Late last week WSNA received a proposal from Manage­ment for a reten­tion bonus of $5000 for a 2‑year commit­ment. This amount would be prorated based on your FTE. For instance, if you are a 0.6 FTE, you would receive $3000 in exchange for agreeing to remain at the UW for 2 years. The agree­ment does not appear to include per diems even though they have a 4- shift per month require­ment and are an invalu­able part of the RN workforce at UWMC.

Your WSNA team met with manage­ment on Thursday, Oct. 21 and proposed a $10,000 bonus for a 1 year commit­ment. These are the same terms UWMC is offering as sign-on bonuses to new nurses. We included per diems, pro-rated based on their shift oblig­a­tion. We asked that a 0.8 FTE and above be consid­ered full-time and not pro-rated. We also included a pro-rated payback in case circum­stances in a nurse’s life change. We included language about exten­u­ating circum­stances such as military deploy­ment, layoffs, etc. where a nurse would not be required to pay back the bonus.

Manage­ment responded with the same $5000 amount and 2‑year commit­ment, no money for per diems, full payback if separating, etc. They did accept a few items that we had proposed such as layoffs and exten­u­ating circum­stances language.

Your WSNA bargaining team members feel this amount is not suffi­cient to increase reten­tion and that you deserve more! The fact is, nurses have enticing choices around the Puget Sound region. We will be consid­ering the UWMC’s response but would like to hear from you. We are committed to solid­i­fying this as soon as possible and have arranged to meet again on Thursday the 28th in an effort to reach a final agree­ment. Thanks for all of your dedica­tion and hard work!

Questions and comments? Please contact one of your WSNA officers or your WSNA Nurse Repre­sen­ta­tive. Contact infor­ma­tion is in the ribbon above.