Unit 15 Bargaining Update for Thursday, July 25, 2019
Unit 15 Fights to Improve Work/Life Balance with Stronger Overtime Language

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Our Unit 15 bargaining team returned to negotiations with the state today in an effort to ensure that the state’s custodians, food service workers, cooks, laundry workers and security guards can enjoy a better work/life balance through more carefully defined and improved overtime distribution provisions for additional work that’s either mandated or voluntary.

“We’re fighting for our member’s rights with clarifying language, making a single overtime list available, and uniform application of that language regardless of your job or where you work,” said Garth Underwood, vice chair of Unit 15’s bargaining team.

Our Unit 15 employees are often mandated to work overtime with little notice and no regard for where that overtime falls in relation to their normal schedule. This includes back-to-back double shifts, shifts beyond a five-day workweek, and in at least one instance, a CalVet worker being called in to work in the middle of a week-long vacation.

Today, Unit 15 presented proposals that would:

  • Expand the definition of overtime distribution rules to affect all Unit 15 employees.
  • Limit the ability of supervisors to mandate overtime shifts with regard and respect to employee’s scheduled time off.
  • Add language defining a “shift” to be any overtime more than two hours in length.
  • Improve transparency of how voluntary overtime shifts are offered to Unit 15 employees by having only one publicly available list per facility.

In addition, our team “rolled over” two existing contract articles, including a hard-fought win in 2016 that improved working conditions for our Unit 15 workers through climate control.

Having presented a full slate of proposals to state negotiators over the last month, our Unit 15 team is looking forward to responses from the state. Unit 15 is scheduled to return to the bargaining table on Monday, July 29, 2019.