CNA Bargaining Update – 4/25/16

Washington Hospital met on Monday, April 25, with the California Nurses Association for another round of negotiations. As you recall, the Hospital presented its initial economic proposals in the March 7 bargaining session and has been awaiting the union’s response.  Rather than simply respond to the Hospital’s initial proposal, this session began at 10:15 a.m. sharp with a group of 50 or so RN’s present at the negotiation session with placards and some five or so RN’s sharing their thoughts as to how they viewed both their working conditions and the Hospital’s proposals.  Negotiations can always produce areas of disagreement despite the best of intentions. Well-intentioned people sometimes simply agree to disagree, but what was truly disappointing at this negotiation session is that this group of professional RN’s chose to scream slogans such as “no justice, no peace” in an area where just down the hall some of our very ill patients were undergoing their chemo treatments.  While we can agree to disagree, professionals should think about the impact of their behavior on our patients before acting in this manner.  Not only was this unproductive to the important economic issues that need discussion, but was not a worthy representation of many of our professional nurses.

While the negotiations continued, the union did eventually make some counterproposals and the Hospital informed CNA that we would need to cost out the union’s counterproposals and future dates for negotiations were provided to the union for consideration.