In our last bargaining session, last Tuesday the 15th, the General Unit was joined by observers from the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, Oakland City Council, and ACCE Action, a community group we often partner with.

At that session, AHS proposed a brand new takeaway to gut Appendix F in the GU contract. Appendix F provides career ladders for many classifications. AHS’ proposal would mean trapping new hires at the I level of their classification, and not letting them advance to II and get the corresponding raise.

AHS management is also continuing to propose language to make it easier for them to discipline and lay off our members, and introducing a new practice of “temporary layoff” that we’ve never had before. We need to stand up for what’s right and vote to authorize a strike.

Previous Takeaways Proposed by AHS

Cutting pay & benefits

• Currently members in the PPO plan pay no monthly costs. AHS wants to make us pay 10% for the PPO plan that is now free, starting in January.
• No raises for three years.
• Cut holiday pay for 10 and 12 hour employees, so no one would get more than 8 hours of holiday pay, and 10 or 12 hour employees would have to use PTO to cover their holidays.
• Making it harder for nurses to get missed meal period overtime. (Art 6)
• Delete the 2 days of emergency PTO. Art 11 ¶154
• The GU & San Leandro chapters participate in the SEIU Joint Education Fund. AHS contributes to the fund, which offers lots of classes, tuition, career counseling and more for our members to be able to move up in their careers and get their continuing education. The Fund just expanded benefits to our SAN members. AHS wants to take it away entirely. (Sec 14.2 ¶205)
• Delete rollover of unused ed leave hours from RN MOU.
• Delete the right to buy long-term disability with vacation sellback (RN 18.3).
• AHS unilaterally took ¶299 B & C out of the 2017 GU MOU, which provided higher shift differentials for classifications in nursing departments.
• Delete temporary voluntary reduction of workweek and voluntary time off from Article 7—GU ¶73-79.
• Delete industrial sick leave supplement to provide support for members who are hurt at work for an extended period of time. ¶168-172
• Cutting protections/giving the bosses more control and us fewer rights
• Remove all safe staffing and Title 22 language from the contract. Allow management to make unilateral changes to staffing without meeting with the union first.
• Delete contractual caseload levels for social
• workers (Article 35)
• They want to make it easier to fire people.
• No more suspensions. Directly from reminder 2 to termination. Allow AHS to bypass reminder 1 for behavior you “should have known was unsatisfactory…” Allow AHS to mix performance, attendance, and conduct discipline—now each type of infraction needs to be its own disciplinary track. Remove our right to have old discipline removed from our personnel files.
• Allow AHS discretion to change schedules from 8-10-12 hour shifts.
• Delete modified duty from the contract.
• Allow AHS to cancel people up to the minute before their shift. (Current contract requires two hours’ notice.)
• Delete seniority rights for cancellations of SANs (RN).
• AHS unilaterally removed PIPs from ¶412 of the GU MOU.
• AHS has the right to approve LOAs
• Require 6 weeks’ notice to schedule medical appointments.
• Delete flex schedule for PA/NPs (6.16)
• Make it harder for nurses to get major holidays off
• Delete extra unpaid leave RN 8.20.
• Delete leave for special project, leave for exams, leave for selection or transfer, union leave, ed leave for literacy training.
• Delete lactation breaks and lactation spaces for RNs. (RN 6.1.1)
• Limiting shift trading. (RN 6.11.3)
• Cutting jobs
• MAKE LAYOFFS EASIER.
• Allow involuntary daily cancellations of FTE employees.
• Allow involuntary cancellations of SANs and FTE extra shifts before travelers
• Increase AHS rights to lay off members outside of seniority order
• Delete recall rights for laid off employees
• Delete every weekend benefitted positions (6.13 RN, GU Side Letter #4 for JGPH)
• Cutting union rights
• Take away our right to honor another union’s picket line (sympathy strike rights).
• Limit scope of grievances to one topic.
• Cap the number of shop stewards we can have.
• Delete union leave (GU Article 9, ¶116) from GU but not RN.

AHS’s Unfair Labor Practices

Throughout our months of bargaining, AHS has acted in unfair ways. We have filed charges with the Public Employment Relations Board about the following (and are adding more):

• Refusal to sign negotiated MOUs and unilateral changes to them
• Refusal to provide requested information relevant to bargaining and to our terms and conditions of employment, with 24 such requests that have gone completely unanswered, going back to November 1, 2019
• Denial of caucus time to review and respond to their hundreds of pages of proposals
• Refusal to respond to proposals: they want to tear up our contracts, and won’t respond to any proposals of ours that don’t start with the language in their new proposals