What Wages Should We Propose?
I think the following wages would be an entirely reasonable ask:
MLS: $45 - $65/hr MLT: $36 - $56/hr Lab Assistant/Phlebotomist: $25 - $35/hr
But why those numbers? Where did those numbers come from?
What is a Fair Wage, Anyway?
Determining the value our work creates is difficult. We know the lab is one of the most profitable departments in a hospital. (LabCorp reputedly paid $100M for LLS, and they didn't do that because LLS loses money!) Nearly all patients get lab testing, and many inpatients are extensively tested (multiple collections per day, multiple tests per collection). Modern medicine is highly dependent on lab testing to guide diagnosis and treatment; without the lab, the ED is half blind, surgeries are too dangerous to attempt, many drug treatments can't be safely monitored, maternal and infant mortality shoots up, and so on.
So we know our work is valuable - but how valuable? If our work is necessary for surgery, what should our cut of every surgery bill be? How much is a CBC actually worth? Healthcare isn't an open market where doctors can charge whatever they like and so can we, so we have no idea what doctors would pay us for lab testing. We don't even have access to LabCorp's books to see how much revenue we generate or what our total costs are. And we can't trust LabCorp to tell us the truth about how much we're worth!
If we can't find the value of our labor's product directly, we can at least look at what similar workers get paid, to see what the market will bear for the kind of work we do. We can also look at the cost of housing (most people's biggest single living expense) in the Portland area, and suggest a standard of living lab workers might find satisfactory.
Peer Comparisons
Here's what the main lab roles earn at some local employers, taken from wage scales where available and job ads or internet searches otherwise.
OHSU MLS $37.61 - $51.63 MLT (based on Google search results) $29.00 - $44.00 Lab Assistant/Phlebotomist $22.30 - $30.14 VA MLS $33.25 - $52.31 MLT $21.95 - $31.80 Kaiser MLS $45.67 - $53.05 MLT $30.13 - $39.74 Lab Assistant/Phlebotomist $27.12 - $32.64 Legacy (in 2023) MLS $39.85 - $56.99 MLT (based on Indeed.com, etc) $28.00 - $37.00 LA/Phleb (based on Indeed.com, etc) $21.00 - $25.00
Notes on these figures:
Some local employers (including LabCorp) recognize an additional lab role, a technical lab assistant who also performs setups, instrument loading, and waived testing. I haven't attempted to break this role out as not all labs have them, but they generally make $4-$5 more than regular lab assistants.
It seems like the VA uses MLTs as technical lab assistants and phlebotomists, which would explain their low wage there (though not why any MLT would choose to work there).
AFSCME recently negotiated a $25 minimum wage with OHSU, meaning that all their lab assistants and phlebotomists will start at a minimum of $25/hour. Their contract is published on OHSU's intranet but not the public internet (as far as I can tell), so I don't know what their new wage range is going to be. I also couldn't find an official wage range for OHSU MLTs. A decade ago they had a policy of promoting MLTs to MLS pay after a certain period of service, but I don't know if this policy is still in force.
Kaiser and OFNHP recently agreed to a 21% increase in MLS pay over the next four(?) years as well as higher differentials, but the new contract isn't published yet.
Compared to some of these numbers, our bargaining team's proposals may seem to be only a little on the low side... but lab workers across the country (except in California) have been complaining for years that lab workers are underpaid compared to their peers. So let's look at some other medical roles with similar work and qualifications, to see what the market offers for their labor. These ranges reflect pay across Providence, Legacy, OHSU, and Kaiser as of late 2025:
Registered Nurse: $47.19 - $92.02/hr Imaging (MRI or X-Ray) Tech: $40.66 - $69.35/hr Respiratory Tech: $35.29 - $58.14/hr Surgical Tech: $31.66 - $48.51/hr CNA: $20.19 - $30.26/hr
Note that none of these roles require more than an Associate's degree and certification, meaning that their qualifications are similar to an MLT and lesser than an MLS. (Many RNs do have Bachelor's degrees, but they're not required to; these are also called BSNs and typically end up in high acuity, highly-technical, or leadership positions which prefer them. Supposedly BSNs account for higher rates in the nursing pay range, but I wasn't able to find any support for this in job listings or union contracts.) CNAs don't need degrees at all, only several weeks in a training program and successful completion of a state certification exam, which makes them similar to phlebotomists in Washington who are required to have formal training and licensure.
Lab assistants and phlebotomists are paid similarly to CNAs, but degreed lab workers are paid significantly less than their hospital-based peers. Several explanations have been suggested for this: lab work is inherently easy, lab work doesn't require patient contact, lab workers are paid less because they're unknown to the public, and even that lab workers are underpaid because their job titles don't sound impressive enough! In my opinion, none of these are convincing reasons why we should be paid so much less.
Our work is often highly technical, requiring experience, medical education, and independent judgement (e.g. blood banking, microorganism ID, and cell microscopy). We follow detailed procedures in order to maintain accuracy and scientific reproducibility and protect our employers from liability. Doctors rely on our work to provide the data they need to make diagnoses and monitor treatment. And while it's true that we work directly with patients and many of us don't want to, the people who work in patient-facing positions typically choose those careers because they enjoy working with patients; they wouldn't want to work in a noisy, windowless, factory-like basement following a lot of strict procedures! The idea that our jobs pay less because they're easier, more pleasant, or less important is absurd.
In a recent email exchange, former phlebotomist Shandi Owens told me about the need for better pay:
"Phlebotomists work directly with blood, a recognized biohazard, and face daily risks including needlestick injuries and exposure to bloodborne pathogens. The accuracy of laboratory results-and ultimately patient outcomes-begins with the phlebotomist. Without properly collected specimens, diagnoses are delayed or compromised. This is not entry-level work; it requires training, precision, and constant vigilance.
It is deeply concerning that fast-casual restaurants are offering starting wages comparable to or higher than those of phlebotomists. When a healthcare professional responsible for patient safety, infection control, and diagnostic accuracy earns the same-or less-than a non-medical position, it signals a serious imbalance in how essential roles are valued.
At $20 an hour, many phlebotomists simply cannot afford to survive, let alone thrive. This wage disparity directly contributes to the ongoing shortage in the field. If compensation does not increase to a realistic range-at minimum $25-$30 an hour-phlebotomy will continue to lose skilled workers, and these responsibilities will increasingly fall to already overextended nursing staff."
Housing Costs
There's an old rule that states that housing should cost no more than 30% of your gross income... but that rule isn't perfect.
The 30% rule originated in federal public housing regulations from 1969, which actually stated that rent should be no more than 25% of a tenant's income, until it was increased to 30% in the 80s due to cost-cutting. Today, mortgage lenders and landlords still use 30% (or a similar number) to determine whether a prospective homeowner or tenant will be able to make their monthly payments, and some agencies use it to determine whether someone is financially burdened by their housing.
This rule is widely considered outdated today. The cost of housing relative to the dollar has increased, particularly in high cost of living areas (and while Portland is still cheaper than many large cities, it's considered a high cost of living area). People are burdened with more educational, consumer, and medical debt than they were decades ago, and changes to employer-funded retirement benefits and Social Security mean that people are having to save more of their income for retirement.
What would a better rule be? Some suggest that 30% of net income is more realistic, but that varies according to debt burden, voluntary retirement savings, healthcare costs (treatment or insurance), and so on. Most people recommend that individuals create a detailed budget for themselves when determining how much they can afford to spend on housing or anything else rather than relying on any broad rule, but this good advice is useless for our purpose. I'll be looking at both gross and after-tax incomes.
Lastly, keep in mind that the 30% rule is not an "average" or "safe" housing expense; it's a maximum, the point at which the cost of your housing is so high that you risk financial instability (which leads to more debt, untreated health problems, and the inability to save for emergencies or retirement). So when I say you need $X/hour to afford a particular kind of housing, remember that people should really make more than that to survive safely and comfortably.
The average asking price of a starter home in the Portland area is about $400k. This depends on exactly what you consider a "starter home", of course, but multiple mortgage and realty websites, as well as news articles talking about housing costs in Portland, orbit around this figure. First time home buyers typically put 9% down. For a 30 year loan at 6%, that house is going to cost you about $2000 - $3000 per month, depending on which mortgage calculator you consult (this includes taxes, insurance, PMI, and normal maintenance, but not renovation, HOA fees, etc). Let's just call it $2500/month. That's $30k/year, which is 30% of $100k ($50/hr for a 40 hour/week job); to get $100k after taxes you'd need to gross about $150k ($75/hr).
In the 80s, the average first-time home buyer was in their late 20s. (Today, the average first-time home buyer is in their late 30s... in other words, we're becoming poorer. I see no reason to accept becoming poorer, so I'll use the older standard.) To be able to afford a house in your late 20s, assuming you went to college within a couple years of graduating high school and got your degree in your mid 20s, you'd need to be making house wages above about five years into your career. If we imagine a ten year wage scale, that $50 or $75 per hour should be in the middle of it.
Of course, there are lots of ways to fiddle with these numbers to make them look better or worse. You could look for the tiniest, cheapest, most run down shack you can find, in the worst location, with an asking price well under $400k. You could buy later in life when you have a larger down payment saved - or maybe you have a nice nest egg from working hard as a teen, having a generous family, etc, so you can afford a house earlier in life. Again, these are averages.
The average cost of a one bedroom apartment in the Portland metro is $1500/month. That's $18k/year, or 30% of $60k ($30/hr). To get $60k after taxes, you'd need to gross about $82k ($41/hr). For a studio, you're looking at about $1300/month, or $15,600/year. That's 30% of $52k ($26/hr). To get $52k after taxes, you'd need to gross about $70k ($35/hr).
Want to suck it up and get a roommate? If you're lucky, you have a partner and you only need one bedroom - but that's not the case for a lot of people. A two bedroom apartment costs about $1900/month in the Portland metro. That's $22,800/year, which is 30% of $76k. Going halfsies, that's $38k ($19/hr) for each tenant, but to have that left after taxes you'd each need to gross about $50k ($25/hr).
There aren't as many numbers to fudge when you're renting. You can try to find a better deal on an apartment. You can live the college dream to cut expenses: Ikea, ramen, thrift stores, dumpster diving, no retirement or emergency savings...
So let's talk about lab wages again. I believe that lab workers should be able to live, and ideally own homes, in the communities they serve. This is an arbitrary standard. I could just as easily say "lab workers deserve to be starving and homeless", but as a worker I wouldn't call that satisfactory and you probably wouldn't either.
The only common lab role that can really afford a house at local rates (never mind the pittance LabCorp would like to pay us!) right now is the MLS - and to get the barely-adequate $50/hour I talked about above they'll have to be several years into their career, if they can get there at all. To save a big down payment to reduce the monthly mortgage payment, they're going to have to wait even longer and give up saving for something else (like, I dunno, retirement). I know a number of MLSs who are "house poor"; they own a home, but nearly all of their wealth is tied up in it, and nearly all of their income after taxes and other living expenses goes toward it. The real trick is to have a working partner (and ideally, no kids), but again, needing two people to afford to buy a home is a level of poverty I don't think we should accept. I'd like to see an MLS making more than $50/hr fairly early in their career. I recommended a $45-$65 range above.
An MLT ought to at least be able to afford their own apartment; at no point should an adult full-time healthcare worker with a science degree need roommates just to survive. On the extreme low end, $26 gets you that studio (and Ikea, ramen, etc) but that kind of lifestyle is ridiculous for an adult worker with a science degree, national certification, and a critical role in patient care. Their starting wage ought to be around $35/hour, similar to the respiratory techs. I recommended a $36-$56/hr range above.
The problem is that lab assistants and phlebotomists ought to make at least that much, too. They're also adult workers with an important role in patient care, and even if they don't have degrees, they still need to make enough to live. I recommended $25-$35/hour above, which starts them at OHSU's new minimum wage and nearer to Kaiser's lab assistants and phlebotomists. If LabCorp won't even pay them $25, they don't deserve to have employees or a running lab.
Aren't Those Wages Too High, Though?
No, not at all!
Again: every adult, full-time healthcare worker ought to be able to comfortably afford their own place. That would mean starting lab assistants and phlebotomists closer to $35/hour. We could pay MLTs like imaging techs, who have similar educational and certification requirements: $45 - $65/hr. And MLSs with their Bachelor's degrees should be getting the upper end of nurse pay, around $60 - $90/hr.
That's where our pay should actually be. The only reason I'm not recommending these wages at the top of this article is too many people would think I was crazy... but if that sounds crazy, it's only because we've been underpaid for so long that some of us don't know what our work is actually worth.
So if this is what I think we should be making, why am I recommending less? The wage ranges I recommended at the top of this article are on par with what the best-paid lab workers in Portland are earning. They're "reasonable". Getting lab worker pay on par with hospital worker pay, or getting our lowest-paid workers well above the minimum wage, is going to take more than one baby union trying to squeeze pennies out of the cheapest lab employer in Portland. It would be a huge region-wide push, and we'd need support from Kaiser, OHSU, Providence, and other hospital techs, as well as nurses and doctors, community leaders, and elected officials.
Beware of Tiers
One trick employers use to convince workers to accept bad deals is splitting the workers into tiers - typically one for current or senior workers, who get the best pay and benefits, and one for newer hires, who get a totally different (worse) wage scale, worse raises, worse benefits package, etc. Th idea is to get the senior workers to sell out the new workers (or even people who haven't been hired yet) so that they can get a better deal.
This harms unions in a couple of ways: first, by creating a divide between senior and new workers, tiers sabotage solidarity and unit cohesion. New workers feel as though they've been screwed over (because they have) and resent the senior workers who said yes to a bad deal because it benefited them. Next time the union goes to fight for a contract, it may find that the newer workers aren't interested. Also, as senior workers quit, retire, or get fired over time, fewer and fewer people get the good deal, and the growing second-tier workforce will have to fight for a good contract all over again.
The reason I mention this is that what we have now is like a tier system. The more senior LabCorp workers who came over from Legacy and Providence still get their original wages and insurance stipends, while new hires are stuck with LabCorp's much worse wages and no stipends. OFNHP has tried to frame the proposal on the table as being a huge windfall for new hires as they'd get substantial raises - but former Legacy and Providence workers are being offered nothing but tepid annual raises that don't engage them, while the low wage scale maintains the tier situation by making it so that new hires will never be able to make as much as the senior workers already do.
My proposals solve the tier problem by raising the top of the wage scale above what senior workers are currently paid, ensuring that new hires can work their way up to getting the same wages while giving senior workers more incentive to fight for the contract.
But LabCorp Doesn't Want To Pay That Much...
Groceries have gotten way more expensive over the past several years. When I go to the store, do you think I want to pay 2026 prices for food? Hell no. Do I pay them anyway? Yes. Why? Because if I don't I go hungry.
Right now LabCorp has no reason to give us anything. Do you realize this? No matter how badly the new hires are paid, no matter how lousy our benefits are, no matter whether they waste our bargaining team's time and ditch bargaining meetings - we keep coming in day after day after day, doing our jobs, giving them exactly what they want, making more profit for them.
As individuals, there's nothing we can do about that. If you told them "pay better or I'll leave", they'd just wish you luck. (Or maybe they'd string you along with empty promises, delays, and excuses, as they've done with a few of my coworkers.) It's not going to hurt their profits if one person leaves - in fact, that's one less worker to pay. But by walking out together as a group, we can shut off the profit pipeline and have Legacy (and Providence?) pounding on their door to get the lab services they contracted for.
LabCorp doesn't have to like our price. They just have to pay it, or else they go hungry.
Of course, if we asked for a million dollars an hour we'd never get it. And they'll do whatever they can to convince us that they'll never budge, that they literally can't afford to go up, that we're being unreasonable or greedy, etc - all because they don't want to pay more. But there's a number higher than what they're offering now that they'd be willing to go to in order to prevent or end a strike. We don't know what that number is, but with a strike or a credible strike threat we should be able to get a lot closer to it. You'd be amazed how reasonable employers can get when they stop making money.
Anyway, we shouldn't be trying to make them happy. We should be telling them what we want to charge them to run their lab. It's their job to try to bargain us down or offer us a compromise that they think we'll settle for. Don't do it for them.
Wages Aren't Everything
I know a lot of us are concerned about the cost and coverage of our health insurance. Some of us want a higher cap on banked PTO. Some of us want better retirement benefits or better differentials or other things. I'm focusing just on wages here for a couple reasons.
First, it's easier to talk about wages than some of those other benefits. What amount of insurance coverage, at what price, is "fair"? How much PTO should we be entitled to save up? We can compare our current benefits to the ones we got with Legacy or Providence, or to what other employers offer, but it's much harder to make an argument for what the "right" amount is. Some employers are more generous with benefits than others and there's not a lot of rhyme or reason to it. Wages are subject to more price discovery than benefits, and wage comparisons are easy and useful.
Second, a lot of the benefits we want are interchangeable with wages. For example, last year our bargaining team proposed that LabCorp offer every worker a $2000 annual stipend to cover the cost of their lousy insurance, since they won't let us have our own. (They refused, of course.) But for a full-time worker, $2000/year is just $1/hour before taxes. We could propose giving up $1/hour to get that $2000 stipend - or, alternately, we could demand higher pay, and cover the cost ourselves. Same for retirement benefits: we can give up pay to get more, or just keep the pay and buy our own retirement.
The number LabCorp actually cares about is total compensation - the cost of all pay and benefits for all of its workers. Right now, we cost about $30M/year. They don't care very much how we slice that pie as long as it doesn't get any bigger. We want it bigger, and I think the clearest and most relatable way to talk about how much bigger we want it to be is by talking about wages. We can always trade one thing for another, but we need to get in the right range first.
What Do You Think?
These numbers are only my suggestions. Do you agree? Disagree? What do you think we should be paid, or how much are you willing to fight for? Talk to your coworkers about it!