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| Photo: Josh Warburton |
Written by Don Gilman
With negotiations breaking down and a deadline looming, paramedics of Gold Cross Ambulance Service may soon be manning picket lines to protest what they say are poor working conditions and a bad-faith effort by Gold Cross to come to terms. Spencer Hogue, the Teamsters 222 secretary, treasurer and business agent, told The Independent that most of the issues have been resolved, but Gold Cross leadership has changed one key point to scuttle successful negotiations: allowing paramedics to use direct deposit to pay for union dues.
“We’ve gotten close to wrapping up negotiations on two occasions. We acquiesced on our latest issues to get the deal done,” Hogue said. “The company has moved the target. They can’t just change policy without bargaining.”
Mike Moffitt, President of Gold Cross, says the allegations of changing terms are not true.
“We told them from day one that we would not do dues checkoff,” Moffitt said. “We had one item left after a ten-hour negotiation session. Every negotiation session they tried to bring it back. We said we would not do it. If employees want to join a union they can do it themselves. It’s not a burden I want to put on my payroll department. That’s what it boils down to.”
Hogue said that with no meetings scheduled with Gold Cross, it is appearing increasingly likely that a strike will occur.
“We are meeting with employees Friday or Saturday,” Hogue said. “We could get the whole thing wrapped up with a phone call. In this industry, you have to give a ten-day notice. The ten-day notice we sent [Gold Cross] expires at 3 p.m. Saturday. We are meeting [with employees] at 2 p.m.”
Moffitt feels the strike is virtually assured.
“They told me they were going to strike,” he said. “They filed the proper notice with 3:00 on Saturday as the deadline. There were three employees involved in our negotiation session, and they indicated they were going to strike on Saturday.”
Paramedic Adam Phillips, who was one of three employees involved in the negotiations, denies that Moffitt was told a strike was going to occur.
“We didn’t come right out and say ‘strike.’ We sent [the notice] last Wednesday. We had negotiations on Friday and pretty much closed up the deal and that one issue popped up,” Phillips said. “There are three things we can do: picketing when we are off the clock, passing handbills around the city and then of course, there’s stop-work. I, for one, am not for that, but if it comes to that, we absolutely will. We live here. This is our city. Mike [Moffitt] doesn’t understand the passion we have for our jobs. We don’t want to leave our city open to vulnerability.”
Both Phillips and Hogue feel that the union has conceded on many points and that Gold Cross could easily allow them to do direct deposit.
“We brought every issue to the table they had and conceded to it,” Phillips said. “The last 11 items were a package deal: 401k, pay scale and insurance. We couldn’t get anything done. The big reason why is we asked if we could have our money for [union] dues to be held out for a direct deposit. Mike said ‘absolutely not.’”
Hogue worries that if the strike happens, Gold Cross will not have the manpower to effectively run the ambulance service.
“Their staffing is so poor, they will put other communities at risk,” he said. “In Salt Lake, they are incredibly shorthanded. They have a lot of part-time employees. I don’t know if they can do it. We will see. They have a lot of problems covering shifts.”
Moffitt says that emergency services will continue unabated.
“We have contingency plans in place. We have enough trucks on line. There won’t be a drop in service,” Moffitt said. “We are in the emergency services; it’s what we do. We will be prepared. We will be ready.”
