The nurses union and management at Central Peninsula General Hospital reached a tentative agreement Friday evening on a new three-year contract for nurses.
Although a verbal consensus was reached, both sides say the language needs to be worked out so it reflects both sides' intended meanings on paper.
"When you talk about things verbally, and until you see it in the actual language, we still need to work at it," said Dianne O'Connell, the labor program director for the Alaska Nurses Association, the organization representing the 90 full- and part-time CPGH nurses. "There are some places where we have to see it in writing and they have to see it in writing."
Hospital human resources director Debbie Honer said she would not release details of the deal until it was finalized, but she said there were some areas that would remain the same in the new contract while some of the more seriously contested issues were addressed.
"Certainly the areas of pay structures was addressed," she said. "But for several areas of the contract, we need to adopt the current language of the contract. There are a lot of noneconomic parts that will remain the same."
The nurses bargaining team and hospital management representatives sat down Thursday and Friday with a federal mediator to negotiate a new contract to replace the 3 1/2-year deal that expired Oct. 31. Each side and the mediator took extensive notes of the exchanges agreed upon in the two-day meeting.
The two sides will reconvene Dec. 4 without the mediator to hammer the details of that documentation into written contract language and determine if that language translates into one cohesive meaning.
"If the understandings reached (Friday) remain the same, we believe we have a contract offer we can recommend to our members for ratification," O'Connell said in a memo distributed to the CPGH nurses Saturday afternoon.
Once a final draft of the contract is agreed upon and signed, both negotiating teams will return to their respective organizations -- the hospital board of directors and the nurses -- for ratification. O'Connell's memo stated a voting date will not be set until after the tentative agreement is signed.
Because nurses aren't allowed to go to arbitration following failed mediation, this effort represented a final step before what may have led to a nurses' strike. Honer said she felt the mediation went smoothly, with the negotiating not being completely relegated to trading deals back and forth from separate rooms through the mediator.
"I thought it went very well," she said. "We were able to meet jointly for much of the two days and were able to talk candidly and come to verbal consensus."
O'Connell said the urgency of the final opportunity to find common ground made the decision-making a lot more serious. She said both sides were able to give some ground to avoid a strike, and she said she felt the nurses would accept the agreement.
"I think both sides knew that our choices were becoming very limited, and we better get an agreement," she said. "I think we're going to have to explain it to them. It's obviously not everything that they wanted, but we can show them that this is a good agreement."
