PORT ANGELES — Olympic Medical Center has settled union contracts with 127 clerical, laundry and billing office employees, Chief Executive Officer Eric Lewis announced Wednesday.
The settlement completes negotiations for three-year contracts with the 374 OMC workers represented by United Food and Commercial Workers 21 in five bargaining units.
Meanwhile, negotiations between OMC and Service Employees International Union Healthcare 1199NW remain stalled.
In the United Food and Commercial Workers contracts, three units — Clerical, Laundry and Centralized Billing Office — were folded into one unit called Support Services, Lewis explained.
The settlement comes two months after OMC reached an agreement with the 198 employees in UFCW 21’s Professional-Technical, or Pro-Tech, unit.
Last spring, OMC settled with UFCW Home Health and its 49 employees.
“All of these negotiations took two or three months to complete,” Lewis said in the bimonthly commissioners meeting.
‘Tough negotiations’
“They were tough negotiations, but both parties were focused on win-win. I think we took a total compensation view. We looked at benefits and raises as we determined the settlements,” Lewis said.
The settlement lowers the retirement plan to 5 percent plus a 2 percent OMC match. Lewis and other managers will have the same retirement plan.
Lewis said the plan is similar to what most hospitals in the region have.
“Our retirement plan is above-market,” he said.
“So we moved the retirement plan to market as we moved wages up.”
The medical plan calls for a 15 percent employee match to cover children of full-time employees. In 2012, that will be $59 per month.
“I think the goals that both parties had is we wanted to avoid subcontracting and avoid layoffs,” said Lewis, who described the settlement as a “win for our patients, a win for our community and a win for our employees in UFCW and a win for OMC.”
Service union
No agreement has been reached with Service Employees International Union Healthcare 1199NW.
SEIU 1199 picketed the hospital in August after a judge declared a one-day walkout that it had threatened was illegal. The union has 370 nurses, dietary workers and service workers at the hospital.
“We still are working on SEIU 1199, and we will continue to work diligently on this,” Lewis said.
“We are in mediation. We are working on setting up the next negotiation sessions.”
Lewis said the offers made to SEIU on wages and benefits are similar to the offers that UFCW accepted.
“We will continue to bargain in good faith,” he said.
SEIU officials have said the two main points of disagreement are health care benefits for employees’ kids and guaranteed staffing levels in their contracts.
The union threatened an 18-hour walkout Aug. 11. OMC said it would have cost the public hospital district $600,000 to fly in 150 replacement workers and train them.
Kitsap County Superior Court Judge Karlynn Haberly issued a restraining order against the walkout.
Hospitals negotiating
Lewis said many hospitals around the region are in negotiations with SEIU, including Swedish Medical Center, Yakima Medical Center, Providence Health & Systems and others.
“Economic times make things more challenging than they have been in the past,” Lewis said.
Earlier in the meeting, several members of the audience spoke on behalf of SEIU workers.
Some said OMC is stalling.
Marion “Honeybee” Burns, a local caregiver, said the union nurses are being disrespected.
“I think that people who make $100,000 a year and more should pay attention to what people who make $10 an hour or a little bit more and say, ‘OK, maybe we need to sit down at the table and negotiate,’” Burns said.
“I believe that a lot of our problems would be solved if the people in our culture who are very, very rich — the top 1 percent — would starting paying their fair share.”
Nelson Cone said OMC is stalling and that the nurses “deserve better treatment than that.”
“These are the people that make this hospital work,” Cone said.
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-417-3537 or at rob.ollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
