Voting again

I had to vote today. And on a ballot that has MAJOR implications for life as I know it.

The union to which I pay dues decided to not approve the offered contract for a June 1 2008 start. Negotiations have now failed, the federal negotiator has failed to mediate an agreement, and a vocal few have pushed for continued efforts to get a "pie-in-the-sky" contract.

At issue is the fact that there are over 4 different pension plans for folks doing the same job, ranging for total crap to crappy. The union has a wonderful pension plan that would not actually cost Kaleida anything over the next 4 years and gives employees back service credit. However, the union has preached parity for years and won many concessions in the name of parity. Kalieda is refusing to move to the SEIU plan because then it would have to offer the same to the other unions. Which would cost major bucks.

Many of us in the professional unit feel that the nurses have picked their timing quite badly. The union announced last week they were filing a 10 day notice for a one day strike to be located in office areas and not patient care areas. It is unclear if that was filed or not.

Kaleida has said that if the nurses do strike, their contingency plan is to move all the patients. And once they do so, it is very likely the hospital will remain closed [back story - they tried to close Children's a few years ago and move it to a wing of the adult hospital]

There are other points of contention that affect fewer people. Such as Kaleida removing the ability of 30 or so school nurses to collect unemployment benefits during WINTER and SPRING breaks. Summer break they are still eligible if they don't work summer school. If they do work summer school [5 or 6 weeks] the nurses will not be able to collect unemployment for the 2 weeks before and the 3 after. I must admit to being rather speechless that those benefits were ever even available.

My vote today doesn't actually mean much in the grand scheme because the professional unit is about 150 people and there are thousands of nurses. We can accept our contract but if they strike we still will lose our jobs.

I took a quick look at our finances today: Ryan's preschools and Zoe's afterschool care and my parking lot alone are almost 50% of my take home pay. Sooooo, could we live? Yup. But it will suck.