On Thursday, June 23rd, SHARE and UMass Memorial officially kicked off negotiations toward our next Contract Bargaining Agreement with a joint-training between the SHARE Team and the Med Center management Team.
Current Highlights
The first two sessions are being facilitated by Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, a professor at Brandeis who studies Labor-management partnerships. Joel has worked with unions and management in healthcare and other industries, and has a history of helping SHARE and UMass Memorial work through negotiations. Dr. Cutcher-Gershenfeld is currently teaching both teams about Interest Based Bargaining.
Negotiations are currently scheduled to take place weekly, four hours a day, every Thursday
We heard from staff that the top bargaining priorities are: pay, followed by respect. SHARE members have a variety of other interests, but it’s clear that we need to keep the health insurance and other benefits strong. And it’s clear that SHARE members often feel burned out and unappreciated (see more highlights of the survey here).
SHARE is also paying close attention to what’s happening with other union negotiations, including our sister SHARE Union at Marlborough hospital, as well as our neighboring MNA unions, both at Memorial (which has already reached a Tentative Agreement with the hospital) and University (which has not yet)
About the Teams
SHARE Union Co-Presidents Jay Hagan (Memorial Campus) and Rita Caputo (University Campus) at the table
Roughly forty people attended the Interest Based Bargaining training with Dr. Cutcher-Gershenfeld, including frontline managers, Human Resources Business Partners, representatives from the Partnership Office, the SHARE Executive Board, and the SHARE organizing staff. The lead negotiator for hospital management will be Michael Pacinda, a senior Labor Relations specialist at UMass Memorial; Lead Organizer Janet Wilder will again coordinate the team for SHARE.
Both lead negotiators described the difficulty of negotiating in a moment like this one, when hospitals everywhere are short-handed and caregivers — including SHARE members and managers — are exhausted. And, at the same time, both described the heightened importance of this negotiations to do something good and real and important in the face of that challenge. Janet Wilder encouraged the negotiators to dig into this in a curious way: “We’re more likely to come out with better answers to things if we bring joy and fun to this,” she said.
A History Lesson & Our historical Moment
Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld has helped to lead large-scale change initiatives in public and private sectors in Australia, Bermuda, Canada, England, Iceland, Jamaica, Japan, New Zealand, Panama, and the United States . . . including at previous negotiations between SHARE and UMass Memorial
Dr. Cutcher-Gershenfeld described that there’s real importance to what we’re doing . . . that SHARE and UMass Memorial are pioneering an uncommon model of partnership, one that has drawn national attention, including from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Services leadership in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Cutcher-Gershenfeld opened with the story of a pivotal moment when Ford and the United Auto Workers Union met to negotiate and realized they would have to do something untraditional, working together in ways that they never had before, or they would almost certainly face the catastrophic collapse of their company. (They adopted an IBB model for negotiations and came back strong; meanwhile, GM and Chrysler continued as usual and were forced to file for bankruptcy.)
Learning IBB
There was an unprecedented amount of theatrical shouting in the initial session, which was a lot of fun and served its purpose . . . but wasn’t as productive as we expect our actual negotiations to be. Through a variety of exercises, conversations, and simulations, the teams explored how the different negotiation styles bring about different results.
The teams spent most of the session learning about and discussing the differences between traditional bargaining—which typically begins from strongly held positions and involves coercive forms of power, and Interest Based Bargaining — which aims toward mutual gains and win-win solutions. In IBB, teams follow a series of steps to mutually understand the facts of the current situation and understand the other side’s interests before proposing solutions to the problems.
What’s Next
The teams will meet again next Thursday, when each negotiator will introduce themselves individually, and, with Dr. Cutcher-Gershenfeld’s help, we’ll begin to “bargain about how to bargain,” reviewing and revising the agreements we’ve made in the past about ground rules, how we’ll develop consensus, and ways that we expect to discuss differences.