Bargaining Update - 1.30.26

OHSU Research Workers United Bargaining Update - 1.30.26

RWU and OHSU met for a bargaining session this afternoon following a strong union showing at the Board of Directors meeting. Two RWU members shared powerful testimony during public comment, and for the first time, RWU was given the opportunity to share a standing report as an established labor union. The bargaining team’s very own Lynne Swarbrick delivered a fiery statement and broke the news that RWU members have voted (with 92% approval!) to authorize the bargaining team to submit a strike notice.

After RWU delivered this news to the board, OHSU’s management team came to the bargaining table with yet another disappointing offer. Although their position did offer some new minimum wages and a $1,200 one-time bonus payment, they failed to make any movement on across-the-board wage increases. The bargaining team is committed to uplifting our lowest paid members, but we cannot send a contract locking in wage stagnation for the majority of our unit to our members for ratification. Instead, we’d like to see the proposed one-time payment directed toward real, lasting wage increases for our members. OHSU’s current proposal, with wage increases ranging from 3 - 4% in each of the three years of the contract, is not one that we can recommend to our membership for a ratification vote.

We are encouraged by the overwhelming support from our members following our strong strike authorization vote and intend to keep fighting for a fair contract. However, we also remain motivated to avoid a strike and come to an agreement we can stand behind. We have reduced our demands for across-the-board wage increases by 1.5% across the life of the contract. We rebalanced the timing of these wage increases, so that the largest increases would occur at the end of the contract, allowing labs and PIs more time to build these anticipated costs into grants. We added language that would allow members to retain their PTO and EIB accruals after a separation from OHSU. Finally, we reduced our proposed PTO cashout from 80 hours to 40 hours, paid at a researcher’s full salary. This last change brings us nearly in line with the status quo, with one important difference: researchers who separate from OHSU with 40 hours or less of PTO would be fairly compensated for that earned time, allowing our members to cash in some portion of their earned benefits without compromising the value of that time. You can see a summary of our latest positions here.

Although each of these compromises represents a difficult shift in our position and reductions to what we believe our members deserve, we hope that this continued demonstration of our good faith bargaining efforts, combined with our credible strike threat, will result in real movement from OHSU’s bargaining team.

By the end of the day, we received some encouraging signals from OHSU’s bargaining team that they intend to seek additional authority from President Elnahal and other executive leaders to move toward our position. To that end, they asked that we schedule another mediated bargaining session for next Wednesday, February 4th. We plan to continue negotiations next week empowered by the knowledge that we have the support of our members to submit a 10-day strike notice should management fail to make significant movement on wages yet again. However, we are hopeful that the threat to withhold our labor will result in real movement from management in the coming days.

In solidarity,

Your RWU bargaining team:

Lynne Swarbrick

Wes Horton

Lillian Raley

Victoria Halls

Caitlin Burbank

Anna Levy

Cort Cox

Henry Harrison