Research Workers United and the OHSU bargaining teams met for our sixth hybrid session on Nov. 13th and made significant progress on our first Collective Bargaining Agreement!
RWU is proud to announce that as a result of bargaining a Recognition article, dozens of researchers OHSU not included in OHSU's original eligibility list can now be represented by Research Workers United, notably including the Staff Scientist and Research Project Manager classifications. This significantly expands our membership in accordance with Employment Relations Board guidelines, and we appreciate OHSU’s bargaining team doing right by affected employees. While we have not officially reached a tentative agreement on this article, we expect to very soon. We will share the details of the added classifications at our general union meeting next week!
We did reach a tentative agreement for Drug and Alcohol Use and Testing, in line with OHSU’s policy as well as contract language of our Graduate and Postdoc colleagues, bringing our total to seven tentative agreements across six sessions. Both teams are proactive in bringing proposals and counter-proposals to the table.
OHSU returned a number of counter-proposals to us, including:
Grievance and Arbitration
Corrective Action (renamed from Discipline and Discharge)
Personnel Files
RWU offered counter-proposals on a trio of closely related articles from previous sessions: Appointments, Probationary Periods, and Layoffs, Rehire and Seniority. During our first bargaining session, OHSU proposed the introduction of probationary periods for new hires. Through researching other universities’ contracts, our team found that researchers are typically employees in one of two ways:
1. Consistent with our current model, Researchers are hired under one-year contracts, but are not put on probation periods of any kind.
2. Researchers are permanent employees, but are subject to probation periods in which an employee’s supervisor can assess their capability to perform the job.
As a compromise to OHSU’s proposal for probationary periods for incoming hires, RWU has moved to counter-propose all Researchers gaining the additional protections of permanent employees rather than being hired on limited-duration contracts.
Other updates:
- Our union siblings in Graduate Researchers United are organizing a rally and petition to push OHSU into compliance with Federally mandated ADA polices to provide accommodations to students. You can join us at a rally on Wednesday, November 20th at 1:00 PM on Mac Hall Lawn where we will be supporting GRU in demanding that OHSU appropriately prioritize student accommodations. You can also support them by signing their petition here in one easy step.
- Our RWU General Union meeting is next Thursday, November 21st at 5:30 PM on Zoom. You can register in advance here.
- We are beginning some updates to our website now and will be posting the Tentatively Agreed articles there for you to view. You can find that and more shortly!
We’re looking forward to sharing further updates from our next bargaining session: 1-5pm on Thursday, December 5th. As a reminder you can observe that bargaining session at the RWU-created Webex link below.
Meeting link:
https://ohsu.webex.com/ohsu/j.php?MTID=ma1a89de4c1b53e3209ae8aaeb8218598
Meeting number:
2867 749 7423
Join from a video or application:
Dial [email protected]
You can also dial 173.243.2.68 and enter your meeting number.Join by phone:
+1-503-388-9555
Toll Access code: 28677497423
Global call-in numbers:
https://ohsu.webex.com/ohsu/globalcallin.php?MTID=mde484d4fd69e728b416856acd57b247e
Your RWU Bargaining Team,
Henry Harrison
Lynne Swarbrick
Victoria Halls
Lillian Raley
Wes Horton
Cort Cox
Anna Levy
Caitlin Burbank
