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 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.
