizing many tentative agreements with the Employer, meaning we are now primarily negotiating over some of our highest priorities we had for this round of bargaining.

On the 7th we exchanged proposals regarding:

• The training, onboarding, and mentoring process of new hires

• Expansion of our rights to bereavement leave

• An extended equal opportunity article, which aims to provide a supportive process for our coworkers should they face discrimination or harassment in the workplace

• And of course: premiums, differentials, and the wages we are paid for the hard work we do

We are continuing to review regional market wages and working hard to ensure that our pay at Virtual Health doesn't just reach the competitive rates in the first year of our contract, but that it stays competitive throughout the next few years. Furthermore, we are also working on some of the "formatting" of our wage scales - such as efforts to uniform the scales to the same number of total steps, and removing "ghost" steps (years where you do not receive a wage increase for another year of employment).

"We're making progress to ensure a fair contract is reached. We're dedicated to making sure we're compensated fairly, and that our union contract provides the support we all need to continue the hard work we do every day."

—Rayann La Madeleine, Monitor Tech

Your bargaining team: Faith Couch, Central Monitoring Telemetry; Chelan Henley, Virtual Companion; Rayann La Madeleine, Central Monitoring Telemetry; Francine Toves (guest), Virtual Companion