6/4 Bargaining Update
Video Update: https://youtu.be/-R6Wf4kX-o0
We met with Allina today following our picket and we are happy to report that we saw real progress for the first time in months. We have always seen progress when Allina sees that many people care about our contract and especially if they are willing to show public support!
Allina came back with a counter proposal regarding our pay. They finally agreed to decrease contact hours for Urgent Care from 40 back to where they currently stand at 36. We have been telling them for many months that 36 contact hours is crucial to attracting people and keeping people working in Urgent Care.
Allina also adjusted their proposal regarding production pay for Primary Care. Their current proposal would essentially give us a salary guarantee set at the 25th percentile nationally and pay per RVU when we produce enough to exceed that guarantee. Their initial proposal would have made it very difficult to earn any production bonus if you had to take an unpaid leave. Today, they altered their proposal to prorate the production target based on your actual FTE worked, taking unpaid leave into account, if this is lower than your FTE. This change would help us continue to earn money for production even if we need to take an unpaid leave.
Although both of these changes are small, we do see it as a hopeful sign that Allina is prepared to once again work together on our contract meaningfully, something we haven’t seen in several months.
In an effort to keep making progress, we altered our economic proposal to try to find common ground with Allina. We agreed to base our yearly guaranteed salary on national data (much as it is now) and decreased our guaranteed salary proposal from the 75th percentile nationally to the 70th percentile nationally. We again made it clear to Allina that we absolutely must have a mechanism in our contract to give us paid time to work on in-basket, attend meetings, etc. We think the cleanest way to do this is to lower the contact hours for Primary Care from 36 to 32. Together with a fair guaranteed salary this will allow us more time within the day to do all of the non-direct patient care work we have. They are still not agreeing to any mechanism to give us time or fair pay for work outside of direct patient care.
Although we have finally seen some movement following our picket, we need to keep the pressure up and continue to show Allina that we will fight for sustainable Primary Care. We have a long way to go and will keep fighting together.
We will have an all member meeting on June 17, 2025 at 8pm. We will have another bargaining session between now and the meeting and are hoping to continue to see progress from Allina. If we don’t see progress we will need to discuss final steps to get Allina to the table.
June 17 Meeting Link: https://seiuhcmn.zoom.us/meeting/register/UeWmXcZCQkavBlAAjcqa2g#/registration
Outstanding Non-economic Issues: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MURBLj0XNkLx7g1eoq2l2TJTL5ZdWy5nGNZs1W2oGFY/edit?usp=sharing
Economics Summary: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HkZFPC2r4Bg80lmrAR9wNGE0CkRO5GzeTfkXk2UpObM/edit?usp=sharing
