Stationary Event Harassment
By Alec Helwig
Springfield just saw a rash of stationary-event related discipline earlier this year. This happened at all three offices in quick succession. When your union reps met on the grievances with management their position was they would not resolve them and they would have to be moved up to the next highest level.
We received most of them back from the Step B team and in every case the discipline was rescinded and expunged from personnel records except for one that was reduced to a job discussion: the carrier admitted they have conducted a personal errand while on the clock. So none of the discipline stuck in any capacity because it could not meet just cause except for one that did not have anything to do with stationary events, and it was reduced to a job discussion; that’s a pretty good win rate.
However, during the handling of these grievances your local union reps kept hearing the same thing:
People felt they were being harassed.
Harassment is a high bar for the union to clear because there is a LOT of documentation that’s needed to support that. When a carrier says they are being harassed we cannot just take it at their word or it really harms our position in the future; we have to be able to prove it to win with a solid case file.
In my opinion, we have done so.
We took interviews with management in which they admitted they could not prove carriers took all the breaks they charged them with taking, fatally flawing their charge by admitting carriers did not act as charged.
We took management’s investigative interviews and showed how management decided carriers were guilty even before conducting any investigation, denying them due process.
We showed a history of Step B decisions from as far back as two years ago when management at JGS tried this “stationary event” tactic before and it was shut down.
We showed this stationary event harassment has had lethal consequences in the heat dating back to 2012, just after management was so hostile and aggressive about their use of DOIS that two Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) came out expressly limiting management’s use of projection tools. Most recently and most well documented was the case with our brother, the late Eugene Gates.
We showed management has a history of demeaning carriers throughout the grievance procedure using their own Formal A position summaries. Management could not take back their toxicity towards carriers as it had been documented on paper.
We showed management has a history of using various harassment tactics in the Springfield MO installation via numerous Step B decisions across several subjects. In each of these, management was required to maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect because it had been documented to be provably absent.
A lot more, but we don’t need to bust out a long document; we’re here for the TLDR version.
A city-wide grievance was filed for the punitive issuance of discipline with the intent to harass carriers into performing their duties on the street faster when there are no standards for street performance. Of course, management refuted they are harassing us, they have to. However, we did have a productive conversation about the union’s concerns regarding the history of treatment carriers have had to endure locally, the safety concerns of carriers on the workroom floor by using this practice, and the drop in morale recently.
Unfortunately, we could not resolve the grievance; we were way too far apart in our remedy requested, which really wasn’t as outlandish as it was demanding accountability. We sent up this grievance to the Step B team mid-May, and I hope we hear back from them sooner than later. I don’t think the Step B team likes dealing with harassment cases very much, so I worked very hard to make this one inescapable in its conclusion.
Thank you to everyone who helped and thank you for watching out for each other; keep that good stuff up.