One of the most important ways our bargaining team gets feedback from our membership is from the two bargaining surveys we run each campaign. We always do one before bargaining starts so we know where to begin and then one towards the end so we know what to drop and what to keep fighting for.

This year’s second survey is almost ready to go, but our bargaining team has decided to wait a little longer before releasing it.

It’s an expensive process in dollars, steward hours, and attention. It takes a lot of work to get a survey to our membership if we want to get results that are statistically significant. There’s a core group who will always complete it on day one within minutes of the email being sent, but we also want to hear from people who are less engaged or have jobs that make it harder for them to take the time to access the information.

With a contract that covers almost 8,500 people across more than 300 job classifications, it’s vitally important that we hear directly from our membership. There’s simply no way to know what everyone thinks without robust participation.

With that in mind, we want to time it properly so that we get the most out of it. We believe that many of OHSU’s responses have been so hollow and dismissive that a survey today won’t paint the kind of picture that we are going to need to finish the last leg of the contract campaign.

With their initial responses containing only:

4 additional hours of paid bereavement leave and no other increases in our time off
raises that are less than 10% of what we asked for
and almost two dozen proposals they just rejected without even discussing them at the table

a survey based on the current state of bargaining wouldn’t help us make the kinds of hard decisions we’ll need to wrestle with as we get closer to a tentative agreement.

Right now, OHSU just looks like Willy Wonka screaming, “You get nothing!” Comparing that to our proposals isn’t exactly going to lead to surprising results.

Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. Top text “OHSU when employees ask for fair wages, more time off, and retirement benefits.” Bottom text: “You get nothing!”

Next week we have a work day planned, so we’re hopeful we’ll see significant movement on July 29th. This should set both teams up to make significant progress on August 5th, which is our next date that we’re scheduled to meet with the mediator.

While this should put us in a much better position to release our survey and take the next turn in the road to ratification, we don’t have an exact date set to release it.

We welcome your comments! Please be sure they follow our updated guidelines.

Update on the Bargaining Survey