September 19, 2023
Take Action to hold WSU Accountable! RSVP to join the Pullman Rally or help plan an event for your home campus.
Yesterday our ASE bargaining team filed an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP), in response to WSU’s illegal failure to bargain changes to the healthcare plan. The full text of the complaint can be found here.
Here’s how we got here:
- WSU CASE received an interim certification from PERC (the state labor board) on November 9, 2022, and our ASE team contacted WSU Admin to start bargaining on November 29, 2022. After months of delays by WSU, we finally had our first bargaining date on February 22, 2023. During this session, we outlined our bargaining demands, which included a demand to bargain our healthcare benefits.
- During this time, ASEs on the Student Health Insurance Advisory Board (SHIAB), were told that WSU was planning to submit a request for proposals (RFP) to other insurance carriers in February or March 2023. An RFP allows the university to solicit bids so that in negotiations, we can review possible changes to the preferred provider network and possibly different cost-sharing and benefit configurations. ASEs on SHIAB asked for additional information about WSU’s plans to address this through the collective bargaining process but were given no information.
- Despite our repeated requests for information about what was going on and our requests to bargain, On May 5, 2023, WSU notified us that they had unilaterally developed their own version of a plan for the upcoming year and that they needed to finalize and submit it to the Office of the Insurance Commissioner (OIC) by May 10. We asked for but did not receive their proposed plan changes until May 9, one day before the deadline. While the plan did include some improvements, it did nothing to address the preferred provider network and other priority items that ASEs have expressed in bargaining surveys and that we communicated at the bargaining table.
- Although we had little ability to substantially bargain this change, we did make a proposal to significantly lower the out-of-pocket maximum, increased co-insurance coverage, and lower the copay for prescriptions, emergency care, and office visits to be closer to par with our peers at other leading universities. WSU rejected this proposal.
- In August, after Admin’s proposal had been approved by the OIC, we learned that they had made dozens of other changes to the benefits (not all for the better). Moreover, they next proposed that we delay bargaining for next year’s plan because they didn’t think they would have sufficient experience information from the current plan year due to the changes that they had unilaterally made. They are therefore seeking to forestall additional improvements to the 2024/25 plan year or later.
- Admin’s actions and unwillingness to negotiate healthcare was as a fait accompli – a finalized decision made for us, without sincere consideration for our voice, effectively leaving us without room to have any input in this negotiation process.
Admin’s failure to bargain with us over healthcare, a benefit that so desperately needs improvement and is so deeply important to many ASEs, is completely unacceptable. We chose to form a union precisely to ensure that these decisions get made through negotiation with us, not presented to us as a foregone conclusion. Had we been part of the process and able to bargain, we feel certain that we would have been able to better understand plan costs, propose possible savings, and improve the plan in a way that is most responsive to our needs. It is also clear that Admin has not learned from this error; we discovered during our Sept 13 bargaining session that they have also failed to send us crucial utilization information about our plan and have started a new Request for Proposals process without our input. This pattern is deeply concerning.
Filing an Unfair Labor Practice is one part of how we hold admin accountable for this violation of our rights. Once PERC (the state labor board) reads our charge, they will first issue a preliminary decision about whether our charge shows “cause” for proceeding (in other words, they will assume that the facts we are presenting are true and make an initial determination of whether those facts would confirm that the employer violated the law). Then, assuming they agree that our claim shows cause, we will schedule a hearing. This typically happens many months down the road. PERC will hear our case, examine our timeline and evidence, hear the University’s rebuttal, and make a final decision on whether or not they believe WSU has violated the law. Our ULP details a list of remedies we would like. In the ULP, we’ve asked PERC to issue an order for WSU to bargain both the insurance plan and the impacts of their failure to bargain in May and to provide us with all of the information we’ve requested. You can read the full ULP here.
Although the ULP will help hold WSU accountable, the most important factor in our ability to win good, accessible healthcare for future years is mass participation and collective action. We need to make it clear to WSU that things have changed; they cannot change our benefits without our input, and we need substantially better healthcare benefits in order to live safely. Our September 27 Day of Action will be a huge opportunity for us to make that message clear, with a 12pm Rally at the Pullman campus and events by all other campuses as well. RSVP to join the Pullman Rally or help plan an event for your home campus.
In Solidarity,
WSU-CASE Bargaining Committee:
Acacia Patterson, Physics & Astronomy (Pullman)
Adam Bozman, Carson College of Business – Finance (Pullman)
Andre Diehl, Comparative Ethnic Studies (Pullman)
Arianna Gonzales, Psychology (Pullman)
Aurora Brinkman, Psychology (Pullman)
Chelsea Mitchell, School of the Environment (Puyallup Research and Extension Center)
Chia-Hui Chen, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (Spokane)
Claudia Skinner, School of Languages, Cultures, and Race (Pullman)
Cody Lauritsen, College of Veterinary Medicine (Pullman)
Coty Jasper, Integrative Physiology & Neuroscience (Vancouver)
Dano Holt, School of the Environment (Pullman)
Evan Domsic, Crop and Soil Science (Mount Vernon NWREC)
Gavin Doyle, English (Pullman)
Hannah Cohen, Veterinary Clinical Sciences (Pullman)
Kartik Sreedhar, Physics & Astronomy (Pullman)
Kayla Spawton, Plant Pathology (Mount Vernon NWREC)
Kelsey King, School of Biological Sciences (Vancouver)
Miles Hopkins, School of the Environment (Pullman)
Miranda Zuniga-Kennedy, Clinical Psychology (Pullman)
Naseeha Cardwell, Chemical Engineering & Bioengineering (Pullman/Tri-Cities)
Natalie Yaw, Chemistry (Pullman)
Ninh Khuu, Plant Pathology (Prosser)
Peter Obi, Pharmaceutical Sciences (Spokane)
Raymond Bennett, Psychology (Pullman)
Rebecca Evans, Biology (Vancouver)
Shawn Domgaard, Communication (Pullman)
Tazin Rahman, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (Pullman)
Tholen Justin Blasko, Animal Sciences (Pullman)
Victor Moore, History (Pullman)
Victoria Oyanna, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (Spokane)
Whitney Shervey, Sociology (Pullman)
Yiran Guo, Mechanical and Materials Engineering (Pullman)