Childrens Therapy Center Bargaining Update

We met with the Employer on March 17 and had a productive session. The Employer presented their proposal at 9:30am. We worked hard throughout the day and came back with a proposal for them at 4:00pm. We have made significant progress through the contract and are coming down to the final topics, which are always the hardest.
 
While we have made significant progress on the contract as a whole, there has been very little movement in a couple of key areas: Wages, PTO and Health care. We are continuing to try and have Management consider each factor independently to get movement on each topic. There have been movements made on our offers in these categories that we hope will be reciprocated by the Employer, who so far has refused to move on their previous proposals surrounding these topics. We are hoping that our petition will also signal to our Employer that these issues are important to the whole bargaining unit. Our goal is to present the petition with signatures from 85-100% of the bargaining unit at our next bargaining session which tentatively will be on April 10.
 
Caseload calculator is a topic where we have had repeated discussions that have been somewhat productive, however, there is a fundamental difference between the goal of our caseload calculator and the Employers. Our caseload calculator was intended to prevent an excessive caseload, protecting us from being overworked and giving us a premium if we are assigned too many cases. The Employer’s caseload calculator is tied to direct service time and has no function or ability to determine a caseload maximum. We have continuously tried to figure out how to incorporate both of these metrics into one formula but have not been able to. Because of this, we put both of our calculators in our previous proposal and the proposal we gave at the end of the day. We had extensive conversations with the Employer trying to work this out and are hopeful that we can incorporate both calculators so that we can have defined caseloads and then determine how much direct service time is needed, after factoring in tasks that are not considered direct service time.
 
If you have any questions about the petition, please talk to our Uniom Bargaining Team members about it!

Our Union Union Bargaining Team: Megan Rupert- Special Educator, Lindsey Gilbert- Family Resource Coordinator, Ronda Duluoz-Infant Mental Health