Thank you to all the postdocs who attended our final bargaining session of the year online and in person! Your bargaining team (Bteam) met with management on Tuesday, December 19th to discuss the following proposals:

 PWU proposals:

1. Wages(new proposal)— Article covering the amount and process of postdoc contribution. Key points were that all postdocs should have a W2, the funding source does not determine a postdoc’s employment status, base salary of $80,000, and pay gap coverage until grants are adjusted, and a suggestion that departments pay postdocs bonuses for acquiring independent funding. *See below for more details on postdoc current wages, our proposal and our justifications.
2. Benefits (new proposal)— Article covering insurance premiums in line with other union contracts at OHSU, including 100% of premium costs for postdocs and 88% for dependents to be paid by OHSU. Also addressed were retirement contributions, childcare, relocation costs, equipment expenses, march wellness discount, and transportation benefits.

OHSU Proposals:

1. Intellectual Property (counter)— OHSU made it very clear they want to keep existing IP policies and not have union representation during meetings to determine licensing sharing agreements.
2. Time and Effort Commitment (counter)— OHSU insists that the project or work of the postdocs should dictate the need to work more than “on average at least 40 hours per week” and that Postdocs may use existing reporting mechanisms like ombudsman to resolve conflicts, should postdoc be compelled to work more than a reasonable schedule.
3. Appointments and Reappointments (counter)— OHSU indicated that Postdocs shall receive at least 1 year appointments with guaranteed funding for that term. However, they do not want to provide the hiring lab’s direct funding information to postdocs in the appointment letters.
4. Layoffs (counter)— OHSU’s counter rejected our request to have a 90 day notice of layoff, and they reinstated the 60 day notice they initially proposed. OHSU justified this by stating that other employee groups get only 15 days notice of a layoff. Your B-team has not yet agreed to this proposal and will further discuss these terms.

Fair Compensation

OHSU provided us a report of postdoc names, their hire date, their career level (according to NIH scale), and their current salary or stipend amount. We’ve heard from postdocs at OHSU that they can only be paid NIH minimums, yet the summary from our information request suggests otherwise:

Your Bteam felt our proposal was fair and in line with the recently published NIH postdoc working group’s recommendations (see here). Our justification for the high base wage is based on a regional cost of living adjustment to the recommended $70K national minimum. Furthermore, OHSU is a stand alone biomedical research institute, and the work we do has comprised an outsized contribution to an unprecedented $600 million in research funding to OHSU. We also requested a report of postdoc names, their hire date, their career level (according to NIH scale), and their current salary or stipend amount. We’ve heard from postdocs at OHSU that they can only be paid NIH minimums, yet the data suggests otherwise:

We hope that you all take some much needed rest of the next couple of weeks. You all have worked hard making OHSU a better place to do science.

In solidarity,

The PWU Bargaining Team