Day 2 of 2010 National Bargaining

Tuesday April 7, 2010

Logistics: 24 elected Union Brothers and Sisters on Common Issues Committees, (CIC's), and 97 Observers from local UHW bargaining teams.

Common Issues Committees: Workforce Planning and Development, Attendance, Performance Improvement & Performance Sharing Program, (PSP), and Labor Management Partnership, (LMP).

The CIC's are the labor participants with management on the above four committees. The Observers are also divided between the groups and although in the rooms where the committees meet, do not sit at the table with the CIC's and management. They participate verbally during labor caucus's or pass notes to labor representatives during sessions with management.

I am participating as a CIC representative on the LMP committee.

Today was the foundation training for the CIC's. This session was intended to provide the grounding for bargaining and interest-based bargaining, (IBB). All bargaining guidelines were discussed and agree to by consensus.

The timeline for National Bargaining is to expedite the process and finish by the end of May.

For the first time since this kick-off session began, I can feel the tension in the room.

I look around to see who joins me on the LMP committee. Dave Regan, SEIU-UHW Trustee is one of our labor Co-Leads. Therese Flemming, the IBHS Contract Specialist and Marilyn Vance, the UBT IT from Santa Rosa are familiar faces. I recognize many of the observer Brothers and Sisters who are seated very closely, behind our square table. Leo Butterbaugh in EVS from Vallejo, Jolen Camp from Roseville and Dennis DeMaio from the International. I gain comfort in knowing these Brothers and Sisters. Although they are not in my bargaining unit, we are all here together as "Labor" to support one another and present as a united front.

We are treated to several hours of Interest-based bargaining education from two facilitators. One is Charlie Huggins from the Restructuring Associates Institute, (RAI), who talked altogether too much and a woman named Carol, from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS).....Frankly, as long as management is in the room I am not bored with the review. My opinion is always that management can always use training, training and more training.

Therefore, I thoroughly enjoyed the review.

Process was stressed, the importance of labor and management separately stating our Interests as opposed to, positions. Examples were given and labor was tested as far as presenting as a united front.

As you can imagine, get a group of labor folks together with management in the room, we want to be heard. Interests and some positions were voiced.

Dave Regan talkes about how the Partnership itself is focused nearly completely internally inside of Kaiser. That there are no measures to deal with the external world such as the 32 million people who are to soon to become eligible for health care and Kaiser has no plan on how to get them insured with Kaiser, and grow the membership.

He proposes using the Partnership to jointly grow the membership. That the most job security we can obtain is from Kaiser growing the membership. This will preserve our benefit structure. He spokes about jointly promoting Kaiser's integrative health care model and joint Partnership work on public policy advocacy. He again challenges Kaiser to Partner with us on calling out the alleged "bottom feeders" in the health care industry, such as Prime Health Care in S. Ca.,

Labor voices are expressing passionately that the Partnership is not working in many areas, that we need to work on our internal challenges as well as expanding the Partnership externally.

Some CIC members bring up contentious issues, and some from management take offense, especially to not having a concrete plan different from what Kaiser is already doing to grow the membership, and not wanting to confront Prime Health Care about their allegedly unethical behavior in the health care industry.

Labors voice is strong and loud, proclaiming how dare Kaiser refuse to fight to change the Medicare reimbursement rates to better reflect the high quality and service scores provided by Kaiser. We let them know that Kaiser has no right to use the Partnership only when it is convenient for them.

About this time I began to really feel like the facilitators were talking too much. To me, they seem to be attempting to "guide" us way too much.

Issues are brought up by labor that supposedly are not supposed to be brought up, and our "united front" image is a bit challenged. But that is what a caucus is for!

During our caucus, all of labor, including the observers have a chance to air our differences, tell each other what we think and move on.

Soon after resuming with management, we all agree to meet separately to discuss/brainstorm on our Interests. 10 flip charts latter, with all of labor engaged we have a list of about 50 interests.

All feel they had a voice in the process and all felt heard.

Tomorrow we meet again with management. The idea is for us to "understand" each others interest, not necessarily agree with them.

Until then...In Unity, Rachelle