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For our Kaiser members covered under the Alliance National Agreement and the Partnership with management, there is an appointed position that helps the bargaining units with added contract enforcement.

Contract Specialists are selected stewards who are on full or partial release from their regular positions for a term of one to two years, typically. This Labor Management Partnership role ensures that the Contract Specialist continues to draw their regular pay from Kaiser.  The contract specialist role was implemented for three important reasons:  

• To improve Partnership implementation at the

The trust was named for Ben Hudnall, a labor leader who held a thirty year business manager position for the Engineers and Scientists of California, Oakland IFPTE Local 20. He was a strong advocate for education and retention of employees. Ben Hudnall’s tireless work in the early days of the partnership, as well as the transition to computerized charting in 2005 saved countless jobs and ensured the Partnership would work towards building the knowledge base of its employees. We now have an employee trust in his name that provides our Kaiser members with critical benefits.

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OFNHP consists of nurses and health professionals who’ve been on the frontlines, providing our communities with lifesaving care throughout this pandemic. To us, a union not only helps protect healthcare workers by fighting for living wages, benefits, and agency on the job. But, it also defends patients by helping medical staff get the resources needed to put patients first. 

That’s why we’re thrilled to voice our support for the newest addition to the American Federation of Teachers, Nurses and Health Professionals (AFT) from the St. Charles Medical System in Bend and Central Oregon. A new

Our union’s strength has been most visible the past few years by the rapid rate of growth we have seen. We’ve added tech units at both St. Charles and Mid-Columbia Medical Center. As such, and as healthcare professionals, we continue to organize and invite new members to become a part of one of the strongest union locals in the country. All workers deserve to build power in their workplaces and have a voice on the job, no matter the size of their unit.

That is why we were proud to invite a group of three new technical employees from PeaceHealth Southwest to join our Tech bargaining unit! The

Weingarten Rights guarantee employees the right to union representation during an investigatory interview or at any time they suspect questioning might be related to disciplinary action. All union represented employees have the right to union representation whenever they believe a line of questioning could result in discipline, not just when the employer says that it could. This is often invoked on normal meetings with management or when answering questions regarding work performance.

What you need to know:

1. If you are represented by a union, you have these rights!
2. You must to invoke them, which

Stewards are the absolute foundation of our union. As a union, we negotiate a union contract (a Collective Bargaining Agreement, or CBA) that affects everything from our wages and benefits to the details of our working conditions all the way to “just cause,” which prevents us from unjust discipline and termination. That contract is, however, only useful in as much as it is followed, and employers are regularly looking for ways around the contract so they can do what they want. Our power is rooted in our ability to enforce the contract, and that’s where stewards come in. A union steward is the

The steward delegates is the legislative power of our union. The assembly is made up of steward representatives from each worksite, and for every fifty union employees there is one steward representative in this decision making body. According to our bylaws, for every additional fifty union employees there shall be an additional steward representative allowed on the assembly. For example, if there are forty-five members you have one representative, but if you have fifty-one members you have two representatives, and so on. The goal is to make sure that just like our congresspeople, we have

For our Kaiser members, our union has a number of specialized committees, roles, and leadership positions that are meant to maintain what is broadly called the “partnership.” In an effort to work collaboratively through interest-based problem solving, our leadership roles are often specific to this unique Alliance-bargained position. This means that those with outside union experience may not know how this system works, so we have created a basic rundown of the different “partnership leadership roles that you might encounter or could seek to inhabit yourself!

Labor Partners are elected members

On Wednesday, May 18th, OFNHP’s  Kaiser Permanente RN Bargaining Unit Chair Joshua Holt, representing both OFNHP and the Nurses and Health Professionals division of the American Federation of Teachers, joined a nursing delegation at the White House to address the crisis that healthcare workers are facing across the country. Meeting with senior policy advisors, Holt was joined by other healthcare leaders, such as the Vice President of National Nurses United (NNU), a U.S. Army Colonel RN who ran the European COVID response for the U.S. military, the Chief of Nursing Services for Veteran Affairs

After months of negotiations, the 52,000 members of the Alliance of Healthcare Unions, which includes the 3,400 Kaiser employees of Oregon and Southwest Washington who are represented by the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (OFNHP), have reached a tentative agreement. Among the various pieces of the contract, workers pushed back on Kaiser’s “two-tier” wage proposal and won good wage increases, racial justice language, and language to address the staffing crisis.

“The pressure our members, including leaders and community, put on Kaiser and the threat of a strike worked and