Mason General Hospital RN - Bargaining Update: First Two Days Underway!

On Thursday, March 19, and Monday, March 23, our Union Bargaining Team representing the Registered Nurses at Mason General Hospital met with management for our first two days of negotiations, following our agreement to open the contract for early negotiations. In preparation for our first two days, our team met on March 13 to review feedback from the bargaining surveys, identified our top contract priorities, and conducted a review of our current Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) to pinpoint areas for improvement.

Most importantly, we felt it was critical to work diligently to get most (if not all) of our proposals into management's hands as early into negotiations as possible in the hopes of reaching agreement and getting competitive wages implemented as soon as possible. During our first session, we provided Mason Gen with the vast majority of the proposals we expected to make throughout negotiations (in fact, the only outstanding item—which we presented on our second day with management—was to align the consecutive weekend pay to other proposals we'd already shared), including:

• Increases to the cross-trained RN premium—including additional compensation when cross-trained RNs are floated consistently during their normal FTE

• New language to reduce the inconsistency and inconvenience the L/C "call-blocks" create

• New language to require advance notice for nurses who are scheduled outside of their normal shift rotation, in conjunction with how Earned Time and other time-off may be submitted and used for these days

• And compensation proposals, like:

  • Wage scales designed to keep our wages competitive with Olympia-area rates

  • Premiums; Standby, Charge, Callback (minimum guarantees), and a new premium for nurses who come in on their time off to perform a PICC

Following this proposal on the 19th and into our session on the 23rd we exchanged proposals with the Employer—which included their responses to our initial proposals and counters to new proposals from their team. While the Employer didn't respond to our compensation proposals just yet, they did propose economic proposals of their own, including reference to the pay-in-lieu-of-benefits differential for part-time workers—which management later hinted at as giving way to a forthcoming proposal to remove the benefit entirely. This was concerning to our Bargaining Team of course, knowing that this benefit is utilized by RNs who likely retain their health insurance elsewhere, and removing this language would result in an RN paying for potentially duplicate health insurance premiums and suffering a reduction in pay at the same time!

Because the Employer has not yet formally proposed removing this benefit, our teams did not actively discuss this prospect across our first two sessions, but we are looking forward to continuing these conversations—and more—during future negotiations dates!

Bargaining Team: Nancy Ownby, RN; Megan Corbin, RN; Tori Willis, RN

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