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The union representing 700 food service workers at the Mayo Clinic has offered a second proposal to address the company’s plan to contract out its food service operations. It also called on the health care giant to publicly disclose details of its plan.
Less than a week after hundreds of workers and supporters picketed outside St Marys Hospital in Rochester, Mayo and members of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota met for a second negotiation session around the hospital’s desire to outsource its food service to Morrison Healthcare, a multinational corporation based in Atlanta.
“At the session, Mayo rejected the union’s compromise plan from the first session and offered no tangible plan to solve the situation,” SEIU said in a statement released Tuesday. In response, the union made another offer that it said could solve the issue.
Because the hospital said that they want to improve food service scores, the union proposed an 18-month window during which the hospital publicly collects the scores of food service workers and compares them with scores from hospitals in other states where the workers are sub-contracted.
“The union believes that in that time, the scores would prove that the food service workers employed by Mayo, if fully staffed and supported, would score higher than sub-contracted employees at other facilities around the country,” SEIU said. “In addition, because so many workers have moved out of the department because of the impending sub-contracting, the union proposed a bonus for food service workers who are currently having to work seven or eight days in a row.”
On Monday, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota President Jamie Gulley wrote in the Rochester Post-Bulletin about how Mayo’s plan could hurt not only the workers and their families, but could also increase prices on seniors and taxpayers. Read the commentary here.
“Rochester deserves to know what this will mean for the community, and we will continue to use all avenues at our disposal to try to get Mayo to publicly release the details around this deal so all of us, not just Mayo executives, understand what the full impact will be,” said Gulley. “We firmly believe they need to reconsider the decision, but also that Mayo owes the workers and the community the respect of saying who made the decision, why the decision was made, and how and what impact it will have on both workers and the seniors who could see higher Medicare costs if they go through with this controversial plan.”