Our People Are Hurting
“Our people are hurting.”
Tuesday wasn’t the first time that our union’s president, Michael Stewart, had said it. It certainly won’t be the last.
It’s never been more clear how much our members are struggling. Inflation is breaking 40-year records; rent and prices are soaring. The pandemic has put many of us through the worst years of our professional lives, exacerbating existing problems caused by more than a decade of understaffing in order to maximize profits.
Given this, the bargaining-survey results that our team reviewed this week were hardly surprising. Our people feel strongly that OHSU doesn’t care about their financial well-being, doesn’t care about staffing and doesn’t care about employees’ work-life balance. Almost half of the respondents have considered leaving OHSU within the past year!
Our people are demanding wages that will keep us in our homes and recognize the sacrifices we’ve made to keep OHSU open and our communities safe over the last few years. Our people need to be safe, too. Safe from burnout and stress. Safe from workplace harassment, discrimination and violence. Safe to take the time off we need to recover from what we’ve endured.
On Tuesday, we asked the mediator to remind OHSU that we’ve never expected to get everything we asked for in this contract, but that our members are demanding more than we’ve gotten in the past. No one could have predicted the circumstances we’ve been through, but now we see that the nature of work — and what employees will accept — has changed. Management needs to see this too.
There’s no way that OHSU can keep running the way it is now — not if it doesn’t want to lose employees in droves and see patient care suffer. It’s time for OHSU to properly invest in the people on whose backs it has built its reputation. What used to work for the employer — chronic understaffing, treating our represented employees as less than, chasing new buildings while ignoring systemic problems — is no longer sustainable, and no longer tolerable.
Only a few members of our bargaining team were still in the building on Tuesday when OHSU asked to talk to us before we closed down for the day. Those of us who hadn’t yet headed home met briefly with management at 5:30 p.m. They informed us that they had prepared a financial proposal for us, but after hearing our concerns (which were shared with them through the mediator), they had decided to rework it before presenting it to us, in hopes of finding common ground for us to work from going forward.
In closing, thank you to everyone who participated in our bargaining survey! The insights it provided were a shot in the arm for all of us on the bargaining team — you showed us that we’re on the right path and fighting for the things that are important to you. You helped us articulate to the mediator why this is an unprecedented time for our union and that we expect a contract that reflects this. We heard you. Hopefully OHSU has, too.