Nov 30, 2007  
Bargaining – 11/29/07
— Peter Calo
 
Today, Thursday, 11/29/07, Enloe's administration and our union reached another Tentative Agreement after a month of none.

Today, Thursday, 11/29/07, Enloe's administration and our union reached another Tentative Agreement after a month of none.

The administration combined two of our proposed articles, 20 and 29, into one counterproposal. So, in effect, we actually signed off on two articles at once:
  1.  Job Related Educational Assistance
  2.  Educational Leave and In Service Training
[See "List of Agreements" elsewhere on this website.]

There were some sticking points but all were resolved. The union wanted 40 hrs. of educational leave a year and the administration proposed only 24; but, they also provide 16 additional hours a year for skills fairs. Altogether this makes 40 hours, so we agreed on the combined hours.

The union proposed full- and part-time employees with 20 hours a week be eligible for educational leave, but management countered with only 32 hours needed to get the time. This is 8 hours less than we proposed.

Courses would be directly related to the position held or for professional growth. The administration's counterproposal covered certification for nursing assistants, phlebotomists, and pharmacy techs. However, your bargaining team convinced management to also agree to cover certification for cardiovascular techs, GI techs and sterile processing II techs.

In the end we signed off on educational training. Keep in mind, we will negotiate on a union-wide educational fund to which our hospital – along with many others – can contribute. This fund shares the cost in order to help employees who would like to upgrade their careers. It works with local colleges to make classes available by pooling staff from nearby hospitals to create enough of an enrollment to make it worthwhile to open classes.

We ended the day reviewing departmental structure. Management had employees grouped by cost centers, but we felt staff should be grouped by job title. The union is now grouping all nursing assistants, secretaries, patient support clerks, etc. together as groups. This will tend to make the groups large enough so that job bidding and mobility would be enhanced with more opportunities. Seniority (from date of hire at Enloe) would play an important role in such job bidding.

We will be meeting tomorrow, 11/30/07. Please come, if you can, and lend your support and ideas.

PC