Unions

Collective Bargaining

The union and the employer come together for a series of meetings to reach an agreement on a union contract.

During these meetings, the union can ask for the things it promised you, but can also ask for things the union wants and it may be things that you might not even care about.

Similarly, the union can trade away things that you do care about to get what they want during negotiations even though they may have promised certain things during the organizing drive.1

The Risks of Bargaining

  • No time limits
  • No Guarantees
  • Everything is on the table
  • Loss of flexibility

Negotiating a first collective bargaining agreement is often a lengthy process. Reaching an agreement typically requires multiple bargaining sessions, proposals, counterproposals, and discussions between the parties. As a result, negotiations can extend over many months and, in some cases, longer. In fact, according to a Bloomberg Law Analysis of first contracts, the average time to negotiate a first contract is 528 days in healthcare

Bloomberg Law Analysis of first contracts
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Currently it takes a newly unionized bargaining unit about 461 days on average to ratify a first contract, according to Bloomberg Law data compiled from 553 first contracts from 2005 to 2025.”

Parker Purifoy & George Weykamp

Punching In: Democrats Want Another Swing at Overtime Expansion, Bloomberg L. News (May 26, 2026).

Management Rights

 In a typical union contract, you’ll see language that says the company has the right to: 

  • Allocate its resources, manage its facilities, and direct the workforce 
  • Hire, promote, transfer, demote, and/or lay off team members 
  • Sub-contract or contract out work 
  • Establish and modify policies, rules and regulations governing safety, performance, procedures, and conduct 

Basically, the organization still gets to run the operations.  

There are no quick fixes and when it’s all over, negotiations are a give and take; there will be trade-offs for both sides.  

There are no guarantees in bargaining. Union promises are not contract terms. The St. Vincent hospitalists are a clear example: after more than a year of bargaining and an over 40-day strike, they ultimately received the same compensation as their peers at PPMC.  

1 Shopping Kart Food Market, Inc. , 228 N.L.R.B. 1311 (1977) (noting Unions can “issue misleading campaign propaganda” because the NLRB does not think employees are “naïve” enough to believe all that they are told during a union campaign.)