On Monday, January 24, your MCEA Bargaining Team met with the County for the second session of bargaining over our new contract. In this meeting we delivered our opening statement outlining our bargaining priorities and expectations for negotiations. We also spent more time discussing bargaining ground rules, but we haven’t reached agreement on them yet, and gave the County our first four proposals for changes to our contract.
Here are the proposals we’ve presented to the County so far:
- Adding Juneteenth as a paid holiday
- Adding other holidays to bring us in line with other Marion County union contracts (the day after Thanksgiving and a yearly Commissioner’s day)
- Improving the language dealing with flex scheduling
- Protecting against discrimination for workers exercising their union rights, and improving our ability to do union work on behalf of our coworkers during the workday.
In addition to the above, we are working on other proposals that reflect the priorities MCEA workers said they wanted to see in our new contract.
We also reminded management to give us their counterproposal to our Paid Quarantine Leave proposal. We hope we are getting close to an agreement on this issue, but we will need to see management’s proposal before we know for sure.
Our next meeting with management is on Thursday, February 10, from 5-9pm. All MCEA workers are welcome to attend. We will share more about how to join as we get closer to the meeting date.