On May 6th, professionals working for PeaceHealth Southwest begin their National Labor Relations Board election to determine whether or not they will officially form a union. These healthcare professionals have opted to join the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (OFNHP), a local affiliate of the national AFT, which includes 1.75 million workers across the country. These workers signed a supermajority of union authorization cards to form their union in order to gain a legally protected voice to bargain for improvements in their work environment and patient care. \

"As a

Now that we are in the heat of bargaining our next union contract we are faced with a major point of contention with St. Charles: a step system vs. market adjustments. In order to win our first contract we settled without something that is often a standard feature of union contracts, a “step and grade system” for wages that ensures transparency for annual wage increases based on years of experience. Management does not like this system and instead is proposing market adjustments, which allows them to make the decision for who will get raises and by how much.

A market adjustment is not, itself

On April 4th, professionals working for PeaceHealth Southwest filed with the National Labor Relations Board to form a union. These healthcare professionals have opted to join the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (OFNHP), a local affiliate of the 1.7 million  AFT Nurses and Health Professionals. These workers have signed a supermajority of union authorization cards, which then gives the employer the opportunity to recognize the wishes of their employees or to  force  a union election.

"We are incredibly excited to welcome the PeaceHealth pros into our union and help them

In a bold move, five union stewards in Kaiser Permanente led a march on their director, armed with a petition demanding the addition of a charge nurse in the Med Surg Overflow unit, a comprehensive paper citing nine peer-reviewed articles supporting the necessity of a charge nurse to the unit, and several ADOs from exhausted nurses who have faced unsafe staffing levels and missed breaks because of this staffing issue.

The petition, signed by 118 nurses from all of Med Surg, reflects a nearly unanimous call for immediate action to alleviate the strain caused by the lack of safe staffing in the

2023 was one of the most significant years in our union’s 50 year history, and we expect that the groundbreaking changes we saw this year will continue into 2024. This year began with us formally announcing what we already knew to be true: that fighting for safe staffing was the future of both our organization and of healthcare justice. We took on an all-organization staffing campaign, which meant finding ways of linking up our different bargaining units in the shared fight for safe staffing. We know that all of our campaigns, from contract battles to shop floor fights, are, at their core