UNA negs

Go to the UNA website (http://www.una.ab.ca) and click on the UNANet log in button at the top left of the page. Follow the instructions to get a UNANet account. They'll want your member number and a few other verifications to be sure you are who you say you are. It might be a few days before you can get everything workign, because of it being Easter. (The union staff get both Friday and Monday off, unlike the nurses they represent!) You'll also have to download the First Class software. Then once you're hooked up, log in to UNANet and look at the list of folders. On the left side of the list second from the bottom is "Negs 2007". Open that folder and start reading. Prepare to be enraged! In solidarity...

Sean, you won't find info on how to become your unit rep on UNANet... you'll find it here. Just call your local office and leave them a voice mail telling them you'd like to represent your unit, with the pertinent information. They'll (eventually) call you back and set you up. Then you'll automatically get all the flyers they send out to unit reps and information about upcoming meetings, opportunities to attend CFNU, ALC and other labour related meetings and other stuff.

Yes, UNANet is frustrating. I personally HATE First Choice but that's the program they went with. You don't actually have to download the software, you can use a web browser, but I've had problems accessing some things that way. Usually I can find a way around that, but not always. I just checked in with them and there's nothing new, other than the summary of positions, 17 pages in total. I'm going to print them up tomorrow and find a way to disseminate them to my unit. I'm underwhelmed to say the least with the employer's position. If they're trying to alienate the nurses of Alberta, they're on the right track.

I second that, joey1967! We all need to make our views clearly known to every level of management, right from the unit on up. Can the employer honestly think that rollbacks in any form would EVER be considered acceptable? It's interesting that when we were given 3% last year, our out-of-scope management people got 4.25 % and this year, the day we started working without a contract, they got another raise, this one 6%. Do you think THEIR benefits were rolled back? Not on your life! The posts on UNANet have been unanimously angry and disappointed with our union for agreeing to mediation without taking it to the membership. I predicted even before negotiations started that things would be at least as ugly this time round as they were last time, and I'm not pleased to have been proven right. The employer just doesn't GET IT!!! But they're pretty well insulated from the fallout, since not a one of them is a front-line health care provider, and they all know darned well that they'd get preferential treatment if they needed health care themselves, so I have very little hope of a swift and just result.

I just got back from a local general meeting. Heather was there and she says she's expecting to meet with the minister of health on Friday... lots of laughter about it being Friday the 13th... She says there has already been a lot of feedback from people and it's all negative. It's quite obvious that the employer has no clue about what's been happening in other provinces, and isn't concerned that Saskatchewan is wooing nurses away from Alberta in growing numbers every day. They have a $5000 per year signing bonus payable up front, so if I were to agree to work in Saskatoon for four years, they'd give me $20K on my first day of work! I could sell my little old house here and pay cash for something bigger, nicer, with lower property taxes and closer to work. Why on Earth would I choose to stay here (if I didn't have family ties and other encumbrances)? The young footloose nurses have nothing to lose by leaving, but it looks like they don't care. Maybe it's time to vote with our feet.

Our union will definitely keep on fighting. The majority of our executive members, other than a very few at the provincial level, are employed as grunts like all the rest of us, so what happens to us happens to them too. The members of the bargaining committee have taken union leaves from the bedside to negotiate for us. None of them are interested in any of that garbage the employer has trotted out and called a good deal. I know it's easy to become discouraged, but I've been through all this more than a few times and I can tell you that nothing worth having ever comes easily. (Or quickly!) Keep your ear to the ground, make your feelings known in as loud a voice as you can and keep the faith. Voluntary mediation is often a good thing for us, so don't give up yet!

Each individual nurse may carry out his/her own work-to-rule campaign by refusing overtime, refusing extra shifts, refusing to do the owrk of other disciplines (answering phones, filling water jugs, stocking bedside carts, filing the millions of chart copies of every document in the world, etc), filing PRCs, filling out overtime slips for missed breaks and leaving late, and anything else that would be legally backed up. BUT... and it's a big but... anything that even remotely looks like an organized effort to work-to-rule will be considered strike action and the government may step in with fines and arrests. The optics of such a move on their part would be bad in the extreme, but when King Ralph was on the throne, he didn't hesitate to remind us that he could and would. In this context, it would seem obvious that any strike vote UNA would consider would be a very serious step, but Heather isn't ruling it out.

The differences with mediation this time around are that it is voluntary, the mediator is not a government puppet, the two sides are still meeting face-to-face in the presence of the mediator and the external pressure on the employer is much greater than it was three years ago. No one was offering signing bonuses then; the boom (population and economic) was just getting underway; Alberta had a reasonably good contract in comparison to other provinces and bed shortages, code burgundies, ER overcrowding and media attention weren't on the radar yet. That's what the union means when they say they can't accept a four year contract... too much changes and we need to be able to react in a timely manner.

We have some very shrewd negotiators on our team. One suggestion that came out of our local meeting on the 9th was that nurses on the bubble call LAPP and ask what their monthly pension payments would be if they took retirement this year. Trust me that word would get around if a couple of hundred of us did that. I could suggest that all those nice nursing students who are in the final weeks of practicum and not yet union members are exempt from the media ban, and they could be an effective voice for our side. I had lunch with one such person the other day; I asked her how she'd feel if she accepted a job with Capital Health while negotiations are ongoing, then found out that she was going to be starting at 3% less than the nurse who graduated last year started at, who now would actually be 7+% ahead of her after the proposed 4% increase. The look on her face spoke volumes.

Talk about all of this where your managers can hear you. They are small potatoes, but they can pass on the message to the bigger potatoes, who then can pass it on to the Head Spuds. The managers in our unit are sweating bullets because of all the talk about leaving for greener pastures. We have more than a few nurses who came here from Saskatchewan when we were the top of the heap, and they have no qualms about going back now that the worm has turned. If I were 25 again and didn't have all the baggage I have, I could live in Saskatchewan for a few years.