Wheeling, Yes. Dealing? Maybe.

Friday - 1 pm - Umpqua Room

We meet tomorrow for what is either going to be the final session where we get a deal or the last session before a big break. At the last session, both sides affirmed our desire to reach a settlement before PacificSource's tentative deadline of September 1st. We both floated some ideas, but the UO indicated that they really weren't in love with our ideas. Their idea, however, is expensive. Puzzling, since they are supposed to be very concerned about costs.

To review:

It turns out that the UO and GTFF have very different interpretations of Appendix I. The GTFF believes that the second paragraph obligates the UO to pay an additional $250K this year for buying a higher annual cap. The UO argues that this language means that they are obligated to maintain the $250K payment they made last year.

Both sides seem genuine that their interpretation of the language is the one they thought they bargained into the contract last year. I know sure as shit that this is what the GTFF thought we were bargaining. The GTFF filed a grievance and the UO has agreed that the best course of action is to let the grievance process play out. While that happens, the UO would be obligated to maintain its health care payments at the same level as last year, so nothing much would change in the Fall term.

In an effort to wrap bargaining up before then and to make everyone feel more comfortable about next year, the two parties agreed to try to find ground common enough that we wouldn't need to grieve or continue bargaining.

Along those lines, the GTFF floated two ideas (as opposed to proposals. There were just ideas we were kicking around, not formal proposals, which is why they are so vague). The first would be to reinstate language in the CBA that would require the UO to guarantee to pay a large portion of any increase that came along next year. This way GTFs would be indemnified against facing a large increase in their costs for families or summer for two years. Our other idea was for the UO to kick in more money for the summer, lowering costs for everyone and making it easier to buy, so fewer GTFs would have to decide to go without health insurance in the summer.

We liked these two ideas because, while it seemed like the goal of increasing the cap was out of reach this year, stability and access/affordability are two of our other goals.

The UO had a different idea. They wanted to find out how much it would cost to raise the cap to something more than $250K (where it is now), but something less than $1,000,000, which is what we are proposing. They needed us to get the dollar figure to them before they would commit to saying that they wanted to roll with that idea.

I just sent them data that indicates that it would only be about $44K cheaper to have a $500K cap instead of a $1M cap. It breaks down like this (figures based on a comparison to the costs from last year):

$250K cap = -$75K
$500K cap = +$188K
$1M cap = +$232K

I don't know what the UO will do with this info. The ball is sort of in their court, since they said they didn't really like our ideas. So, tomorrow we'll see what shakes out. I know that the GTFF is more than prepared to walk away from the table if the UO is not willing to give us a deal we like. We're confident we'll win the grievance and the UO will owe us $250K and we'll be able to buy that $1M cap eventually.

Should be exciting, see you there.