Unit Steward Speaks Up About Unfair Labor Practice
Before we learned that OHSU will possibly remove our COVID sick leave altogether, OHSU announced on Tuesday, Jan. 25, that it would temporarily allow employees to use their vacation time to cover COVID-related absences if they had run out of both COVID leave and regular sick time.
While it’s hard to say exactly how employees felt about this change, since we can no longer comment on OHSU Now, acute-care physical therapist and Local 328 unit steward Jackie Lombard had serious reservations. Here’s the feedback she sent in response to Connie Seeley’s email about the vacation-for-COVID announcement:
So over the past 2 years employees who work in person, in buildings, have been required to stay home for a variety of days (10, 5, 2, etc.), with the most recent being at least 5, unless negative PCR test initially (sometimes hard to go get or with wait time for results) or immune compromised. At the beginning, it took several days to get results of a PCR, but you had to stay home waiting. All this meant, for some, using up all of the COVID sick bank.
It's bad enough that people had to use their own sick time to comply with OHSU's mandate. OHSU should have restored the COVID sick banks at least each year, not just carried them over. But now people have to use their own vacation to comply with OHSU's policy?
Do they want people to do the right thing and stay home or not?
Do they want to care for their employees, who are Oregonians, or not?
This just adds to the burnout (no vacation time) and increases risk for us all (come to work sick to preserve vacation time).
If they really want to "support our employees" they should renew all COVID sick time banks for in person employees.
Jackie’s questions were valid, and her bringing this to the attention of our union’s leadership revealed something that might not have been caught otherwise: OHSU may have committed an unfair labor practice when it bypassed the collective-bargaining process mandated by ORS 243.650 - 243.806. Unit stewards are one of our first lines of defense against managerial misdeeds, helping their coworkers navigate OHSU’s policies and our contract while keeping our union’s leadership informed about what is happening in their work units.
Our union will be filing a ULP complaint about this issue. Of course, our union welcomes OHSU finding ways to help our represented employees take time off for themselves or to assist their family members to recover from COVID-19. We do expect the employer to abide by legal requirements when doing so, however. We let OHSU Labor Relations know on Thursday, Feb. 17, that we believe the employer has engaged in direct dealing on several issues, including the use of vacation hours to cover COVID-related absences. More details about our ULP complaints can be found here.
Bargaining begins in earnest in 15 days, so this is a particularly disappointing time for OHSU fail to live up to the promises it has made about entering negotiations in good faith. After the disastrous problems on OHSU’s bargaining team in 2019, our union had hoped the employer would be more careful with how it approach labor relations this time around.
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