UAPD met with AHS two days ago in a meet and confer over TBH’s efforts to staff a “triage psychiatrist” position in PES. AHS is claiming that recruitment has been unsuccessful over the past three months and that not enough SAN psychiatrists are interested in taking regular employment from the current employee pool. UAPD made several recommendations to AHS to recruit psychiatrists as an alternative to contracting out to TBH. For example, we asked that AHS advertise psychiatrists’ salaries online and in all of its outside advertisements. Interestingly, AHS has a policy of not advertising salaries for any of its vacant positions because it believes that applicants “interested in working for AHS for the high salaries are not employees we want to hire here.” Of course, this is ludicrous! All public employers advertise salaries for open positions. Furthermore, it is no secret that physicians’ salaries must be competitive with the market in order to recruit and retain them. AHS’ argument is a poor attempt at hiding its intentional obstruction of recruiting and retaining UAPD jobs.
Although UAPD doubts that AHS will present the union proposals to the Board of Trustees, more meeting are scheduled. Anticipating no movement from AHS, UAPD is prepared to move quickly to arbitration on this issue and will also file an unfair labor practice charge against AHS for meeting in bad faith with the Union.