BREAKING: RWU and OHSU Management Have Reached A Tentative Agreement

We are pleased to announce that we have reached a tentative agreement (TA) with OHSU on our first contract, avoiding a strike on Wednesday! This represents 526 days of bargaining on your behalf. This TA was reached just over FOUR years after we started organizing to form a union. It has been a long road to get here and everyone should be proud of what we have accomplished together! Many of us have never been in a union and this first contract shows what we can achieve when we are united.

We have won some tremendous gains for our members as summarized here. These include greater protections and safety nets as permanent employees, significant gains on our health insurance benefits (including full coverage for all dependants on the EPO plan, the addition of over 100 Tier 1 options across Oregon, and a commitment to improvement in national coverage options), an employee initiated process for reclassifications and promotions, the ability to access EIB after using just 24 hours of PTS, 3 days of paid bereavement leave, 16 hours of paid career development, and many more.

We were also able to negotiate progressive wage increases and a higher minimum wage at the start of our contract to uplift our lowest paid members, which was one of the bargaining team’s top priorities from the outset of this process. By the end of the three-year contract, our lowest paid members will be earning just over 50k annually. This is a huge improvement over a status quo starting salary that fell under 38k, and will be keenly felt by many members who have been grossly underpaid for years. Our Year 1 wage increase will take effect at the beginning of the 2nd pay period after ratification and will be the greater of:

A new minimum wage of $23.18/hour ($48,214/year) OR $1.25/hour increase OR

Progressive wage increases of:

• 5.5% for grades R06-R14*
• 5% for grades R15-R17
• 4.5% for grades R18-R26
• 4% for grades R27+

(*See Table 1 at the end of this email mapping these new job classifications to researcher’s current job titles).

Some job titles will also be consolidated and/or moved into a higher classification grade, with a corresponding new minimum salary (Tables 2 and 3). This will lead to a higher wage increase for some of those members than the progressive wage increases outlined above.

In Years 2 and 3 of the contract, researchers will receive across the board wage increases of 3.25% and 3% respectively. While this is a significant decrease from our last offer and might come as a shock to many of our members, we were able to win a major concession from OHSU, agreeing that our Year 2 wage increases will go into effect on October 1, 2026. This means that researchers will receive two wage increases this year: one in early March and a second raise just 7 months later. While these across-the-board amounts are not where we hoped to land when we began bargaining, we did not make this decision lightly and believe this is the best contract that we could realistically win in the current federal climate.

OHSU’s final published offer on December 9th, after we declared impasse, included wage increases of 3.5% in Year 1, 2% in Year 2, and 2% in Year 3 with the Year 2 and 3 wage increases going into effect one and two full years after ratification, respectively, with a minimum wage of $22/hour by the end of the contract. It was your vocal support and our strong strike authorization vote that won us so much movement from that position over the last two months, and helped us lock in larger gains for our members in the contract we’ll be recommending for ratification this week.

We will be holding town halls on Tuesday and Wednesday at noon where we’ll welcome your questions, and will launch our ratification vote on Thursday, Feb 19th. Meeting details will be sent to you shortly.

We could not have gotten here without the support of all of our members! Thank you for your thoughts, your feedback, and your well wishing. It has all meant a lot to us.

We must shout out our amazing Member Action Team (MAT)! They are just the best and the bargaining team couldn’t have made it through this process without them. Your bargaining team is exhausted after 12 hours of negotiations yesterday, and we will have more details and a FAQ forthcoming in the next few days. Please bear with us as we recover from this week of bargaining. In the meantime, you can join the RWU union slack and post your questions there.

Table 1. New Pay Grades

In solidarity,
 

Your RWU bargaining team:

Lynne Swarbrick

Wes Horton

Lillian Raley

Victoria Halls

Caitlin Burbank

Anna Levy

Cort Cox

Henry Harrison