SHARE Blog Digest: Incentive Pay, Covid Pay, Redeployment, and More

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Happy MLK Day! We encourage SHARE members to take time today to reflect on the importance of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy to our country and even our own union. His ideas and example remain essential to SHARE as we face our own challenges today. 

COVID Vaccine 

SHARE Reps continue to report that UMass Memorial’s COVID vaccination process is going well. Some have declined for the moment, but most Reps have gotten at least the first shot so far. At a recent SHARE Rep meeting, only a few people had stories of a co-worker feeling sick afterwards. Hospital management tells us only about 10% of employees are declining the vaccine. 

The SHARE organizing team is seeing many positive signs in the broader roll-out of the vaccine, too. Our parent union, AFSCME, together with the country’s other three largest public sector unions, recently sponsored a virtual town hall, summarized here, with leading scientific experts, academics and government officials to address the safety, efficacy and equitable distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines.  

SHARE Argues that Members Should Be Included in Incentive Pay 

It’s a good news, bad news situation: when incentive pay for RNs who pick up extra shifts in some COVID units got extended, SHARE Respiratory Therapists were added (good news), but SHARE PCAs who work side-by-side with the RNs, did not (bad news). Read more . . .  

SHARE and UMass Memorial Medical Center Sign Improved Redeployment Agreement  

SHARE leaders and management have spent a lot of time talking about the redeployments last Spring, so that we could try to make things better for SHARE members during subsequent surges. (See SHARE members survey responses here.) We now have an agreement that creates a voluntary float pool to cover the need for one-to-one patient observers on COVID floors, strengthens the commitment to voluntary redeployment in other areas, and provides members a process for declining a redeployment assignment. One key change from the previous surge is that if a SHARE member declines to be redeployed to any job, then they will be placed on furlough. The furlough process will be more clear this time, and the SHARE member still has the option to use their paid time off or go on unemployment. Read more . . . 

COVID Pay 

The hospital has started COVID pay again, going back to November 1st. This pay is designed to make it so that employees don’t have to use their own accrued time for hospital-acquired COVID. Unfortunately, the new policy doesn’t cover as much this time, less than COVID pay last Spring. Now COVID pay covers two weeks of missed work, if you were infected at work.  

Staff who get COVID are to work with Employee Health and file for Workers’ Compensation. If Employee Health determines that you were infected at work, then the hospital pays you for the first five-day waiting period, and then they “top off” your Workers’ Comp pay during the second week of leave in order to make your pay whole. 

SHARE is urging management to re-instate COVID pay for absences due to COVID testing or illness, regardless of where you got infected. SHARE members should not have to use their own time. We want to encourage people to do the right thing and stay home if they have symptoms, which is tough to do if you don’t have any time in your bank. 

More Updates on the SHARE Website 

Thank you on this day, as every day, for everything you do to help keep our union, our hospital, and our community strong.