 Hi, I'm Gene Bergman. I'm a Ward 2 City Councilor in Burlington, and I want to welcome you to this month's edition of Burlington Progressives TV. This is a monthly show that we've got and what we try to do is explore community issues, the issues that are facing the city, our people, our environment, and really sort of get a chance to talk about things that are not part of the political conversation. We've had community members talk about police oversight and also state issues like the tax fairness that we've got in the state or the lack thereof. We've had politicians talk about the housing crisis and progressive taxation and this month what we're going to talk about is justice in the workplace and in particular the union struggle around the UVM Medical Center's support staff. First of all, I want to welcome you guys, Jacob and Lou and Heather. Thank you really very much for joining me on this. I want to frame this because, you know, Burlington Progressives are part of a progressive party, and so it's a political organization. What the heck are we doing, you know, like talking not about politics? And the reason is because our party is fundamentally concerned with economic justice and with the rights of workers. So I just want to read for the folks there and I will like read excerpts from our principles. So you understand why this is important to me and as a former union member of the GCIU in a failed attempt to get a contract with the Burlington Free Press many decades ago, my heart is with you all. So the purpose of the progressive party is to promote economic, social and environmental justice and sustainability through electoral and other democratic political activities like this, like your union drive. Democracy requires empowering people not only in government but also in the workplace, schools and in the overall economy. Society's wealth should not be concentrated in the hands of a few and a wealthy minority should not control the conditions under which we live. Here's one that I think is really pertinent. Collective organizing is essential for people of low and moderate income to attain economic justice. Everyone is entitled to decent work at a living wage in a safe working environment. I'm going to stop there because this has gone on long enough. We've got a few more there. But all of these, to my understanding, are things that you guys are working on every single day in your work lives and because it never spills, doesn't stop in your home with your families, with your extended families. Again, I want to thank you so much and I'm about done with my yapping. But I'd love for you guys to tell us who you are and what your job titles are but also what you do. Because people need to know what you do and understand that. So I don't really care who it starts. So my name is Jacob Berkowitz. I'm a staffing office specialist at UVMMC. Basically my job is to staff the hospital which can be a challenge. I work with 15 plus inpatient nursing units and I've been doing the job for almost three years. 15, that's a lot. And I'm in charge of all the nurses that work with those units essentially. All the LNAs, licensed nursing assistants and the clinical patient safety attendants. So there's a resource pool that I'm in charge of to try and fill the plethora of gaps. Wow, wow. We'll go into the challenges. I believe you'll tell me about the number of calls that you all make, for example. I think it's pretty amazing. Absolutely. Thanks Jacob. Hi, I'm in operational support. Your last name, Lou, is Lou Levec. That's correct, Lou Levec. There we have it. I'm an operational support specialist. So I work on the outpatient side. So that means that I am the main trainer of a doctor's office. So in a doctor's office you might have a scheduler and a medical assistant and then you'll have a supervisor and so I'm sort of middle management between the two. But I'm in a unique position in the sense that I'm boots on the ground and also having a hand in helping the next group of workers come in. My day looks like taking the referrals that your providers send to us and helping get them to the right scheduler so that you can have your... I work in neurology, so a subspecialty appointment, something like that. Well, that's like seriously important. Having been referred to a variety of different UVM MC facilities, if that referral doesn't make it there, it's not really a good thing. And support staffing is really integral to getting those steps through the process. They just doesn't happen automatically. We'd love it to be that way. The AI is a whole nother show that we'll have, but human beings are essential unless they're going to... Great. Heather, hi. Hi, my name is Heather Bauman and I am a direct care provider as a phlebotomist. What is a phlebotomist? I'm the person who tries to make one of the worst experiences or most fearful experiences at the hospital pleasant for people. I draw blood. And that means we work in one of the three outpatient clinics at the Fannie Allen at One South Prospect or at the clinic within the hospital or sometimes I work inpatient like I did this morning. Working at the clinic sites means, you know, greeting the patients who show up. Like clinics where? So there's one just across the street from the main hospital. There's one in the hospital and then there's one over in the medical office building next to Fannie Allen. Okay. And we see hundreds of patients today, many of whom first thing in the morning have been fasting and again not excited and the hanger is real. And then also in the hospital we usually have about 200 draws spread out over the five buildings of the inpatient structure that we are supposed to get six of us usually within an hour. Well, I have to say and, you know, medical privacy is personal. So I am able to say myself that the last time I got blood drawn at the Gosbrion unit was an amazing experience. It was great. It took no time to get in and out and it was painless. And then I got to go ski at a powder day. So it was like a beautiful, beautiful thing. So thank you. And although the Vermont Progressive is a statewide party, this is a Burlington show and the medical center is in Burlington. And so I know, Jacob, you are a Burlington resident. You live where? In the old North End. And Lou? I live in Colchester. And Heather? I live just south of town in Sherlock. You know, that is actually really important, right? Because this is an issue that relates to everywhere all around us. We have this like a, what's the, I'm going to call it a euphemism, but of the hospital itself, it's like a trauma center. Trauma one center. I mean, this is a big deal. Right. And there are, and we're going to go to slides now. How many people are in your union? I think it's over 2,300. Yeah. And the hospital severely understaffed. So if we were fully staffed, it would be momentous. And it already is. As somebody who was part of a bargaining unit of about 200, your 10 times, the more than 10 times that amount, that is a lot. So here we are. We see your logo there. And why don't you talk to us about who you are? Yeah, absolutely. So like you just touched on, we're over 2,000 of UVM MC support staff, which includes phlebotomists like Heather. We have licensed nursing assistants who I work with very closely, environmental services workers who, you know, clean and take care of, take care of the hospital. We have the chefs and, you know, over a hundred other job titles whose work is the backbone of the hospital. So when you talk about how large the union is, it's not just that it's a large amount of people. It's a very diverse amount of people from all different job descriptions. Janitors, building maintenance folks, those folks, people who are repairing things. I mean, I really believe that if, like, you don't have people who are going to clean the bathrooms, you don't have a healthy environment. So, you know, it seemed like it's on the bottom, but it's just on one side of a spectrum to the other. So all those folks are in union. They are the plate passers. So if you're in the hospital and you want a meal or you need a specialized diet, those are the folks that bring it to you. Make sure it's hot. Make sure it tastes good. Any other things about, maybe we can get that slide up again in case, or the other one where we said who we are? There we go. So you mentioned about the short staffing and stuff. And we'll get into that in detail some, but 2200 workers and you won with an 86%. How did that happen? It was definitely a lot of work. That's for sure. Our election was in January and we had been working for around a year before that to sort of organize, get all of our stuff together and get the word out, because people have been upset for a long time and have been overworked in short staff for longer than just the pandemic, but the pandemic certainly exacerbated that. And so 86%, especially for a support staff union, which are notoriously difficult to form, it's not just a landslide, it's a mandate. We have a significant chunk of support from a lot of very tired folks. But it did take a lot of work. Well, clearly a credit to the organizing team and the union itself and to all the other people and they know that would support you because this is not as somebody who's been through it. This is not an easy thing to do. Totally worth it though. Totally worth it. Absolutely. Tell us about, you know, like why it's worth it. Why it was, why it is worth it just sort of on that really personal basis. I can say one thing about just the start of it. I actually worked at the election and I've worked at elections for years. This is my first union election and I have never been so nervous sitting and people are casting their ballots and getting very anxious and the mandate from the National Labor Board not to speak to anyone and not to bring anything up, but to see middle-aged, older adults coming in and then their children coming in right after them to see people who needed support with the translation of their ballots. You know, it was a really moving experience and so the reason that it's so worth it is we've come together, you know, we raise our heads in the hall now. There's a pretty intense cast system in the hospital but we stand a little taller and we keep our eyes up and if we're not being seen by others, that's okay, we see each other now. Yeah, I was in the cafeteria's mac and cheese day today and I just sort of had my head down because I was thinking about mac and cheese and I looked up and the food, the line chef was also wearing one of these and she goes, nice shirt, nice shirt and it was a good little moment. Yeah, yeah, that's very, very, very special and you know, this is a big deal in the private sector for you guys to have won this. This is not something, it's a major problem in the country and you're at the vanguard of making sure that working people have dignity and respect. So there are other slides. Let's see what the next slide that we can chat about will be. So Jacob, you talked about and Lou, you talked about short staffing but tell us more. So I'm in a unique position in the staffing office where I not only get to hear the stories of people being short staff but I see the numbers and all the data that goes along with it. So, like I said earlier, I'm responsible for filling all the gaps and I have a couple of snapshots of data that I think are pretty telling as far as just like the impact of what we've been going through and how it's been getting worse over time. So I had a couple of graphs that myself and one of my staffing office colleagues put together. So these are calls that you make? Yes, so our office... Oh yeah, so we're talking like the amount of calls that goes out per day, per shift is extraordinary for recruitment to fill those holes by putting out you know, urgent pay, you know, trying to get people in for double pay otherwise the work, whether it's nurses, LNAs, etc. just doesn't get done. And as you can see, outside of a two month blank period during our infamous power or infamous outage with the cyber attack. Even through the pandemic it's been getting steadily worse as far as the amount of calls we send out per day. So the number of calls the shorter the staffing is, the bigger the gap is, that's a reflection of that? Yes, absolutely. So yeah, a lot of those calls are to support staff particularly LNAs who, I mean you'll talk to any LNA that works at the hospital they'll tell you that they get three, four, five, sometimes more calls per day to where like their mailboxes just from messages from me pretty much. Saying we need you, can you come in? So what is the call? Basically, you know, we have a staffing need from this time to this time, you know, essentially please come in for urgent pay. Sorry, tell your little kid that mom is coming or dad has got to leave after dinner because there's this really urgent emergency that we've got to do. Give him a kiss for me. Absolutely. And tell them that without the urgent pay we can't make ends meet. Right? Because it's not really about wanting, I mean it is about wanting to help your coworkers and wanting to help the community but it's also that our wages are so low that without these urgent pay shifts we can't make it. That's really fascinating. And on that, I think, or the things with money, I mean this is an institution which pays its upper executives a lot. That was very clear when the nurses went on strike. I actually, I retired on a Friday and on Sunday I went to a strike support meeting, a community strike support meeting on Monday. I walked a picket line and went down because I had worked for the city for a long time and then went back to the council, to the city council to thank them for having appointed me for 20 years and to ask them to join me on the picket line. So that experience was pretty strong for me so I know that the upper management does not underpaid if you've got any sense of propriety. Yeah, it's public information. Check out ProPublica and the tax forms are there and the latest tax forms are from 2021 and it is it's terrible. It's disgusting. So you guys are and you live all around the county? If we can get that slide up that so this is the this is the shift and it just gives you more data for comes more data on what you're facing on the floors but if we could see a slide that relates to to the cost of living we can get we can get back to we can get back to that but let's let's look since we've we're talking about money right now. Are you talking about the one that has how much each person is expected? Well, let's let's start with let's start with this. Let's start with this one. This graph is essentially just an indicator that wages and inflation have been on the rise or rather when adjusted for inflation wages have been stagnant versus what the actual bottom line is the wages that you guys have been getting paid. Well, just in general this is like the employment cost index for for private industry just across the country. So this is just working people. We know that this is a problem it's a problem with people trying to pay their taxes in Burlington. We just had this fight on Monday tried to lower the tax rate unsuccessfully but so this is a this is a problem that is across the board. So that's what that shows and yeah, I think even more pertinent is this next slide that maybe goes a little bit more in depth to like recent memory. One thing that I've consistently said to my colleagues is these are the inflation numbers of the last 23 months or 29 months or 29 months rather where inflation has been 13 percent and the wage increases for support staff have not even been close to that. In fact. So do we have a slide that goes directly to we have an average wage increase year over year of 3 percent 3 percent. Yes, which is significantly less than 13 percent. Exactly. In essence, we've been taking pay cuts throughout the pandemic and the administration would probably prefer if we continue to take pay cuts but the sense that I'm getting from my colleagues is that we're done taking pay cuts for the hospital. Good. Good. I mean, I'm proud of what the the city did in terms of our unionized workforce and making raises and it was hard but it was the right thing to do and so, you know you just have to do that austerity kills and that means paying people what they need and so there was the next slide that was up there around so this was a survey that you did. Yeah, we we put out a survey right after our election to sort of capture what was most important to folks so we could focus our proposals and down at the bottom here it says numbers based on the 641 surveys completed after this question was added so about halfway through the survey we added the this question of which expenses do we currently struggle to afford and it's staggering that you know the three like the two basic things housing and nourishment over you know over 50% of folks. Yeah, yeah 70% are having a hard time paying roof over their head roof over their head Jacob presented the slide at our first in person bargaining team meeting it was about 60 of us and we met over at the Fletcher Free Library and he put the slide up and there were audible gasps from the 60 and then someone raised their hands and said I have a colleague who sleeps in their car and all these hands went up to indicate that in every department we have colleagues who are housing insecure and who are you know showering at work are sleeping in unsafe places you know truly upsetting and this is again a private industry but you know it's supposed to be providing care to the community and doesn't feel like care and there that pain is not being shared right? I mean the CEO got a big job no doubt but not sharing that pain in any stretch of the imagination does not have to worry about paying his rent or his and I mean the 2200 people and you were talking about this in terms of the election these are older people these are older people these are people with families and kids these are young folks so there's this range and they own homes or they rent I think that you know there's a certain generation that owns homes in our generation I mean yeah look at that face same but like there's no way we can you know working at this largest institution there's no way we can conceive of owning a home so a lot of us rent up until recently one of our colleagues many of them drive an hour in outside of Tintin County yeah many many of them do and the rising cost of fuel doesn't help them their expenses yeah yeah yeah and these are folks that haven't just shown up there last week this is not the starting wage right these are people who've been working in these jobs for a long time yeah and have going back to that slide with the flat line yeah of wages it's and I can't remember if there's a slide about this but that is actually one of the problems is there's a real wage compression and so we have people with you know I mean someone spoke the other at one of our bargaining sessions last week about having worked here for 36 years you know and no he's not earning a livable wage after 36 years well we'll go on to to the next slide but I heard a telling when I was negotiating I heard this incredible comment I was telling this to Jacob the other day we were talking about us being underpaid at the free press and I was a production worker making $9 an hour and at the end of the day when we showed them the the compression so to speak and what they were making a lot of money and what other places were were making with other workers and other unionized places were making they just turned us and said what does what we make have to do with what we pay you we pay you what we have to we were not yes I this is this is 30 years I still say this and I would go home as a member of the bargaining team I'd go home crying you know I had a baby at the time yes and so what gives me heart I could not make them pay people I mean I could make them stop taking away benefits which is what they were doing at the time taking away healthcare stuff but but you are hopefully going to show them that okay we're going to make you pay what's fair so what is the this next slide is just again let's talk to us about about this yes so our of our financial based proposals are based on the cost of living and you know I think a lot of people might think particularly our our friends at administration probably would stop at the fact that we'd be asking for you know $25 an hour but unless you're you know a single person with no children you know which I would probably say the majority are not it's like it doesn't even cover the cost of living to be honest it's it's the only reasonable thing to ask for is what covers the cost of living anything below that is like what are we even doing here okay so we can get into the you know some more of what you're asking for and stuff and we could go through the slides but like with the with the staffing shortage are they aware as the administration aware of the problems and you know what do they what do they say and what is your response to what they say so they are very well aware the numbers that they see I could tell you personally that directors of the hospital see my staffing plans personally they see all the gaps they see all of it they hear the stories they're just not prioritizing correctly and so they know it and they're just that's just not part of their priorities and you're now raising with them the need to change their priorities absolutely and to what it looks like from a patient care perspective and I think Heather could definitely point to this the phlebotomists are also very understaffed I mean we're currently operating with the staff of I believe 38 people and optimally staffed we should have 30 more you know you know we're understaffed when you come to one of our clinics for a blood draw and you have to wait an hour an hour and a half in the morning you know to get in and haven't helped you if your orders aren't all set if your doctor forgot to you know dot an I or cross a T wait another hour because we have to get through to patient support services and to the lab customer services and have them help us with the orders I mentioned before that we often have 200 patients to be drawn at 6 a.m. with six phlebotomists we're expected to do four draws an hour we're pretty good at our gigs and some of us can do six to eight but there's no way we can get those draws done at 6 a.m. so that the care teams have the results in time for a rounding at 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning which is what they're hoping for we're lucky if we get the 6 a.m. draws done by the time we have a shift change at 1.30 and we often don't today I finished the last 6 a.m. draw at 1.35 I clocked out late I was really lucky I mean you know yeah sometimes you get lucky but most days you you suffer from lower quality care because we don't have the we have the urge to provide it but we don't have the people to help us do it and we've lost a lot of people who can you know take higher paying jobs in other places right so what is the union proposing in terms of wages I mean and the staffing yeah in terms of staffing well one of the things is to make it a livable wage and we are proposing we you know kind of talked about it and we talk about it every week we talk about it in our meetings and we talk about it in our bargaining sessions and you know you say that you know the progresses are a political movement but this is a personal movement for us it is and it is an intersection of the personal and political if they aren't all and so we're looking for ways to make this this job work for people so they can stay and sustain it as a life they're not people are not asking to get rich they're asking to get by and we're looking for ways to support them and living full lives as employees of UVMMC and supporting their neighbors you know and taking care of their community which is really gratifying work yeah yeah we're looking to as Heather said treat our staff like humans one of the things we're really excited about is so we have a colleague named Hari and he shared with us stories of his cultural holidays and right now regardless of your culture or your religious affiliation you sort of go by the you know Judeo-Christian holidays that are established so one of the proposals we're bringing forward is that we employees can designate three days that can be their own they that are their own holidays Hari was talking about where he goes with his family to the elders who bless them and you know wishes for their good fortune in the year coming and why are we you know forcing folks to not work on a day there indifferent about and instead just sort of scheduling them on a day they really need to you know seep in to their lives yeah so we're really excited about that one and you know some of the things that we're doing as well as knowing how how powerful we are as a group even though we're just in bargaining and in the beginning of bargaining 600 of our folks went to these meetings and you know we talked about the basic needs that we are that were being shorted and so there's childcare and food at every bargaining session what can we do to provide for each other people are telling us we're not afraid anymore we're not afraid to lift up our head and you know speak to management it went from whispered conversations over months preparation to speaking out loud and normalizing each other yeah it reminds me of what the Memphis sanitation workers yeah anything to add on and what you're what you're looking what you're looking for how things are are progressing I think things are going you know extremely well as far as the momentum that we have the excitement in the room I think a lot of the most recent proposals that we've made are definitely exciting for folks it's not just about you know the financials though it you know ensuring that we can you know the people taking care of you can take care of themselves is of paramount importance I'd actually just like to quickly share a story about one of my colleagues that I've been working with for some time his name is Alexis Wei Mbengi and he is an LNA one of the resource LNAs I call him one of the hardest working people on the face of the planet I've he constantly has to pick up urgent shifts in order to make ends meet working you know I've seen weeks where he's working almost every single night during during a particular week and I think what my numbers showed earlier is there's often times where LNAs like Alexis are working on their own on a floor meaning that he's responsible for taking care of you know 30 plus patients whereas you know nurses have because of their union contract have you know very set in stone staffing grids that need to be respected so they can take care of their patients appropriately but LNAs and many other job positions that do take care of patients their staffing grids if they have them thrown out the window there's no seriousness with those grids and I think Alexis shared many stories a few weeks ago saying basically that if he's unable to when he's on his own and he's unable to get to a patient who needs to like walk to the bathroom or something along those lines you know they might you know wet themselves because he can't get there in time or he even told us it was very scary it was a night where he was alone on the floor and he told the patient you know to please wait because he has to do all these other things and he couldn't get there in time to bring the patient to the bathroom and they ended up cracking their head open and needed to go to the ICU and that's something that if we had safe staffing with support staff that would be extremely avoidable but these are differences and I think when we say you know when the hospital tries to plead poverty it's like well you know we we can afford it and if anything we can't afford not to stabilize support staffing levels when you think about all the effects that short staffing has over the long term so your proposals are to have those grids and then be enforceable yes and also to have the support staff be a part of the conversation that we've made proposals that there be committees composed of members of the support staff because we're there doing the work we know what it needs to be we're not kidding around we're not looking again to get rich we're just looking to get by and we need some more people doing this job for us to do it well and they their response to date so they haven't they haven't responded to that one yet we've got a proposal forward about that referring to the health and safety of our colleagues in terms of violence that is inflicted upon us by patients and the emergency department is understandably a pretty dangerous place to work we had a colleague Shannon share with us a story of how she you know the violence that has been inflicted by people punched and they asked please that the hospital invest in slash-resistant gear for everyone in their department you know they're very sweet and very precise saying there's nothing slash-proof but could we please have slash-resistant gloves and vests and the hospital came back you know the hospital is you know they really couldn't see fit for doing that it's just too expensive and they weren't sure it could work and a friend from the ed stood up and pointed out that they had been stabbed that very weak while the management was deciding that it wasn't worth it to invest in slash-resistant gear our colleagues are getting sick time the institution should care enough to give you a moment to recover from that they told us that we had misplaced it in our proposal and that they would consider it if it were part of a different proposal but I'm not sure they mean that they came before we gave our wage proposal they gave a wage proposal and it was insulting and infuriating it was extremely low they didn't like it that there were 600 of us in the room who were upset by their proposal and they said that they felt you know menaced or threatened or something like that but we feel pretty under threat ourselves but they did that was also in that moment when their attorney councilman ben told us that he would be rejecting our wage proposal out of hand so they were actually sitting with that and we expect on July 12 the wage does have some differentials in it and does have some urgent pay but really what it does is it is a rising tide and it raises all the boats we want all of our colleagues to be making a living wage and we're not quite there but we're starting everyone at $25 an hour like I said you know those at the top are not having to worry about paying their rent or anything that are on there we're the ones that are right there with everyone has a story of being inpatient in the hospital of needing care and that one receptionist who was so sweet and made sure their insurance was right that's us at the end of the day and we're almost going to close here and ask for some final things on you the principles is that human labor is the key to the creation of wealth and so we challenge the assumed right to derive vast wealth from ownership or position and that means that when you're in those those bodies that you you look like you're taking care of your whole family right and make sure that the littlest and the most vulnerable are taking care of that they're saved first we're almost at the end how can people the community people of good goodwill regardless of political orientation here I'm trying to reach out over the aisle how can they partner with you how can we support you that's a fantastic question so appreciative so on the screen there is a link to us on social media it'll link you to our website there's a petition there that you can sign essentially saying we support you in solidarity and it is these collective voices from inside the hospital from our community that's really going to make these differences we've seen that it works the strength and numbers we are we're here today and we you know plan to keep being visible in the community drive by our honking wave honk at us write letters to the city council but you know show up for us the way we show up for you the way we draw your blood and make sure that there are people on your floor that's what we're asking for okay well every way that I and my my comrades on the council and in the Burlington progressive party can help I know we want to do and I do too so I just want to thank you for taking the time and you got any last word any further last words if not then any buttons guys thank you for having us and thank you for providing this opportunity for us to share our cause because it is a community cause well this is a monthly show and I generally wait to book people depending on these things and so perhaps in July or in August there'll be an issue that you'll want to to have out there and like I said everything that we can do to support you we're all a big family here and solidarity is at the heart of building a decent society and so thank you for standing up not just for yourselves and each other but for all of us thanks good night