A large number of us really don’t get too involved with politics, and feel that we are doing our part simply by voting in each election. The practice of just sitting around, watching the price of everything rise at an accelerated pace while our pay seems to be stagnate, and the possibility of whatever else might happen while doing nothing proactive must change.
Most of us sit around, whether at work or home, and don’t really get involved until the situation affects us or our loved ones. If this type of behavior continues, by the time we feel that we need to do something it may be too late. We have to become proactive rather than reactive.
For the past several years President Burrus has continuously reminded us how important it is to give to COPA so that we can get the attention and support of our political representatives who are willing to fight for our causes. And even though we hear and read his message over and over again, a majority of this Locals’ members completely ignore it.
There are people out there that want to disassemble the postal service as we know it, and by not donating to COPA we are letting them do it. We don’t donate money, we don’t contact our representatives when asked, and we don’t show up for demonstrations to show our displeasure with the decisions that are being made, or with the individuals who are supporting these decisions.
We are not doing it locally, in Harrisburg or in Washington D.C. The bottom line is we need to get off of our butts and start fighting for the welfare of our postal and economic life.
We can start off by reaching into our pockets and making a donation to COPA. Last month we all received at least a pay level increase as a result of our national contract. Now is the time to do it for more reasons than one. As the saying goes, you can pay now or you can pay later.
My hat goes off to the remaining Human Resources Specialists who have been working with the union in trying to expedite the process of getting our retreat rights employees back.
President Burrus encourages all APWU members to voice their opposition to these proposed changes by submitting comments to the Federal Register. A link to the page can be found on the National APWU web site at www.apwu.org. Just click on the FMLA box on the APWU home page. We have until April 11, 2008.
Play time is over. It’s time to get busy!
We just had another training class that was very informative about the grievance procedure and how to properly file and document our grievances. When you file a grievance you want to make sure that if it is not settled at the lowest level with the immediate supervisor that as it moves up the different steps that is put together so that it is understood what violations of what articles and whether it is a local or national violation, or both. They need to know exactly what remedy to request, and the documentation that will be needed to be requested. All the things that are needed to enable our advocates to win the grievances at the next level or arbitration.
We will continue having the local arbitration advocates and the national business agents handle as much of the training as possible, which should result in our cases being better prepared and documented for arbitration. Poorly prepared grievances usually mean losses for the union in arbitration. The union spends a lot of money on the grievance/arbitration process and it is a waste of funds to pursue poorly prepared cases that we can’t win. Not only must we make all the right arguments, but we have to back those arguments up with supporting documentation. The better our grievances are prepared the better our chances of winning them. The more cases we win the stronger our union becomes. The stronger our union is the more we all benefit at the bargaining table and the easier it becomes to represent our members on the work floor.
This is the electronic generation, and we must keep up because management is always changing the game plan and the rules. As our national officers have stated, education and training are the keys for our union’s continued success in the future. We have to make sure the national and local agreements are being honored and respected, which is why training is so critical. Our shop stewards need your help. They can’t be everywhere or see everything. We need our membership to be active in protecting their jobs and their contract. The union is only as strong as its members.
A union is all about promoting the greater good of the collective. As such, the collective is better off when they take an active role in the union; and there is no better way to take that active role than exercising your right to vote and choose the people you want to lead this union.
At the present time we were able to buy, outright, our new building and bank approximately one million dollars. As we move forward we must make prudent investments to get the best possible return on our money.
I say all this to remind everyone that right now we are doing well, but I also have to let everyone know that unless we make changes in our financial planning we will find ourselves in dire financial trouble once again within the next ten years.
The plain truth is that the union’s operating expenses haven’t really decreased, however, our income has. The union’s sole income at this point in time is you, the member, in the amount of dues you pay to the Local. Each pay period you pay $22.52 in union dues. Of that amount $12.70 goes to the Local, the rest goes to the National APWU.
In June of 2005, the Local had 2,752 dues paying members. As of November of 2006, the Local was down to approximately 2,200 dues paying members, a drop of 552 members. Each member’s Local dues are approximately $330 per year. That is the amount paid just to the Local. Let’s put a face on just what an impact those numbers mean; 552 members at $330 per year equals a loss of $182,160 per year to this Local.
I don’t say all this to be an alarmist. I am just giving us all fair warning that things must change. We must find ways to increase the income of the Local. What I give you here are facts. In the early 1990’s this Local had about 4,000 dues paying members. Over the last decade and a half we dropped to about 2,200. When people ask where the money went before the sale of the 1904 Arch Street building the answer is more than obvious; we spent more than we brought in. The drop in 1,800 members translates to a $594,000 per year decrease in our income.
We cannot make the same mistake that was made before and run in the red year after year. Very simply put, if we do not find other ways to increase our income we will have to increase our Local dues in order to maintain the basic day-to-day operation of this Local and maintain the current level of representation.
We have the finances to weather a few storms, but if we ignore the facts about our financial situation we will surely erode our savings account and we will end up in the same position as the preceding union administration found themselves in.
Because of the controversy the union hired an independent real estate attorney, Jeff L. Lewin, Esquire, to obtain a legal opinion on whether the deed was properly listed. The union also asked that Mr. Lewin be present at the February general membership meeting to answer questions from our members.
The reason, according to Mr. Lewin, that the officers are listed on the deed as holding it in trust is because our Local is an unincorporated association, and as such could not own property except through its officers. It was however recommended that the deed be changed to list the APWU first on the deed so anyone doing a title search will immediately understand that the property is owned by the union. And, according to Mr. Lewin, by doing this creditors of the individual officers would not be misled into thinking that the officers had any ownership interest in this property. Indeed, they are listed only in parentheses and identified as “currently” serving, which should avoid any possible confusion about their role.
I hope this clears up any confusion you might have about the deed to the building and who owns the building. If you have any questions at all about this, or any issue, please remember that as the Treasurer I have an open door policy so please feel free to make an appointment to come in and review things for yourself.
According to law, employee notification of the positive drug test result will be in writing, and the employee will be informed they have 72 hours to request a split specimen test.
The MRO has the employee sign a copy of the notification indicating the beginning time and date of the 72 hour notification period. If the employee refuses to sign, the MRO notes the refusal on the form and completes the date and time, and signs the form to verify the information was received by the employee.
The notice has been posted this way for over ten years because some supervisors didn’t grant leave by seniority, but by favoritism. The union had to file a grievance one year before it was done this way because a supervisor let junior employees off and wouldn’t change it, which means senior employees had to work the holidays. This is the only way to make sure leave is granted by seniority and there is no favoritism or discrimination.
Management has put the UNION on notice about drivers not going to all their stops on their run, turning in their daily trip log, or making sure they get scanned when arriving and before departing.
It is very important to make sure we do these things every day. If we don’t, when they get the reports in Washington it looks like we are not doing much work, and the next step will be, they take trucks away. The job you save may be your own.
The high point for me came outside of my workshop. One night, about twenty of us went into downtown Reno to see Michael Moore’s important new film, “Sicko.” After the film, we sat down together in one of the classrooms and engaged in a prolonged, intense discussion. I found it eye-opening.
As most of you probably know, “Sicko” examines the American healthcare system from the experience of people with health insurance but who have been denied the care they need. Moore places the American system in a comparative framework, taking his viewers to Canada, England, France, and Cuba. In all of these places healthcare is universal, provided free of charge by the government, which relies on taxes for funding. Moore demonstrates that these systems are anything but “bureaucratic” or “impersonal,” as U.S. critics have suggested. The French system even includes free house calls and nanny assistance for new mothers!
This much seemed so obvious to my APWU editor colleagues that little more than five minutes of discussion was necessary to declare ourselves convinced by Moore’s case for universal health care. That’s when our conversation got really interesting.
Underlying Moore’s argument is a deep, deep question: Why have we become a society in which “me” is valued so much more than “we”? Time and again, his interview subjects in other countries justify their system in terms such as: “Well, of course we take care of each other. What else would people do?” But the American system seems grounded in a welter of selfishness and individualism, where we think about “Number One” and, as they used to say, let the devil catch the hindmost. This was the issue that grabbed my APWU sisters and brothers.
Our conversation carried me quickly back to labor history. In the late 19th century, when the ideology of “the self-made man” was sweeping the United States, propagated by the dime novels of Horatio Alger and the “rags-to-riches” biographies of the likes of Andrew Carnegie, the labor movement put forward a vision of “the group-made man,” the worker whose job description, working conditions, hours and wages were the results of collective struggles and collective bargaining. Rare was the worker, even the most skilled, who imagined that he had the strength to make a favorable deal with the boss on his own.
At the heart of my workshop presentation this summer was the story of the building of the City Hall in Richmond, Virginia, in 1886. The Knights of Labor had petitioned the conservative-dominated City Council that the new hall be built of local materials with local labor, that workers be paid union scale and employed on the eight hour day, and that African American workers be given access to skilled as well as unskilled jobs. When the City Council rebuffed their request, the local Knights organized themselves into the Workingmen’s Reform Party, ran in the spring 1886 municipal elections, and swept to control of the city government. They then oversaw the building of that new City Hall just as they had imagined it. For me, the icing on the cake was the hand-carved gargoyles which adorned each corner of that handsome building. The stone cutters, Black as well as white, who carved those symbolic faces, who left their handiwork for generations of citizens to appreciate, got their jobs because they had participated in a collective movement. Their opportunity rested on a group effort.
We have been living for more than 25 years now in an era in which the ideology of individualism, of looking out for me, has dominated our culture. “Lean and mean” has been the order of the day, from reductions in workforces with greater pressure on the surviving workers to cuts in government spending on infrastructure. When I made my travel arrangements to Reno, I chose to fly anyone but Northwest Airlines, where reductions in their pilot and flight attendant workforces led to the cancelling of thousands of flights at the end of June and July. And while I was in Reno the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis over the Mississippi River collapsed, killing more than a dozen people and injuring more than 100. The chickens hatched by decades of “lean and mean” were coming home to roost.
My APWU colleagues and I discussed the costs of the “me” response to the “lean and mean” agenda. It turned us and our fellow workers into shoppers at Wal-Mart, seeking the cheapest goods (and getting what we paid for), into critics of government spending and the taxes on which it relies (thereby undermining our schools, our bridges, and the rationale for our own jobs with the Postal Service), into overtime hogs (desperate to take home more wages even at the expense of our excessed brothers and sisters), into men and women with inadequate time for our children, our families, our communities, and our unions.
The PPA National Editors’ Conference gave me a great opportunity to reflect on these issues. Frankly, we all must confront them if we are to turn our society out of this “lean and mean” framework. It’s not only no way to run a health care system, it’s no way to work and live.
“The Postal Service also paid FedEx to sort mail when they could have avoided those costs by sorting the mail or properly preparing it for transport before giving it FedEx,” the audit [NL-AR-08-002, Feb. 2008 - PDF] found. The report estimated that the Pacific Area USPS could save approximately $45 million over the next 10 years by eliminating the unnecessary expenditures.
The Postal Service first entered into a contract with FedEx to provide air transportation in 2001. On Aug. 2, 2006, the USPS announced that it had truncated the original contract and signed a new seven-year agreement that included an “immediate price reduction in all contract categories.” The revised contract allowed the Postal Service to continue outsourcing Terminal Handling Services (THS), which sort and prepare mail for FedEx.
“This is another example of the wasteful, inefficient use of subcontractors by the Postal Service,” said APWU President William Burrus. “It demonstrates the importance of passing H.R. 4236.”
The bill, known as the Mail Network Protection Act, would require the USPS to negotiate with the unions before engaging in significant subcontracting. “This legislation would protect the Postal Service and the American people from such detrimental policies.
“I urge APWU members to continue to solicit support for the bill by contacting their legislators and asking them to sign on as co-sponsors.”
For more information about the Mail Network Protection Act and the union’s effort to gather support for it, go to www.apwu.org.
The Department of Labor proposed new regulations on Feb. 11 that would require workers to provide more proof of their illness; to present documentation more often; and to relinquish medical information to non-medical personnel. The new rules also would allow management personnel to contact workers’ medical providers.
“If adopted, the regulations would make it far more difficult for workers to use leave under the terms of the Family and Medical Leave Act,” Burrus said. “I encourage union activists to work with APWU members to show solidarity in opposition to these proposed changes by submitting comments to the Federal Register,” said APWU Legislative Director Myke Reid. Public comment on the proposals will be accepted through April 11.
Among the anti-worker regulations presented by the Department of Labor; employees with chronic conditions could be required to see their doctors more frequently than the current one time per year. Employees would have to pay for the extra visits out of their own pockets. Employers could authorize anyone they choose to demand information to support FMLA absences; under the current rules, employees are required to share medical information only with medical professionals. The proposed rules would widen the discretion of low-level supervisors to force employees to seek second medical opinions — at the employees’ expense— to determine the facts of a “diagnosis or prognosis.” Under current rules if those facts are unclear, the cost of a second opinion is charged to the employer. Employees who typically work overtime could be charged overtime hours as FMLA leave during their absence.
The APWU is reviewing the proposed regulations and will file formal objections within the 60-day public comment period. The Labor Department is expected to publish final recommendations before the end of the year. “We take this very seriously,” Burrus said. “Due to the limited time to comment, we must make a swift and strong response.”
The FMLA was signed into law by President Clinton in 1993. It requires employers to grant eligible employees up to 12 workweeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period due to a serious health condition, to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition, to care for a newborn child, or for adopting a child or caring for a foster child.
The FMLA applies to government agencies and most businesses that employ 50 or more workers. To be eligible, employees must have worked for their employer for least 12 months and must have worked a minimum 1,250 hours during the 12-month period immediately preceding the FMLA leave.
Ballots will bemailed out, in conformity with the local constitution, no earlier than May 23, 2008, and no later than May 28, 2008. They must be in the hands of the balloting association no later than the close of business on Thursday, June 12, 2008.
The Judge of Election is Harry Dugan. The Teller is Lindsey Royal.
The positions for which nominations will be made are as follows: