Economic Bargaining (Central Table)-We met with state management this week and were presented with a number of counterproposals. While we saw some progress in certain areas, management is still either rejecting or failing to respond to our priority issues. For instance, they continue to reject our proposal to allow workers who experience discrimination at work to have their grievances heard by a neutral, third-party arbitrator, and they are asking us to withdraw our proposal to create a labor-management committee that can investigate complaints of harassment or discrimination at work. They still have not given us a new proposal on cost-of living adjustments.

There were a few improvements in their proposals, including: Paid leave around inclement weather: Allowing employees to use inclement weather leave for a full day, and eliminating the requirement that essential employees must use leave without pay when unable to get to work.

Remote work: We are making incremental progress to language temporarily modifying remote work agreements.

We are pushing back on a couple of proposals around holiday and vacation leave: Management rejected our proposal to add Indigenous People’s Day as a holiday. They also rejected increases to vacation leave or adding an additional tier for employees who have worked at the state for 30 years or more. (We are, however, making progress on removing prorated holiday pay for workers on leave without pay status during the month and adding language workers on trial service to use vacation time.)

ODFW bargaining (ODOT Coalition) team met with management for two sessions this week. On both nights, our bargaining delegates kept management at the table past 10 pm, for a total of 15 hours of bargaining. We spent this time analyzing management’s proposals, crafting counter proposals, and working hard to defend and improve our union contract.

We were able to come to tentative agreements on two articles:

• Article 90.3B: Allows OPRD workers to agree to trade days, shifts, and hours with supervisor approval. We strengthened the language so that requests cannot be denied without a valid business reason
• We held onto the ability for ODFW workers to request a review of CDL requirements for their position is they haven’t been assigned to drive a CDL vehicle for the past 24 months. This was already in a Letter of Agreement, but management was proposing that workers would no longer have this right. Because we have a union, we were able to fight back and keep it as a guarantee.

We continue to go back and forth with management on proposals that would improve contract language for firefighters, seasonal positions, workers out in the field and state workers who interact with hostile members of the public, including:

• Increasing incident management rest after 14-day and 21-day fire assignments;
• Increasing vacation roll-over for back-to back seasonal positions;
• Allowing the use of chemical deterrents when in contact with aggressive animals; and
• Providing more clarity and communication around plans regarding hostile members of the public.

We continue to await management’s response to our boots and uniforms proposal.