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What’s on the Table?

Our goals are to provide competitive pay and benefits, and maintain excellent working conditions and patient care. We appreciate the importance of our employees and recognize that to be a “Best Place to Heal,” we must too be a “Best Place to Work.”

What SEIU is asking of St. Joseph:

• 6% percent across-the-board wage increase for each SEIU member, in addition to anniversary step increases
• Lower health benefit costs maintained for the life of the contract
• Low census fund
• Training fund to advance health care careers
• Prohibitions to St. Joseph Medical Center’s ability to subcontract work

What St. Joseph is offering SEIU:

• A comprehensive, competitive wage and benefits proposal, to include adoption of the PTO policy that RNs adopted in 2010.

See the state of health care.

Locally, SEIU recently settled a prolonged negotiation at Community Health Care in which both management and the union agreed to freeze anniversary step increases. This is not on the table at St. Joseph, where management is proposing to grant competitive, market-based wage adjustments as we have done in years past.

Franciscan PTO plan

We are proposing to move St. Joseph Medical Center’s services workers to the Franciscan PTO plan. This is the plan that all other hospital employees have and it is among the most generous plans in health care.

Differences between our proposed plan and the employee’s current PTO plan, include:

• Allows cash out of up to120 hours of PTO annually, as opposed to the current policy which caps at 72 hours per year.
• Extended Illness Bank (EIB) access at 17th hour versus current 25th hour, with a 16 hour PTO elimination period.

Competitive wages and benefits

Franciscan’s 8,100 employees, including members of the SEIU, management and other workers at St. Joseph, are all offered the same health insurance plans. The wage and benefits proposals we have submitted to the union are comparable to the pay and benefits of other workers throughout our hospital system and the Puget Sound area. St. Joseph values the contribution of each employee and seeks to provide fair and competitive pay and benefits.