Dozens of healthcare workers, patients and community supporters gathered outside Legacy Meridian Park Medical Center on August 12 to stand with Meridian Park Techs as they continue their fight for a fair second union contract.
A huge proportion of the Tech bargaining unit turned out for the rally after months of negotiations in which Legacy has continued to push back against some of the workers’ central priorities, including fair wage increases, differential parity with Legacy RNs, and basic union security language that is standard in private-sector healthcare union contracts.
But before workers headed outside for the rally, they took their concerns directly to Legacy’s new CEO.
Techs attended CEO Joe Yoder’s town hall at Meridian Park, where they pressed him on the problems they are experiencing and invited him to come directly to the bargaining table. Yoder declined to commit to attending bargaining that Friday.
“Legacy’s lawyers are using stall tactics at every table and with every union to delay bargaining and make it as difficult as possible to reach a fair deal,” said Sean Weiss, an X-Ray Technologist, chair of the Meridian Park Technical Unit and member of the bargaining team. “For a company purportedly struggling to make ends meet, Legacy seems happy to spend money on lawyers who do little but rack up billable hours.”
For Weiss, the problem goes beyond any individual proposal at the table. Techs organized because they wanted a meaningful voice over their working conditions, and they wanted Legacy leadership to respect that decision.
“As Legacy employees, we want Legacy to live up to their purported values, and we think that starts with them respecting their employees’ decisions to form unions and by sending actual decision makers to negotiate with us,” Weiss said.
For Techs, the rally was an opportunity to demonstrate that they are not facing Legacy alone. Workers came from across Legacy and from other OFNHP bargaining units, while members of other unions and community organizations joined them to make the same point: the standards Techs are fighting for affect healthcare workers throughout the region.
Kari Wooten, a Labcorp Lab Tech and OFNHP steward at Meridian Park, has a particularly close connection to the Techs’ fight. Before Legacy outsourced its laboratory services to Labcorp, Wooten worked for Legacy for seven years and helped with the original organizing effort that ultimately brought Meridian Park Techs together.
Today, the Techs and their former Legacy laboratory coworkers technically work for different employers, but they still work side by side in the same hospital.
“Our ability to weather the next storm, whatever that may look like, will come from our willingness to stand in solidarity with one another, regardless of who signs our paychecks,” Wooten told the crowd. “Your coworkers in the lab see you and stand with you.”
Wooten recalled how Labcorp workers learned the importance of visible member participation while negotiating their own first union contract.
“Nothing scares a corporation at the bargaining table more than showing up in numbers to show them how serious you are,” Wooten said. “When we Labcorp workers packed the bargaining room at our negotiations, the temperature of the room shifted almost immediately.”
That message was echoed by Techs from Kaiser Permanente, who recently emerged from their own long contract campaign.
Rhea Hindemit, chair of OFNHP’s Kaiser Technical bargaining unit, said the Meridian Park fight felt immediately familiar.
“We just came off of a two-year bargaining campaign with Kaiser, and I am having déjà vu,” she said, pointing to many of the same problems around wages, recruitment and retention that Kaiser Techs confronted.
But she also offered Meridian Park workers a picture of what sticking together can accomplish. After their long campaign, she said, Kaiser Techs won the highest raises for a Tech bargaining unit across Kaiser nationally.
“I know the fight you’re fighting feels really hard, and the employer will tire you out,” she said. “We were exhausted, but guess what? At the end of the day, we got the highest raises in all of Kaiser National for our Tech bargaining unit.”
Kellie Brewer, another Kaiser Tech leader, also spoke about how unionization changed her experience at work and created standards that did not depend on an individual worker’s ability to convince a manager that they deserved more. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without the hard work of all of our members, all of us together,” she told the crowd, explaining that she had once worked at Meridian Park and knew very well the difference a union can make.
Solidarity also came from other Legacy bargaining units and unions. Workers represented by the Oregon Nurses Association and AFSCME joined the rally, along with Dr. Chris Ewing, a unionized obstetrician at Legacy Silverton who has been fighting for a first union contract for three years as a part of NW Medicine United.
Ewing rejected the idea that physicians, nurses, Techs and other healthcare workers have fundamentally different interests when it comes to building a sustainable healthcare system.
“There’s an old, old model of healthcare where physicians are supposed to stand apart. Doctors over here, nurses over there, Techs somewhere else, and administration somewhere above everybody,” Ewing said. “I don’t believe in that model, because when something goes wrong at two o’clock in the morning, we’re all standing in the same room.”
Ewing called on Legacy to apply the same logic it uses to justify executive compensation to the workers actually providing patient care.
“You cannot build a healthcare system around the idea that executives must be recruited, retained, and motivated, while frontline workers are treated as an expense to be minimized,” he said.
That question of who Legacy chooses to invest in is at the heart of the Techs’ contract fight.
“Our demands are simple: fair raises and differential parity with what our nursing colleagues already receive,” Weiss told the crowd.
The Techs have reached an agreement in principle on a traditional step system for the first year of the contract, but Weiss said Legacy’s wage proposal for the following years would provide increases of just 2% and then 1%—and would require Techs to give up their class action grievance over step increases they say Legacy wrongly denied them under their first contract.
“That’s not a real offer,” Weiss said. “A Tech job used to be a ticket to the middle class, and we need competitive wages to attract high-quality new employees and to retain experienced long-term Techs.”
The contrast was particularly stark after years in which healthcare workers were publicly celebrated for carrying hospitals through the pandemic.
“During COVID, they called us essential,” Weiss said. “So now they’re telling us we’re worth a 1% raise. Does that sound essential to you?”
“We have never expected to be rich,” he continued. “We just want to earn enough to support our families and continue doing the work our patients depend on.”
The rally also drew support from the broader labor and community movement. David Young, a retired registered nurse who worked for 19 years at Legacy Emanuel and now an active member of the Portland Jobs With Justice coalition, told Techs that solidarity from other unions was not symbolic—it was how workers win difficult fights.
“What I’m saying to you is, you are definitely not alone,” he said. “You have Jobs With Justice behind you.”
Having spent years trying to organize workers at Emanuel before later working at unionized OHSU, he said he experienced firsthand the difference a union can make in healthcare. “The patients of union healthcare workers have better outcomes than the patients of non-union healthcare workers,” he told the crowd, pointing specifically to staffing ratios as one reason.
OFNHP President Sarina Roher emphasized that Meridian Park Techs have the backing of thousands of OFNHP members throughout Oregon and Southwest Washington.
“We work for different employers. We have different contracts, and we have different jobs. But at the end of the day, we are one union, and this is one fight,” Roher said. “When one group of members has to fight to be valued and respected, that’s a fight that belongs to all of us.”
Roher said the Techs’ proposals are straightforward measures that would help Legacy recruit and retain the experienced workers its patients depend on: competitive wages, differential parity and basic union security.
“Appreciation is not measured by those words,” Roher said of healthcare employers calling workers “heroes” and “essential.” “It’s measured by whether workers are paid fairly, whether experienced healthcare professionals can afford to stay in the jobs and the communities that they love, and whether the employer truly values their skill and dedication.”
“Respect is not a slogan,” she said. “It’s a contract.”
For Weiss, the turnout demonstrated that what happens at the bargaining table at Meridian Park is connected to a much larger fight over the future of Legacy and healthcare throughout the region.
“Whether it’s a fight for fair wages, respect, safe staffing, or for us to maintain our health insurance, in light of Legacy’s announcement they are switching us to Aetna in 2027, this kind of solidarity is what it’s going to take to protect healthcare for Legacy patients,” Weiss said.
“When we go to work, our number one priority should be caring for our patients…If we are having to worry about our own healthcare or our ability to pay our bills, we cannot give patients the attention they truly deserve.”
The following Friday we returned to the table, but Legacy seemed uninterested in addressing the issues that will determine the future of our region’s care system. The Techs are now fighting for them to set more dates and finally bring this thing to a close, before we have to escalate again.
After months at the bargaining table, Meridian Park Techs have made clear that they are prepared to keep fighting for that respect—and that healthcare workers from across Legacy, OFNHP and the broader labor movement are prepared to fight alongside them.