On December 18, 2013, SEIU Local 99 members working at MAOF ratified their Tentative Agreement, the first step to winning OUR NEW CONTRACT! The Tentative Agreement will be presented to the MAOF Board of Directors for their approval during their upcoming February meeting.
Many thanks to our Bargaining Team members who kept united and strong over many months of difficult negotiations. They bargained hard and we won some great improvements!
Here are some hightlights:
Article IX—Hours and Overtime
We adopted language that reflects State and Federal laws. This means we now have very clear descriptions of full-time and part-time positions and what kinds of breaks and overtime rules apply.
Article X—Seniority
We made huge progress in this area. Our total years of service with MAOF, regardless of our position, will now be the measure of our seniority. This encourages employees to establish long histories with the families we serve and to continue gaining experience that inspires our work. The strengthening of this language in turn led to improvements in Article XII—Layoff and Recall and Article XV—Transfers, which now follow this definition of seniority.
Article XIII—Evaluation Procedure
We won new language that protects us from being taken by surprise during our annual performance evaluations. Supervisors must now speak with us as soon as they have any concerns about our job performance. This way, we are given an opportunity to improve our performance prior to our annual evaluation. Supervisors may not wait until our evaluation to bring up concerns. In other words, there can’t be any surprises during our evaluation.
Article XIV—Discipline and Discharge
We negotiated the establishment of a very clear process for progressive discipline. In other words, there are clear steps for supervisors to follow if they have concerns about our job performance.
Article XVII—Personal Time Off
Pending program budgets, MAOF part time employees will now able to accrue vacation days, sick time, and holiday pay.
Article XIX—Safety Conditions
Our new contract language establishes a safety committee of members and management to ensure safe working conditions.
Article XXI—Wages and Salaries
Pending program budgets, we established two additional step increases to our current three steps. This means employees will be able to get increases when there are no COLA or Quality Improvement funds.
We won improved language in every article that was opened.
We will post a full version of the contract once available. Stay tuned!
