[B]rattleboro Retreat has reached a new one-year contract for more than 550 employees.
Hammered out over 11 negotiations starting in August, the contract covers nurses, mental health workers and other employees who are members of the Local 5086 branch of the United Nurses and Allied Professionals Union.
“We’re very happy to have reached a contract,” said Sy Creamer, UNAP Unit 1 president. “We had no interest in striking.”
The contract, which goes into effect Nov. 1, provides a 3 percent pay increase for all union staff and establishes additional “market based” wage increases for registered nurses and mental health workers, according to a joint press release from the union and hospital administration. Mental health workers will now receive a minimum starting wage of $15 per hour under the new contract.
“What we realized, way before this last contract ended, is that for a whole host of reasons, we had fallen behind market significantly,” said Brattleboro Retreat CEO Louis Josephson. “And in that position, just giving across the board increases you never catch people up.”
Josephson said the wage increases will help make the hospital more competitive in the midst of a national health care worker shortage that’s “affecting hospitals around Vermont.” The new wages will be around 10 percent higher than in the rest of Vermont and New Hampshire and close to wages in western Massachusetts, he said.
Contract negotiations had a rocky start in the wake of the hospital administration announcing schedule changes for hundreds of employees this summer. Union members staged a picket following the announcement, saying that the administration had imposed the changes without first consulting employees, causing stress for employees and their families.
Creamer said that the new contract contains language around increased “transparency” for scheduling, such as first requesting volunteers for schedule changes and, if needed, assigning mandated schedule changes to the most junior staffers. However, she said, some of the scheduling disputes from this past summer are being resolved through arbitration.
The new contract makes staff who are union members eligible to participate in the retreat’s retirement plan after one year employment, instead of two, said Josephson. The union also negotiated for 17 positions for licensed practical nurses who were going to be phased out, said Creamer.
One union request that did not make into the contract was a clause assuring positions would be protected if the retreat were sold, she added.
The new contract has a significantly shorter term than the previous three-year contract as the retreat’s financial situation is “especially challenging,” said Josephson. “As CEO, I don’t want to make promises I can’t commit to or keep.”
He added that the shorter contract term will allow both the union and hospital to reconvene to work on remaining issues in a shorter timeframe.
“We are planning on being very well prepared to go into the next negotiation,” said Creamer.
In 2016, the federal government told the state that it could no longer use Medicaid funding for “institutions of mental disease,” which includes the Brattleboro Retreat. Josephson said that as it stands now, this key funding source would disappear in 2021.
“The worst case scenario is that the Retreat would have to shrink by quite a few beds, and so that would be a real challenge for the organization operationally and fiscally,” said Josephson.
The Retreat administration has been continuing discussions with Agency of Human Services Secretary Al Gobeille in the hopes of convincing the federal government to reverse that decision, he said.
The Brattleboro Retreat is a private nonprofit specialty psychiatric and addiction treatment hospital that employs around 870 employees.
