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Show Salary Negotiations Between County-Hospital Staff Stalemated Hospital employees, represented rep-resented by C. O. Wiggie. Vera Camberlango and Ruth Marsing, met with County Commissioners Wednesday morning to discuss dis-cuss salary raises and employee em-ployee benefits. The meeting meet-ing followed a staff meeting meet-ing at the hospital Tuesday Tues-day night where the issue was discussed. Tensions between the two groups have grown over ov-er the past week after the Commission met last Friday Fri-day and agreed to giving the hospital employees a raise amounting to 10 cents per hour in benefits and 20 cents per hour in wages, wag-es, then recinded this raise on Monday. T!ii raise was to have amounted amoun-ted to about 10 per cent of the salaries and was to have covered cost of living liv-ing increases over the past two years, since the employees em-ployees did not receive raises last year. ! As the employees met "with the Commission on Wednesday they indicated that since the men were not willing to give them more than a cursory raise which would amount to only ?35 per month, they would not accept less than 13.7 per cent, the amount which the cost of livinf has raised in the past two years. Some discussion followed the announcement by the employees but no decision was reached and the group left the Corn-mission Corn-mission room with tiie statement that they would not be back until the men were ready to talk business. busi-ness. In the Friday meeting, the Commission agreed to raise hospital room rates from i'Sj to $33 for semi-private semi-private room and from i"i to $4) for a private facility. facil-ity. Accord. ng to hospital administrator Kay Hawks, since the institution is nonprofit, non-profit, the raise in room-rates room-rates would be used to cover cov-er the proposed wage increases in-creases for the employees. Hawks said that the increase in-crease is necessary since operating revenues should equal operating expenses. A spokesman for the employees em-ployees stated that although al-though people would be forced to pay more for loom rents to give tno wage increases, hospital employees did not feel that they should be donating their services to support the rest of the county. The spokesman continued that simply because a person worked at the hospital and had not received a raise, he did not receive a discount dis-count at stores. Salaries at Allen Memorial Hospital are not comparable to oth er groups in the community communi-ty doing work on similar skill levels, the spokesman said. Hospital employees also indicated that they felt the hospital had teen misrepresented misrep-resented in the financial picture by County officials. They stated that in the proposed budget for 1971, the hospital was asking for S12.Cu) to pay for indigent i bad debts) patents and for $S.(X0 fir capital outlay. out-lay. This is S20.0:0 out of an approximate S4CO.0C0 budget. The rest of the n: !..- is to come f n -r. operating op-erating revenue. Administrator Adminis-trator Hawks p.:;-. oat that the County U i-bligat-e.i to pick up indigent accounts ac-counts and that trie can:-t;tl can:-t;tl outlay money must, come from tax revenues and not from operating revenues re-venues at the ho-pital according ac-cording to State Law which says that public institutions in-stitutions cannot fund for capital outlay. Following the joint meeting members of the Commission remained in the Commission room to discuss the problem. Final decision of the Commission was to stay with their offer of-fer o: 20 cents per hour increase with no fringe benefits. |