Workers and supporters picket outside Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland on Friday, Jan. 10.

Health workers at Providence women’s clinics in the Portland area reached a tentative contract agreement with the health system, the first of the several striking bargaining units to make a deal that could return them to work.

The deal does not cover nearly 5,000 striking nurses at Providence Health & Services’ eight hospitals in Oregon, nor 70 striking hospitalist physicians who work at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center. Some 380 nurses at Providence Medford Medical Center are part of the statewide strike, the largest in Oregon history.

The 81 women’s clinic workers will need to ratify the agreement. The Oregon Nurses Association, the labor union that represents them, said a vote would begin Monday and conclude by 7 p.m. Tuesday.

The proposed contract would be the first for both the nurses and advanced practitioners at the women’s clinics, who voted to unionize in 2023.

The union said the nurses’ agreement includes a new wage scale that would result in between 4% and 20% pay increases for most, raises in the contract’s second year and a bonus upon ratification of the contract.

For physicians and other advanced practitioners the agreement includes 7.5% to 15% pay increases and “industry-leading protections for physician time,” the union said.

The Providence Women’s Clinic operates at six locations in the Portland area. All but two have been closed since the strike began Jan. 10.

Negotiators for Providence and the health worker unions — the Oregon Nurses Association and the Pacific Northwest Hospital Medicine Association, which represents the striking St. Vincent doctors — began meeting for marathon face-to-face mediation sessions on Wednesday at the insistence of Gov. Tina Kotek.

Those meetings marked the first direct talks since the strike began. Before then, bargaining teams had been exchanging written contract proposals.

Kotek met with leaders of the hospital system and the unions on Tuesday and urged them to strike a deal to resolve the strike by the end of the week, union officials said.

That didn’t happen, but the intervention did mark an apparent shift as both Providence and its workers’ unions turned their attention to the talks. Federal mediators were brought in to facilitate round-the-clock negotiations.