In years past, when we had messages to get out to the membership, we were lucky to have a shadowy figure communicate that message to the membership. His name is Lance London, aka, Larry Burns. From Lance’s style of communication, an award was named after him to a member that focused on keeping members in their area informed. We haven’t given out this award in several years, but tonight we have Lance in attendance to hand out this award for 2009, and the recipient of the award this year is Noah Kaaa.
I want thank the Executive Board. As I mentioned last month, they visited with members in Supply on Adamo, and today they were downtown in the Tampa Main building talking with the members there. Next month they will be at the EAX building in downtown Tampa and fliers will be posted soon to notify everyone.
On September 26th, which is a Saturday, we will be hosting the retirement party for Harrison Thornhill, and that party will start at Noon. More information is on the website.
We now have over 300 members signed up to receive email updates from our website, ibew824.org, and we have received a lot of compliments on the amount of information being sent out. If you are not aware, once you sign up, you will receive an email notifying you that an update has been placed on the site. I urge each of you that have not signed up yet, to do so as soon as you can.
We were notified this week that the Company is getting out of the pay phone business by the end of this year. We have 12 employees left in the coin operations and John and myself met with several of them yesterday to answer their questions. They will be offered the ISP in the 4th quarter.
I have been talking with other Business Managers around the country and we are all working on retaining the work we have now, and bringing in new work. This all stems from the proposed sale to Frontier. When the dust settles, it will be Florida, Texas, and California competing for work in the old GTE footprint. We were successful last week in obtaining additional work in the BSC, which will be the Business billing calls and billing offline work. By getting the billing work, it looks like we will have enough work in the BSC to keep the headcount we have there now after the sale. We believe we have a chance to bring in more calls to the Care Center and we’re working on that now. With all the surplus we have out there, it’s really great that we are bringing in some new work.
After almost 2 weeks straight of preparing for the Article XI arbitration, the hearing was held on August 21st. We feel we presented a very strong case to the arbitrator and that we will be successful. Usually there is about a 70-day time period from the hearing until the decision is received, but we cut out almost a month from that time frame and we should receive the award by the end of this month. We were told yesterday that the Company is not going to move forward with the force adjustment/layoff until that decision comes in. Remember, the techs in question were originally scheduled to be bumped on July 18th, then we received a 60-day suspension and now we have another 2 weeks or so extension.
We have also been preparing for the required 6th day Arbitration and will have that hearing on September 17th. Again, a lot of time and research was done and we feel confident with our case.
It’s come to the Union’s attention that we have members, both outside and inside that think it’s ok to be on a company computer and have private conversations on sametime and also communicating through Facebook, while on company time. If you or anyone you know is doing this, please ask them to stop. We do not want to have to represent a member who gets fired for doing this. Please pass this info along to your brothers and sisters.
As everyone probably knows by now, the company has notified the union that they are going to implement their workplace attire on September 14th. Originally we thought we would just file 1 grievance from the Hall on this issue, but after talking to some Chiefs, we think it would be better for any member that wants to file a grievance to do so, so the Company realizes how we feel. In my opinion, as I talked with the company, on several occasions, about their need for the workplace attire, it seemed they were not interested in bargaining on this issue, but instead just imposing their guidelines. This issue isn’t dead and we will continue to look at viable options to proceed.
Last month I reported on BSWTechs being force adjusted from several locations, but fortunately the techs that moved to different locations did so voluntarily and no one was forced to go somewhere they didn’t want to go.
During the last month, we sent 6 members to the Southern School for Union Women and from what I have been told a lot of good information and education was provided and you will be able to read a report or 2 from those that attended on this site shortly.
We had our first joint Union/Company Stress Committee meeting on August 13th. The Union committee consists of Michelle Agne, Noah Kaaa, and Zaida Menendez. They are looking for volunteers to be on several sub-committees and if you are interested, please contact them.
Parking Lot Meetings and Unit meetings have again been well attended. The most important message that we are bringing to these meetings is the importance of EVERY member to get involved. We need to continue to grow the attendance at every meeting so the company knows we are getting stronger as a local. We’ve talked about providing information to the members and we feel that is going very well. Next on the agenda to strengthening our membership is EDUCATION. Membership Training classes are going to start on September 15th with approximately 40 members and the next 2 scheduled classes will be on September 23rd and 30th. As I stated last month, we will continue to conduct these classes through the end of the year and into 2010 as well.
Finally, after months and months of trying to get the newly formed Circuit Repair group back within the CZT II classification, we had our 4th meeting on this issue yesterday and received confirmation this morning that is going to happen. The work will be brought back to the CZT II classification from the Cable Splicer classification, in a new work group. The CZT II’s will be asked, by seniority, if they want to volunteer. All the details will be known up front as to the tours, which will include 24 hrs, and the areas that the groups will work in. If they do not get enough volunteers from the CZT II’s, Cable Splicers will be asked next. This is something that our local has been trying to resolve for months and we are glad that the Company worked with us to resolve this BIG issue.
I want to personally say thank you to every member that has been attending meetings and doing more to get involved within our union. I look forward to working with every member and together we will become united again.
In Solidarity,
Robert
