Springfield Update
Man, where do I even start?
Let’s start with the morale-boosting elimination of the no-lunch policy. This one is pretty straightforward. Your local Union has over two decades of grievance settlements in our favor to establish this long-term past practice. Management did notify the local Union representative, but made no attempt to bargain over the change of the past practice in accordance with Article 5 of the National Agreement. As such, we submitted a grievance that many of you contributed to. Your local Union does not agree with the elimination of the no-lunch policy, and we are working to get it reinstated under the prohibition of unilateral action portion of our National Agreement. Thank you all so much for providing your statements; we looked at every one and gained many of our talking points through your words. As soon as we know the result you’ll hear about it. Keep your fingers crossed. If there’s interest we’ll talk more about this in another post.
Next up is SPM, our sampling requests. This is a hot button issue right now, and guess why: Management’s pay bonuses are affected by your responses! Here’s the skinny: if you get a sampling request, answer it as honestly and accurately as possible. There’s a ton of misinformation going around right now regarding this stuff, and your local union is taking advantage of that. It seems like management doesn’t know a lot of the rules about this stuff and is just making it up as they go along, so we are documenting the inconsistencies and building a file. Discipline is being issued without rhyme or reason and management feebly tries to support it in grievance meetings but so far has only mustered, “Since we’ve started issuing discipline the numbers have gotten better.” If you get discipline for SPM, sign that thing and request a steward immediately so we can interview you and get your statement. These things are being based solely on GPS data, and that’s not going to fly.
Up next is projections, or the thing they use to assign you undertime based on your numbers and unauthorize your overtime. I have it on decent authority that this is coming back into vogue in Springfield. I’ve written about this exhaustively, so just look through past posts and get educated on your rights and procedures. I have made management aware this practice is only going to result in more grievances with escalated awards, so I hope they listen to what’s contractually appropriate and abide their signed grievance settlements.
That’s a quick overview on the big ticket items happening in Springfield. I hear that some of these are reaching into other areas of our branch, so be vigilant and look out for your brothers and sisters out there!