Recovery Cafe - Tentative Agreement Reached – Vote Days Soon!

Recovery Cafe
Tentative Agreement Reached – Vote Days Soon!

After nearly a year of negotiations, our Bargaining Team has reached a fully recommended tentative agreement with Recovery Cafe for our first contract! This is a momentous step in securing our core benefits and having job protections that are enforceable.

Key highlights in our first contract include:

• “Just Cause” protections that set a grievance procedure for when members are disciplined or terminated

• Guaranteed wage increases with backpay from July 2025 to when we ratify the agreement

• A tenure-based wage scale that ensures wage increases based on seniority

• A fully Employer-funded pension retirement plan at a 2.8% contribution rate

• Protections on health care costs and introducing a new $200 per month maximum Employer-funded subsidy toward monthly premiums for members with dependents

• And more improvements from the status quo

This first contract is a stepping stone for future negotiations and will be as strong as how we enforce it. We are also not done organizing! Our Union will be putting together a Labor Management Committee (LMC) to continue discussions with Recovery Cafe over an attendance policy. We also must stay organized to fight against unrealistic metrics for Recovery Specialists in our SODO Cafe!

What Happens Next?

Our Bargaining Team is recommending a “Yes” vote on the tentative agreement reached with Recovery Cafe. Our Union will be sending out a vote notice soon with the dates, times, and locations of a contract vote. Before the voting day, we will hold online contract walkthroughs where members can review the contract with the Bargaining Committee and Union staff, ask questions, and understand the agreement before the vote.

All members must be in good standing to be eligible to vote. Sign your union application to ensure you are in good standing before the vote: UFCW 3000 Membership Application.

If you have any questions, please reach out to one of your Bargaining Team members or our bargainer Dominick Ojeda: (360) 409-0595.

Recovery Cafe - Bargaining Update: Progress Toward a Deal

We organized at Recovery Cafe to safeguard our coworkers from retaliatory management and arbitrary policies, for guaranteed and predictable wage increases, and to better this organization for staff and the members we serve. After nearly a year of negotiations, we can see our progress toward those goals nearly ready for a ratification vote. Our bargaining committee met with Recovery Cafe on May 12 for a half day of negotiations.

After weeks in between sessions, our bargaining committee focused on our top priorities to get us to a deal: health care and wages. Our team met before our last session to put together a proposal around dependent coverage on health care that would cap the maximum amount our coworkers would have to pay to have their families on the Employer's insurance. Recovery Cafe responded by supposing a $300 contribution toward health care costs for dependents, while introducing a new cost share for the platinum health care plan at 85 percent covered by the Employer and 15 percent covered by workers.

We don't agree that the way forward is to take money from other coworkers to offset dependent health care costs. To get toward this goal, we did what's called a package proposal: combining many articles together to trade some proposals the Employer wants for some proposals our Union bargaining committee wants. Our package proposal maintains the existing health care cost sharing, introduces a $500 contribution from the Employer toward dependent coverage, responds with a reasonable wage counter, and includes us agreeing to nearly every other article the Employer has proposed.

While we hoped the Employer came prepared to continue negotiations after reviewing our package proposal, they were not ready to respond to our most important articles and needed to break for the day.

At the end of the session, the Employer then proposed an attendance policy. Because we are in a Union, we have the ability to negotiate before any attendance policy is implemented. The Employer's intent is to treat our discussion over the attendance policy separately from our contract negotiations. We hope to get to a deal on our contract first and then continue discussions with Recovery Cafe regarding the proposed attendance policy.

We have set another bargaining date with Recovery Cafe for June 2 with the explicit goal to get to a deal that we can feel proud of, to serve as the foundation for future negotiations.

Contract Action Team Meeting

May 28
7pm
Meeting ID: 822 3510 5335
Passcode: 437517

Join Zoom Meeting >>

Join our next contract action team meeting on May 28 at 7pm on Zoom to discuss some of the tentative agreements we have and the next steps toward a contract vote.

Recovery Cafe - Worksite Closure Update

On Monday, Recovery Cafe announced it was considering the future of its SODO location. This comes after reassurances from the Employer that they had no plans on closing one of their worksites when we brought it up earlier in the bargaining process. The pace of negotiations alongside this new announcement shows why it is vital that we come together and organize—organize to win the contract we deserve, preserve our jobs, and fight for what's best for Recovery Cafe members.

Thursday, November 13 at 7pm our Union is holding an online meeting to discuss how we're feeling, what we know, and how we plan to organize and win what we want.

Recovery Cafe Union Membership Meeting

Thursday, November 13
7pm
Join Zoom Meeting >>

Meeting ID: 856 6584 3592
Passcode: 102822

If you have any questions before our meeting, you can call your Union Rep Allison Hanley: (206) 436-6586.

Recovery Cafe - Bargaining Update

On September 15, our bargaining team met with Recovery Cafe and made significant progress on our harassment language—including language protecting staff if a Recovery Cafe member harasses staff. We are moving through non-economics and plan to introduce economics at an upcoming session. This would include our vacation, healthcare and retirement benefits, wages, and other economic items.

We'll be discussing the next steps in our bargaining process, highlights of the economic proposal, and how we can win what we deserve at our membership meeting this Thursday at 7:00 PM.

We will hold our next contract membership meeting on September 18 at 7:00 PM.

If you have any questions, please reach out to your bargaining team or your union representative Allison Hanley at (206) 436-6586.