May 15, 2008

After much haggling, we have finally reached an agreement with the Clinic on a new bargaining date. Negotiations are set to continue on Friday, May 30th.

In the News…

Most people probably saw the article on the front page of the May 10th Kitsap Sun titled The Doctors Clinic, Union Battle over Benefits, Wages. It was a fair article explaining the issues we are bargaining over. Doctor Wicks was quoted in the article stating the reason that the Clinic doesn’t pay anything for dependent medical coverage is because “That was not something that we have done in the past.” However, there’s no reason that The Doctors Clinic can’t do better in the future. We intend to make that happen.

You may have also seen the ad from The Doctors Clinic that appeared in the paper the next day, with employees pictured in the ad who don’t look like workers anyone can remember ever working with at The Doctors Clinic. Most likely, the photos came from a pay-per-image service that supplies photos to advertising agencies.

As you know, we’re also preparing an ad to bring our case to the public — but we don’t need to purchase photos for our ad. Already, well over 100 Doctors Clinic employees have agreed to put their faces on record behind our message about the issues we’re fighting for.

What’s Next

Between now and the next bargaining session, we’re hoping to meet with the Clinic’s top management to get some indication that we’ll be able to make progress on our issues. If we see progress is coming, we may not have to run the ad. If we don’t see indications of progress, we’ll be ready to place our ad in the newspaper prior to our May 30th bargaining meeting.

Everyone at The Doctors Clinic deserves a fair contract that provides fair wages for all job classifications, and offer some help on dependent medical coverage – and together, we can get there. We’re hopeful our ad will help make a strong settlement possible, whether or not we have to run it. If the ad doesn’t result in a fair contract, we’ll have to plan for additional actions to continue pressing our case until management responds positively.

It’s simply wrong that hard-working health care workers at The Doctors Clinic have their children uninsured or on state-funded health care plans. This employer is in a fine position to do what most health care providers in the Puget Sound region do for their employees: provide fair wages and good benefits for their employees.