We’ve just wrapped up our July national bargaining session with Kaiser, held in coordination with the entire Alliance of Healthcare Unions. Below is a detailed update on the progress made by each of the national subgroups working on the language for our next union contract.
Economic Subgroup
This week, management presented their initial offer on wages. Over four years, management offered 5% (2025), 5% (2026), 4% (2027), and 4% (2028). While this offer represents the highest initial offer in the history of partnership bargaining, it is not enough. Record inflation, chronic staffing shortages, and recent settlements with other unions mean our members are falling further and further behind.
Management also made several counters on smaller economic items, including tuition reimbursement, union leave, the partnership trust, and alliance affiliate union education trusts.
Alliance-wide, local union leaders have been reporting little progress at local tables. Alliance union leaders made it clear to KP: local tables must start delivering real progress. So far, we have seen little but stonewalling and delay. In response, management said they were putting in place a plan to make movement at local tables. We’ll be closely tracking whether management follows through on this promise over the next two weeks in preparation for national bargaining in Portland.
The Economic subgroup will be meeting soon to develop an economic counter to management, with more information to come.
Staffing and Patient Care Subgroup
When we last met, we had developed nine problems statements over our three subject areas: flexibility, joint staffing, and the Alliance staffing committees. We started the session by reviewing the interest and determining whether interests were jointly shared, or could not be supported. We found that there were no shared interests around flexibility in the subgroup and decided to stop our work on that subject.
For the two other topics, the subgroup developed 100+ options that would address our remaining seven problem statements. We then conducted an exercise to determine whether each option was feasible, beneficial, and acceptable.
The subgroup hit a roadblock with management being unable to complete the exercise regarding acceptability around the options. Well, they did ultimately complete the exercise but left us in a place where we did not have joint work around developing those options into solutions in our last day. It’s unfortunate that so much time was taken up, but the alliance labor caucus determined it was not in our interest to work on only part of the solution for this incredibly important work until management had done their job, completing the determination of acceptability across all of our options.
The clock is ticking. And we suspect labor is going to have to do a lot of work to ultimately propose unilateral solutions to make up for time being lost. It’s unfortunate because there is clear alignment around many good goals that will help our frontline teams and our members take a more active role in determining staffing levels and budgeting, including backfill for their departments.
It is our hope that management comes to the next session ready to move at an appropriate pace to complete our deliverables by our deadline.
AI and Technology Subgroup
This week’s bargaining session started off a little choppy but quickly righted itself as our labor group organized around our strategy and held our line. Through our solidarity we were able to move the interest-based bargaining process forward and discuss with management details of options that would serve our needs. Our subgroup still has a ways to go, but the wheels are turning, and progress looks promising for our next bargaining session in August–in Portland!. We will continue to advocate for responsible, ethical, and worker-minded implementation of AI.
Partnership Effectiveness Subgroup
Our subgroup is moving swiftly on several different recommendations to renew and strengthen our commitment to working in partnership, as our national agreement requires from both labor and management. Toward that end, we are in the process of moving forward the following recommendations to the full voting body for consideration.
UBTs
- Encouraging the use of UBT tracker proxies to support documentation.
- Ensuring UBT assessments are accurate through annual evaluation throughout all markets/service areas.
- Establishing uniform usage of a UBT recognition program to broaden adoption of best practices.
- Sponsors Community of Practice (COP) being made available to all all labor and management sponsors.
LMP Training
- Pilot modularizing Preparing Management for Partnership.
Just Culture
- Full implementation of existing work plan within 1-year of ratification.
- Additional oversight through Improved communication between the Committee and LMP Executive Committee Tri-chairs and Regional Labor Management Partnership Councils
- Conducting a full assessment of current resources to fully implement the program across all markets/regions.
- A Just Culture communication plan that identifies all participants to ensure widespread awareness and participation.
- Program can only change with approval of the Committee.
Measuring Partnership Effectiveness Above the UBT Level
- Create a joint body to develop and implement a measurement tool.