Contract Enforcement: We’re Fighting Every Day to Protect our Hard-Earned Rights

Our contract is a comprehensive document that protects our wages, benefits, and working conditions, and also includes hundreds of articles that govern how we do our work, schedule our leaves, and interact with our supervisors.

When we stand up and stand together against violations of those rules, we receive the full benefit of the contract we all worked so hard to win.

Our 100,000 represented employees are further protected by our Job Stewards, who are trained in our contract rights and how to defend them, as well as our Union Resource Center (URC), which provides additional support in working with management to solve workplace issues and contract violations.

In some cases, the Local 1000 legal department steps in to represent wronged employees at the State Personnel Board, often the final arbiter in disputes between rank-and-file workers and state management.

When one of our registered nurses was served a Notice of Adverse Action (NOAA) that included a 5% salary reduction for 12 months, our member and our Union fought back.

The Department of State Hospitals employee was accused of sleeping on the job, leaving patients unsupervised, and failing to account for a patient during rounds.

The member had made an error during rounds in which she documented that a patient was sleeping when that patient had actually been discharged hours earlier. Local 1000 proved that the records hadn’t been updated to show that the patient had been discharged, that a new patient had been admitted and filled the bed of the discharged patient, and that the supervising RN made the same documentation error without receiving any discipline.

The hearing judge found that the testimony of our member and her coworker was more credible than their supervisor’s testimony, that our member was not asleep, and that no patients were out of their beds. And most importantly, the salary reduction of 5% for 12 months was revoked.

To read the State Personnel Board decision, click here.

If you feel your rights are being violated, contact the Union Steward in your workplace or call the SEIU Local 1000 Member Resource Center at 866.471.SEIU (7348).

And don’t forget, if you’re looking for information about your contract, including sick leave, vacation accrual, or how to take advantage of an upward mobility program in your department, the answers are just a click away at contract.seiu1000.org