BRATTLEBORO — For those of you who have heard the recent news that the Brattleboro Retreat and the United Nurses and Allied Health Professionals (UNAP) Local 5086 have reached a new two-year contract agreement, we would like to share with the community certain aspects of the negotiation process that did not make it into the press releases and news stories.
If there is a hidden headline here, it is this: Both sides agreed beforehand to try an innovative new approach that ended up transforming this year's contract negotiations into a genuine collaboration that produced results beneficial to both the Retreat and the 720 people who work for our hospital.
To begin, the union and management negotiating teams agreed to attend a series of pre-negotiation meetings in order to agree to ground rules for the negotiations and to allow us to better understand one another's concerns and needs.
We also agreed to do away with the early negotiation posturing that often puts people on an adversarial path from the start. That is to say, we started our official talks by all wearing our “reality” hats. No outlandish demands met by cold counter offers. No hidden agendas. No winner-take-all mentalities.
Doing so meant that we marked a starting line that was already much closer to the place where we all hoped to end up. And this fact alone gave each person at the negotiating table a strong sense of the possible.
Both management and the union agreed to eschew representation in the negotiation sessions by any third parties. We feel this contributed to our success, because it set a more collaborative tone to our discussions and facilitated the kind of candid exchange of ideas that is required in a true collaboration.
In the end, we agreed on a two-year contract that was quickly ratified by the UNAP members who work at the Retreat. And we accomplished this milestone in just five negotiating sessions that lasted no more than three hours each.
Perhaps what's most exciting is that the terms of the agreement provide a structure that encourages the type of ongoing partnership between staff and management that will allow the Retreat to be more innovative in areas of safety, cost containment, and quality of care, while offering our staff more control of their benefits and the opportunity to influence their own wage increases.
The shared goal of union and management is to position the Retreat in ways that allow the hospital to thrive as the changes called for in the new health-care-reform law become reality.
Exactly where these changes will take us as a nation is tough to predict. But we are encouraged to know that both union and non-union employees of the Brattleboro Retreat will be on the journey together.