It's Never Too Early to Think About Bargaining

Bargaining is coming up again next year.

If this will be your first experience bargaining as a member of AFSCME Local 328, you’re going to see our union’s activity explode. We’ll send out surveys to be sure the bargaining team is addressing our biggest concerns, hold town halls, publish constant blog posts, organize rallies, and anything else that we, as a body, decide we need to do to get the contract we deserve.

It’s exciting, even for our members who have been through it enough times that they’re not sure when we got this raise or that vacation increase. 2025 will be my third bargaining year.

During bargaining in 2019, our union pulled me from my regular duties at OHSU, and I helped the bargaining team with communications and whatever other tasks I could. It was a peek-behind-the-curtains that convinced me I wanted to run for a spot on the team next time around.

Famously, this is when we caught the now-former VP of Human Resources and another member of management’s bargaining team trolling us on social media, which began a shake-up in OHSU’s HR that still hasn’t seen all its dust settle.

At the time, one of the glaring problems I saw was how little our contract allowed us to do for our members when they were the target of harassment, discrimination, and/or violence. As a steward, I tried to help our members navigate a system that we had very little impact on. In my personal life, I could only witness the instances of racism and sexism experienced by my Latina partner and other women I knew who worked at OHSU outside of our bargaining unit.

Bargaining team members, union staff, and other stewards I spoke to agreed we couldn’t wait until bargaining came back around in 2022 to address these problems. They were too big to tackle without extensive preparation and our membership’s buy-in. I don’t remember the task being assigned to me in particular; I just happened to be a member with the time and passion to get the ball rolling, so I started asking for help from pretty much anyone I could get to listen. I connected with then DEIJ committee chair TJ Acena who was already looking into possibilities on his own.

By autumn of 2019, TJ had worked with contacts at Council 75 and AFSCME International to research anti-discrimination language from other AFSCME contracts around the country. Writing better language became a standing item on the committee’s monthly meetings. By winter, using what we’d learned from how other unions had tackled these issues, and after hours of discussion both in committee meetings and outside of them with stewards, union staff, and friends, I’d come up with the strategy that we ended up using to get DEI language into our contract: We would treat bigotry like asbestos.

While we were crafting an approach that would treat DEI as a workplace safety issue, I took the research we were doing, and my own training and experiences with trauma-informed practices, and pitched the idea to form a core group of stewards that could handle cases involving harassment, discrimination, and violence. Even if we didn’t have contract language that gave us teeth to fight OHSU with, we could be sure they weren’t going through the system alone. Given the sensitive nature of these cases, it was important that members not be re-traumatized when trying to seek justice.

This was around the time that our union was assigned Valyria Lewis as one of our AFSCME staff representatives. Her history fighting bigotry as a member of the TSA union gave us invaluable insight into the ways an employer could circumvent even the most carefully written contract language to defend abusers. With her help, and with resources provided by AFSCME Council 75 and AFSCME International, stewards were given tools to educate members about their right to obtain legal counsel under BOLI and EEOC.

That acted as a pressure-release valve that let us direct some of our most egregious cases towards people who could help in ways that we, as union stewards, couldn’t. It also helped expand my own and other stewards’ view of just how endemic and egregious these issues were (and still are) at OHSU.

All of this work was already being done by the time the TikTok Doc story broke. The Covington Report inspired by the case told us very little we didn’t already know.

At every step, we gathered more people who were interested in addressing harassment, discrimination, and violence at OHSU. We took the new knowledge and experiences that they brought with them, and we sharpened our tools.

Our plan to treat DEI issues like asbestos was coming together. Just like toxic chemicals and fire safety, it is the employer’s responsibility to protect employees from repeat and especially prolonged exposure. We spent those three years refining our definitions of harassment, discrimination, and violence to be sure that we captured all the different ways we’d seen our colleagues, friends, and loved ones be mistreated at work. We did our best to be sure OHSU couldn’t ignore their responsibility to protect their workers. Input from the rest of the bargaining team and AFSCME staff rep Sima Anekonda tied it all up in a carefully constructed proposal OHSU made very few changes to before agreeing to add it to our contract.

That language, as good as it is, and as much time as we put into crafting it, hasn't magically solved all of our problems at OHSU. While the people who have been impacted by the most recent scandal involving sexual harassment don’t appear to be in our bargaining unit, it’s a pattern of behavior from management that has become all too familiar.

The continuing mistreatment of the employees and students at OHSU, despite robust protections and repeated promises that things will change, is exactly why I’ve been stressed about bargaining for a year now.

Good contracts aren’t just about wage increases and more time off. Good contracts require big ideas. While our current contract doesn’t expire until June 30th, 2025, we have to introduce all of our new language by the end of next April. With this kind of deadline, we can’t just start in January when the bargaining team first meets, or even this summer when they’re elected. We all need to be thinking about how we can make OHSU a better, safer place to work, every day.

The 40-hour work week, the weekend, the end of child labor (even if corporate greed is trying to bring it back), health insurance, sick leave, maternity leave - these are all things that unions fought for that have become largely standard benefits, whether you’re in a union or not. It’s easy to think that we can’t fix the big problems, but the truth is that we can. We’ve done it before. If we want to leave a better world for those who come after us, we have to do it again.

Our experiences fuel these changes. Without the stories that my fellow workers shared with me, I wouldn’t have started down my DEI-language rabbit hole.Even if you’re not someone who sees yourself at the bargaining table, your story can inspire the next wave of change we see at OHSU. The strength of a union is in the workers who stand up for themselves and all those around them who hear what they’ve been through and lock arms beside them. This is one of the most important reasons to have our union contract bargained by rank-and-file members rather than by officers, AFSCME staff, or labor lawyers. A diverse bargaining team brings all those stories they’ve lived or heard to the table with them.

Here are two changes that were inspired by my own stories:

In 2022, I insisted we bargain for paid bereavement leave. I wrote about the tragedy I experienced that inspired me in a blog piece shortly after bargaining wrapped. Last month, it was part of our OHSU House Officers Union’s tentative agreement.

After the wildfires and civil unrest of 2020, I pushed for language that allowed members to use their sick or vacation accrual when disasters of any sort prevented them from getting to work— language many members took advantage of during the ice storm earlier this year.

I did some of the work to push the boulders, but it took thousands of us to get them rolling downhill and get these changes added to our contract. Every single one of the 200-plus changes we made to our contract in 2022 came from a similar action by someone in our union.

Appendix J, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” began with a group of stewards voicing their frustrations about not being able to help members who had been sexually harassed and racially discriminated against. Bereavement leave started with a story that I told about losing my mother five days into a new job. 14.2.7 Catastrophic Event/Emergency Leave was initially conceived in 2020 while I was laying in my house, eyes burning, unable to breathe because of all the wildfire smoke that was leaking through our old windows while I had friends evacuating from their homes to avoid the flames.

This was just my personal experience as a member of the bargaining team. Every single person who has served in that role could tell you a similar story about what they brought to the table and why.

There are 7,000 of us in this local, and each of us has these ideas and these stories that the rest of us are waiting to hear and stand behind.

No contract is perfect. There’s always something that we missed or that needs to be shored up. Between bargaining years, all of us need to be thinking and daydreaming about what we can do for ourselves and our fellow workers the next time around. What groundwork did we lay last time that we can expand on next time? What footholds can we make next time that we can build on the time after that?

Other unions are already thinking about 2028. We should, too.

This is going to take all of us. Any one of us may have the next great idea, but it will die on the vine if it’s not heard and spread and we don’t all stand together.

We all need to start preparing for next year. Open your eyes to everything that could be better. Be ready to share your story. Be ready to listen. And most importantly, be ready to fight like hell.