Your staff nurse bargaining team met with the County on June 9 for our 9^th negotiation session (due to unavoidable circumstances, the June 4 session was canceled by the County). This session was dedicated to the staff bargaining unit and addressed issues that impact staff nurses only. These staff-only team sessions are to provide valuable time to focus on priorities that affect the staff nurses, specifically.

We presented a staffing language proposal in response to a counterproposal made by the County.

Our priorities for this proposal are:

1. Reassurance of no retaliation or discipline for presenting staffing concerns.
2. Protecting and promoting the right to fill out a staffing concern form (Assignment Despite Objection or ADO), not just the County’s incident reporting system (Origami).

While the County agreed to consider this, we did not come to agreement at this session. Thank you to nurses in any division who submit ADOs, which are legally discoverable for the benefit of safe patient care, nursing licensure, process-improvement, and align very well with the safe staffing law requirements. These ADOs alert your union of staffing problems that need to be addressed and are an important way to both protect yourself and advocate for better staffing - keep up the great work!

We also proposed rest and meal breaks language that aligns with state and other applicable laws. Our priority for this proposal is:

1. No retaliation or discipline for reporting missed breaks. There is fear and an understandable avoidance of inviting unnecessary scrutiny from management that doesn’t consider the real conditions that lead to missed breaks. We asked the County to put the money where their mouth is; show us their commitment to the provision of breaks by putting the language into the contract! We want to eradicate any punitive action for someone accurately recording missed breaks. We are asking the County to meet us in the middle, the contract language need not micromanage the specifics of nurses reporting missed breaks but the general principle that nurses are encouraged to accurately record when they miss a break should not be controversial!

Notably, this proposal is intended to ensure that barriers to reporting missed breaks are removed in all divisions in a respectful, equitable manner.

We encourage nurses to continue to report missed breaks to demonstrate missed breaks are not an individual issue – they are reflective of larger staffing problems! We have been clear that this is a systems issue, at some sites more than others. Your team described in detail the very real conditions that exist which lead to missed breaks. The County conveyed that they appreciated the testimonies, but because JHS management was not present at this session, they could not yet to come to agreement on this proposal.

We made a counterproposal in response to the County on continuing education. Our priorities are:

1. Upholding the language that supports what we see is the true intent for staff nurses and advanced practice nurses to obtain paid time off for continuing education, four and five days (32 and 40 hours), respectively.
2. Those hours should only be pro-rated for nurses who are hired in much later in the year – not based on FTE. This achieves simplicity without a lot of cost to the County, in contrast to the County’s complex proposal that unnecessarily limits what the original language was intended to provide.

Calls to action in support of our priorities as we will return to the bargaining table on June 26

1. Thanks to KCCF nurses who met up last week to boost support for a strong, fair contract. Wear your WSNA T-shirts, badge buddies and stickers on any shift. You are not out of compliance with the dress code because you wear your JHS lab coat 😊, too!
2. All staff nurses are invited to take this quick survey regarding the maintenance of reduced parking rates for KCCF nurses at Goat Hill AND express support for the dangerously short-staffed nurses at CCFJC. Even though we work at different sites and divisions, we must continue to stand together to achieve our shared goals for a strong, fair contract https://forms.office.com/r/3UDWGmSdMX
3. Follow us on social media https://www.instagram.com/phskc_staffnurses/

Questions about this update? Contact any team member or your Nurse Representative.

In solidarity, your negotiations team:

Elena Schensted, CHS at Columbia City PH clinic
Stephen Lee, Jail Health at MRJC
Evie Devera, CHS at Downtown PH clinic
Tami Nesler, Jail Health at MRJC 
Carolyn Clark, Jail Health at KCCF 
Kiesha Garcia-Stubbs, CHS at Downtown PH clinic

Tara Barnes, WSNA Nurse Representative tbarnes@wsna.org