We had our third bargaining session with Whatcom County on November 17 and will head back to the table tomorrow, November 19, for session four.

Your team reached several additional tentative agreements with the County on outstanding articles yesterday:

• Vacation accrual 6.2 – management agreed to our proposed updates that clarified our existing vacation accrual rate tables.
• 6.2.2 Maximum vacation accruals and carryover – management agreed to new terms that set clear standards for when nurses may roll over more than 240 vacation hours to the following calendar year if leave was not approved.
• 7.3.1 Paid sick leave definitions – the parties agreed to update our contract’s sick leave language to align our definition of “family member” with the definitions in Washington’s Paid Family Medical Leave statute, which permits workers to take paid time off to care for important people in their lives even when they aren’t immediate family members.
• We agreed to combine articles 8,9,10 regarding leaves of absence for the sake of clarity
• NEW Bilingual premium – Bilingual nurses who pass a fluency assessment will earn a 2% premium on top of base wages for all compensated hours.
• Health Insurance -- Because the open enrollment period for health benefits occurs before our current contract expires on December 31, we are working out the procedural details to provide a pathway for nurses to enroll in health insurance benefits as soon as possible. Stay tuned for more details on this later this week.

In case you missed it, here are the tentative agreements (TAs) on individual articles we already reached at session 2 on November 5:

• 2.10 improved language on providing public information requests.
• 4.6 improved language to clarify that nurses aren’t obligated to answer emergency call backs while on vacation.
• 4.8 improved language regarding absences due to inclement weather that clarifies the terms to approve remote work.
• 6.4.1 clearer language regarding vacation cashout by mutual agreement
• 14.4.1 improved language regarding eligibility for nurses who are required to cross the Canadian border for work and bargaining rights if crossing the border ever becomes unsafe.

We continue to have productive discussions about how to work toward TAs in the following areas:

• Wage scale characteristics and yearly cost of living increases for each year of the contract term
• Identification of a clear distinction between PHN1 and PHN2 roles and a process by which nurses may transition from one to the other.
• A new weekly call rotation proposal from the County. We’ve asked for more specific information on this issue and the County agreed to work on gathering this information for us.

Our next scheduled bargaining date is November 19. With this progress, we have a true sense of momentum and hope to reach an agreement very soon.

Our calls to action:

• Contact Nicole, Kai, Julie, or Lela for a WSNA T-shirt or other swag. It is your right to show/wear your union insignia at the work site, the field or anywhere!
• Take a selfie or group pic and send it to a team member or Nurse Rep. Thank you to the nurses who sent us your pictures together, let’s keep it going! We loved the latest from Whatcom Public Health Doggies in the picture!
• Read all WSNA communications to stay current with progress as we continue to negotiate your union contract for 2026-2028. This will be even more important to read updates as we anticipate electronic voting this year. We have successfully held a great many WSNA votes this way, but it will be a first for the Whatcom nurses. Stay tuned for details 😊
• Not a member yet? No problem. Join today. This supports your team’s efforts to negotiate from a position of unified strength. Choose the option for UNION member https://www.wsna.org/membership/application

In solidarity,

Your bargaining team:
Nicole Miller nicolemiller.tupperware@gmail.com
Kai Rapaport kainui98@gmail.com
Lela Riherd lela132001@yahoo.com
Julie McElroy rnjuliemcelroy@gmail.com

Tara Barnes Nurse Representative tbarnes@wsna.org