A strike has been avoided at Berkshire County’s largest mental health and substance abuse treatment center.
The last minute deal between the Brien Center in Pittsfield, and its workers kept 350 front line clinicians and others on the job. The tentative contract includes wage increases and reduced health insurance costs and wraps up months of tense negotiations. The Brien Center treats about 10-thousand people a year, and staff say they are seeing a substantial increase in heroin addicts coming for treatment . Raya Kirby is a coordinator in Brein’s intensive care unit.
“We want to be able to provide the best quality services for the families we serve,” Kirby says. “In order to do that, we really needed to make the agency a place where people want to stay and a place that good people want to work.”
Kirby says the agreement should help solve the problem of employee turnover, which sometimes disrupted client care. Christine Macbeth is Brien’s CEO. She says the new deal will help both employees and the people they treat.
“The better they feel about how they’re being treated by the employer, and in this case, that’s the Brien Center, ultimately, it’s the people of Berkshire County that are going to benefit”, Macbeth says.