On Wednesday, September 2, UFCW 3000 Children’s Therapy Center members voted with an OVERWHELMING MAJORITY to ratify our new two year collective bargaining agreement.

On July 15, we had our thirteenth session with the employer, and the second with the federal mediator. Despite a great deal of back and forth, we remain apart on the same outstanding issues, which was very frustrating. Our team came in hoping to finalize our union contract, however, due to the responses from the employer, we were unable to and will be going forward with an informational picket.

At the end of the day, we presented our community petition to the employer and told them of our intention to have an informational picket. We are still finalizing the date of the picket and will send out that information when we have it confirmed. Once a date has been finalized for the informational picket, we will hold a meeting to talk about it and answer any questions.

“Ronda’s last bargaining session and we are so grateful for her help and leadership throughout this process and wish her the best of luck in her future endeavors. We will miss her terribly.” -Megan Rupert and Lindsay Gilbert

We have been made aware of potential unfair labor practices, which are currently being reviewed. Training on how to identify them will be provided at the next CAT meeting, which will be on May 28 at 6:00pm (link below).

Our session on April 10 was very productive. Our Bargaining Committee started the day meeting with a subcommittee of Kristina and Rachel to work on the caseload calculator. The Employer acknowledged that they heard us about how important a caseload maximum was and worked on integrating it into their proposal. It was very beneficial and while there are still some adjustments we would like to make, we are very close to closing the gap on our proposals and finalizing the section. After that session, Management presented their proposal and TA’d inclement weather, without making movement on much else. In an attempt to identify places we would be willing to move without sacrificing our position, we passed across package proposals (proposals that need to be accepted in their entirety or rejected). We hope this signals to the employer where our outstanding issues are and help them create proposals that could move in similar directions.

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.

Because of this gulf, we are creating a petition to pass around and sign. It will not be seen by the Employers until we surpass a certain threshold of signatures to ensure that people are not singled out. It will be circulated shortly, and we encourage everyone to sign!

On Friday, January 23 we had our sixth bargaining session with Children’s Therapy Center Management. Our team presented our responses to Management’s proposals from our previous session and brought up the total compensation model that Children’s Therapy Center touts as their strategy.

On January 14, we met for our fifth bargaining session with Management at CTC to continue negotiations on our first contract. We first met with the Employer at 11am to receive their counterproposals, as we had provided them with responses to everything in our previous session on December 12.

In our second day of bargaining, we received the Employer’s counters to our proposals, including non-economic language, economic language and pure economics (including wages and health insurance). When looking over their proposals, we found a few pleasant surprises, alongside a number of items we expect we will need to discuss at length.