St. Joseph Medical Center Technical Bargaining Update
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Our Union Bargaining Team: Michelle Gilmore, Respiratory Therapist; Monica Dewitt, Pharmacy Tech; Vanessa Giles, Surgical Technologist; Chad Michels, Cardiovascular Technologist; Sissy Allison, Surgical Technologist
Following just over a month since our last bargaining date with the Employer, we started off our third session ready to continue working with Management on our 2026 – 2029 contract.
To recap: our first two sessions with SJMC started with our team presenting Management with all of the proposals we intended to make this cycle in one initial pass (March 4)- which led us to move through the bulk of non-economics over the course of our second session (March 24). While there were still a handful of non-economics on the table going into our third session (April 28), Management remarked at the end of our previous session that given the time between March 24 and now- we should be able to get to economics.
Unfortunately, it became clear that that might not be the case when our first joint-session on April 28 saw only non-economics returned by Management. Puzzled, our Bargaining Team asked Management when economics might be returned, and we got back an unclear response, and that they’d have to get back to us on this in a bit.
To cut to the chase- we ended bargaining tht day having asked the Employer on three separate occasions for even an ETA on economic proposals, and in our last meeting in the afternoon, they stated that hopefully they would have these back to us at our next session. Of course, we reminded them that this is what we’d already been told at our session before today.
Frankly, we are disappointed. The progress we have made on non-economics is great, but we worked extremely hard leading up to negotiations and presented Management with thirteen pages worth of proposals to prove it. Given the amount of time that has passed since our first session to now- and seeing what the pharmacists at SJMC have been experiencing in their contract negotiations- we’re led to believe that if we want to win a strong contract, we will have to use our collective power to do so.
Join our next Contract Action Team meeting to learn more about ongoing negotiations. In the meantime, sign-up to be a Communication Action Network Lead:
