Where’s My Grievance?

Hey there all, Alec here to try and answer a question we get a lot: where’s my grievance at?

When we settle grievances locally we do our best to reach out and notify the parties of a settlement. Settlements often don’t get resolved at the lowest levels, however, which results with them being escalated. That’s the rough part. I’ll explain as briefly and thoroughly as I can here.

Informal A is the lowest level of the grievance procedure. This part happens in-house with local parties who are familiar with the situation that the grievance arose in. In Springfield, we generally have 10 of these backed up at a time, so we keep things moving forward here pretty well. When we resolve something here we’re able to quickly reach out and let you know what happened.

Formal A is the second step and includes a lot more contractual “tightness.” Final arguments are made here with the deepest level of contractual applications available. This is also worked by local parties, and the last step before sending disagreements out of town. When we resolve something here we’re able to reach out pretty quick and let you know what went down.

Step B is the third step, and is the bulk of our problem. If we’re unable to agree that the Formal A level then we have to escalate to the Step B level of the grievance procedure. This step happens out of town to Dispute Resolution Teams across the country. They have no idea who we are or what the situation is outside of what is expressly stated from the Formal A level (thus the contractual and situational “tightness” I mentioned earlier). Moreover, other installations send their disagreements to the same place as well, so these DRT are dealing with a lot more than just Springfield and branch 203, they’re sectioned off regionally to do their grim work.

As a result, the regional Step B level has over 500 cases backed up from areas all around the KC MO district. They resolve maybe 20 a week, and then they get 40 more dumped on them from the region, so they are continually behind.

When you ask where your grievance is and we haven’t been able to settle it locally, it goes here first: a place where it takes a year or more to get resolved. While it’s here we get no updates other than, “it’s at Step B.” It shouldn’t take that long, not by a long shot, but with so many cases getting dumped there it’s no wonder things take forever to resolve.

Lastly is the fourth step, Arbitration. If the parties can’t agree at the Step B level and the National Business Agent feels like the case is good enough, it will go to arbitration. This similarly enters a queue with many, many other cases and it waits in line to be heard at the final level for a ruling.

Why are there so many cases being sent up? Management doesn’t want to admit they’re wrong, and simply has to say “impasse” and it gets forced up the chain. Management is not incentivized to resolve grievances, quite the opposite; they are told to delay the resolution of grievances in an attempt to make them untimely and costly for the NALC.

Management regularly bargains in bad faith by issuing baseless or improper discipline, then doesn’t admit they were wrong to do so. Additionally, if we bring a contract case to them, they don’t want to agree to stop the violation, so it forces us to escalate it to attempt to get language that forces them to comply. Now, not all cases are handled that way, and not all members of management bargain like that, however, management does have to cover their butts at the end of the day, so if the choice is to escalate something or settle if with restrictive language they’ll send it up 99% of the time.

Your local isn’t happy about this. We wait years for resolutions for discipline, contract, payouts, compliance, and more. You all experience it. There’s no excuse for it, but currently there’s no remedy to make it go faster either down here. Your local is stuck filing and waiting on higher levels to agree to a resolution, like a bottleneck.

Where’s your grievance? Probably awaiting a resolution at a higher level, and your local stewards want a better answer than that too.

Be safe out there, we’ll do our best for you.