Bargaining 101

Dr. Yancy Phillips discusses the national agreement with Pete diCicco at the National Press Club.

If you work at Kaiser Permanente, collective bargaining now under way affects you. For the 81,000 employees represented by the Coalition of KP Unions, the 2005 National Labor Agreement will determine wages, benefits, and working conditions. The parties will also attempt to resolve a host of issues not traditionally addressed in contract negotiations, like worker training, service quality, work-life balance, and attendance.
In turn, what comes out of the agreement will shape working relationships among union employees, managers, and physicians for years to come.

That makes the process, which will involve more than 500 union members, labor leaders, managers, and physician leaders, hard for anyone at KP to ignore. It kicks off in April and ends by October 1 with a new National Agreement, along with some 30 local contracts.

How it works

Current bargaining aims to upgrade and improve the existing 2000 National Bargaining Agreement, which laid out everything from new problem-solving methods—known as issue resolution and corrective action—to shared goals around patient care and service. The 39-page document took six months to negotiate and provides a shared vision of what Kaiser Permanente should look like as a premier health care provider and employer. It also laid the groundwork for joint decision making in key areas such as patient care, policy, and budgeting. It was ratified by an overwhelming 92 percent of Union Coalition members as well as KP's top executives and board.

Negotiators this year will use the same Interest-Based process used in 2000. Each side will define its own interests and then come together to find common ground and develop solutions together, agreed upon by consensus. In the end this makes for a better agreement for all concerned, according to Christine Robisch, chief operating officer of Northern California's Diablo Service Area, who participated in the 2000 bargaining. "At the end of the day it is a decision we can all support," she noted five years ago.

Bargaining Task Groups (BTGs), made up of frontline union members, labor leaders, managers, executives, and physician leaders, will hold a series of meetings from April to June in Los Angeles and San Francisco to make sweeping proposals on specific areas such as workforce development, benefits, and performance improvement. They will issue reports to a joint labor-management Common Issues Committee (CIC) that will negotiate the final contract based on the BTGs' recommendations, for approval by the unions and KP leadership.

"Each side is actually commanded to look out for the interests of the opposite side and not be focused on positions," explained Shirley Ann Shirley, a shop steward with SEIU Local 399 (now SEIU United Healthcare Workers-West) who participated in a Bargaining Task Group in 2000.

Coming to agreement

In August, the draft national agreement goes to the Kaiser Permanente Partnership Group, which is made up of Health Plan and Medical Group executives, and to the 400-member Union Bargaining Council for endorsement. Then local negotiations begin, addressing issues specific to individual bargaining units. In September, the 81,000 members of the Union Coalition will vote on the national agreement along with local contracts. On October 1, 2005, the new National Bargaining Agreement and the local contracts will take effect.

It is a gargantuan, groundbreaking effort involving hundreds of hours of hard work by hundreds of people—and huge potential benefits for the people benefits for the people of KP.

March 23, 2005