Members of Local 12 held informational picketing outside HealthPartners’ headquarters in Bloomington last November.
For the second time since negotiations began last September, members of Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) Local 12 have warned HealthPartners that they intend to strike unless the two sides make meaningful progress toward a new contract.
The union, which represents about 1,000 workers across the Twin Cities, is planning a 10-day strike, beginning May 5.
Union leaders said picketing would touch all 31 HealthPartners facilities, including its headquarters in Bloomington and local clinics, where union members staff the check-in desks and work in back-office positions like scheduling, claims and accounting. The union was arranging a “click-it line” for members in telework positions.
Local 12’s bargaining team scrapped plans for a three-day strike in March after HealthPartners negotiators improved their economic proposal. But progress has stalled since then, representative Cesar Montufar said during a press conference April 18.
HealthPartners’ lowest-paid workers, he said, “are fed up, and they’re ready to go.”
OPEIU’s bargaining team has pushed hard for wage increases to keep up with inflation, pointing to a Local 12 analysis that estimates members have lost $3.50 per hour in buying power since their last contract took effect three years ago.
HealthPartners’ initial offer of 0.25% annual raises sparked outrage across the bargaining unit. The offer has since increased to 4%.
But bargaining team members said that pay increases given to executives like CEO Andrea Walsh, whose compensation grew from $1.4 million in 2017 to $3.8 million in 2023, prove the not-for-profit organization can do better.
“These executives are drawing the line for our members at 4%,” Montufar said. “That’s 4% for someone trying to survive on $30,000 a year, but $400,000 raises for the executives? That is the definition of corporate greed.”
Members of Local 12’s bargaining team are also demanding accountability for what they described as an increasingly hostile work environment.
At the press conference, current workers and union representatives alleged that HealthPartners has retaliated against union activists, used aggressive discipline to push veteran employees into lower-paying positions and established a “culture of fear” under Walsh’s leadership.
A 26-year veteran of HealthPartners, Janell Kelly said she recently took a “huge pay cut” to transfer into the dental clinic. The move came after a supervisor in her previous department, during a one-on-one meeting, chided Kelly because she “wasn’t smiling anymore” after the unexpected death of her son.
“My supervisor was making my life miserable,” Kelly said. “I knew that job well and was confident in doing it, I just couldn’t take the way I was treated.”
In the dental clinic, Kelly has encountered management issues of a different kind.
“When my supervisor found out I was on the bargaining team, she began a campaign to fire me, including fabricating evidence and secretly making changes to my timecard in an attempt to steal wages,” Kelly said. “Their behavior is unacceptable.”
Kelly isn’t the only HealthPartners worker to chafe at a changing attitude among management. Union representative Kelsie Morgan described a trend of “more punitive discipline than legitimate corrective action” doled out to members she represents over the last decade.
HealthPartners fired one probationary employee because she “smelled like cigarettes and perfume and didn’t adhere to a break schedule,” Morgan said. But when she followed up with the worker, Morgan heard a much different story: she was in the middle of trying to leave an abusive relationship.
“Work was her safe space,” Morgan said. “The day she was not adhering to her break schedule was the day she was working to get on the phone with her lawyer and find help with her situation.”
Paula Moyer, a union steward, recalled attending disciplinary meetings with a co-worker who was awaiting surgery for a congenital spine condition. Rather than offering compassion and support, Moyer said, her manager wrote the worker up for missing the window to report excused absences by mere minutes.
“You think most people would kind of want to help, you know?” Moyer said. “Maybe bring over a hot dish. But no, not this supervisor.”
– Michael Moore, Union Advocate editor
Union Advocate 