At today’s meeting with the State, we continued to discuss their responses to our information requests. Their Chief Negotiator clarified which of the dozens of reports they have provided gives the clearest picture of the vacancy rate in our unit, an important issue when we begin to discuss recruitment and retention of doctors.
The UAPD team raised our concerns about new mechanisms of investigating doctors that seem to violate the terms of our contract. Some managers claim that doctors facing “administrative reviews” or “audits” are not being “investigated,” so they are not subject to the protections in Article 12.2. Others say that investigations done by certain outside or internal units can proceed without regard to that contractual language. Next week we will continue listing our objections to this change in practice, and later this month the State will bring representatives from DSH and CDCR to present information and answer our questions.
Next week the State will do a presentation on OPEB (other post-employment benefits), which we anticipate will focus on the pre-funding of retiree health benefits (BU 16 members currently contribute .5% towards that).
Also today, we discussed a management proposal to allow grievance meetings to be conducted via teleconference or video conference. UAPD’s position is that such technologies can replace in-person meetings only when the union agrees that it’s appropriate.
Most of the day was spent in caucus, where the UAPD team continued to draft proposals and identify our expert speakers. For instance, for our proposed language to expand the use of the 4-10 schedule, we will bring in one or more doctors who have been denied such a schedule with inadequate reasons from management.
We will continue making non-economic proposals (ones that would not cost the state significant money to adopt) in the next few sessions. This is the typical schedule that bargaining follows, as teams try to resolve as many non-economic issues as they can before salary and other monetary issues come to the table. This means we are still weeks away from presenting our economic proposals, which we know are of great interest to our members.
As always, we are your UAPD bargaining team:
Ron Lewis, M.D. – CCHCS/CDCR
Mubashir Farooqi, M.D. – DSH
Brian Kennedy, D.D.S. – DHCS
Pitr Conroy, M.D. – DDS
Keith Quint, M.D. – DSS
Stuart Bussey, M.D., J.D., UAPD President
Nereyda Rivera, Chief Negotiator
Zegory A. Williams, Executive Director
Sue Wilson, Business and Communications Director
Glynnis Golden Ortiz, Labor Representative