This is the twenty-fourth FYI to be released to the membership. As always, I hope this FYI will provide you with relevant information on the Local’s activities. If you have any questions, feel free to convey them to the Local at 455-6400.

Our Local has finalized all of our back tax obligations under the settlement with the IRS negotiated in 1993. Earlier this year we made our final payment ($33,600.00) to the IRS relating to back taxes, which were imposed on our income from associate members for tax years 1982 thru 1992.

In an effort to gain additional income we have started investing some funds into a Mutual Fund with Prudential. To date the funds have not produced any real return, as the market has not been real stable. It is hoped that in the future these funds begin to produce a return for our Local.

As was conveyed to you in our last newsletter, we have been implementing various methods of reducing expenses. This includes reduced LWOP usage, reduced hall help hours-which are used to provide assistance to the Local President, reduced amount of Executive Board meetings, not issuing gift certificates for Christmas, and placing on hold on much of the training we would like to provide, until next year. The reason for the financial pinch is attributed to substantial training earlier in the year, final payment to the IRS, jurisdictional review of many offices in the state where Mail Handlers do not currently work, second full-time officer review period (2 months), reduced income from our associate membership and our regular membership and an increase in arbitration costs.

After much discussion is was decided by the Executive Board that we would not be issuing gift certificates this year. The reason for this decision is that we have been holding down expenses to ensure that we make it through the year without any financial hardships. The expense of purchasing gift certificates for the membership would impose an unreasonable burden on the Local this year. The approximate cost of issuing gift certificates is about $13,000.00. It is fully intended to return to this practice next year, provided our financial outlook remains as anticipated. We do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

As many of you may have already noticed, your dues increased a total of $.50 per pay period. This is the first full dues increase that members of Local 321 have experienced in over 6 years. For the last 6 years we have waived the Local’s portion of these increases ($.25) when dues increases were enacted. The reason we implemented these reductions was that our Local in years past had increased dues beyond the minimum allowed under our constitution. We are still $.25 higher than the minimum dues amount allowed but have decided not to waive the Local’s share this time. The reason for this decision is partially attributed to those points made above and additionally based on the fact that our membership as a whole has dropped.

Over the last year our regular membership has dropped from an all time high of 1252 members to around 1160 members today. The majority of these losses have been experienced within the BMC and the GMF as a result of attrition, (transfers, retirements, etc.) With the manager’s mentality in each of these facilities, low mail volume, and the District hiring freeze, we have had little luck at getting management to replace members when they transfer or retire. We are continuing to work on this problem.

In addition to a decrease in regular membership we have also been experiencing a decrease in associate membership. This decrease is predominantly due to the substantial rate increases, which have been seen in our health plan over the last several years. In an attempt to combat these losses our plan placed most of its emphasis on the standard plan this year, which sells for considerably less. By the end of March next year we should know how well we did during this years open season.

This year all of the Local LMOU’s were negotiated successfully with the exception of the GMF. The GMF negotiations were very unproductive as managements representatives brought Mr. Ruden’s mentality to the table with them. They were unwilling to make any concessions and only wanted to take away what we have fought for years to gain. This mentality resulted in a breakdown of negotiations and ultimately the LMOU for the GMF is moving toward arbitration. Once we are able to arbitrate the issues that are unresolved an update will be provided to you.

As many of you already know we have a modified Step 3 grievance process here in Colorado (currently the only Local under this modified process). In this modified process the Local President meets on all Step 3 grievances for the state. This was a practice we began over six years ago and continue to this day. The practice has proven to allow for many more cases to be settled than the prior process where the Region was meeting on our cases. We have been experiencing some problems with obtaining Step 3 decisions recently. The problem seems to stem from the fact that management’s representative has too many cases with too many people for him to keep up. In an attempt to ensure timeliness, we are moving cases that are verbally denied (after the allotted time frames have passed) on to the Executive Board for a vote on arbitration. Additionally we have been hold meetings with the Western Area in an attempt to eliminate this delay problem.

1999 was the most expense arbitration year our local has on record. We had more cases heard and decided than in any previous year. Our Local will most likely have spent more than $40,000.00 in arbitration related expenses by the end of the year. We were successful in exactly 50 % of the cases, which we arbitrated this year. This obviously is not where we want to be but we are right at the National average and will continue to try and improve on these numbers. Additionally we were able to pre-arbitrate (settle) more than 16 other cases on our docket.

Currently our arbitration docket has 17 cases pending regular arbitration and 19 cases pending RI-399 arbitration. The cases pending RI-399 arbitration will be addressed briefly under the heading of RI-399 in this posting. The 17 cases pending regular arbitration should for the most part appear with a scheduled hearing date in the first quarter of next year, although some of these cases may be listed as backups and not actually get heard until a later date. Currently we have no discipline cases on our docket as we have had very good success in getting these cases heard in an expedient fashion. In fact the arbitrator heard our last discipline case within about 30 days of the date it was docketed (this is almost unheard of).

We have also been actively meeting with the Postal Service in pre-arbitration discussions over about twelve separate cases (about half are on the arbitration docket and the half are currently at step three). Based on the discussions it sounds like we will possibly settle the majority of these cases, but only time will tell.

This year we did some in-depth investigation of the arbitrators we use and the fees associated to those arbitrations. After much research we have compiled a list of arbitrator names that are located within Colorado and forwarded them to National for consideration. It is hoped that we can begin to utilize arbitrators from around the state, which will in turn reduce the travel related expenses we currently are paying arbitrators.

We have been evaluating various non-Mail Handler offices around the state over the last year. As a result of this evaluation process we have filed for positions in about a dozen different offices around the state. To date the only office which we have had any success with is the Golden office. Since May of this year we have been successful in getting three regular positions and one PTF in Golden. The reason Golden went so well is management was in agreement that they needed Mail Handlers. The other offices seem to fear the idea of having another craft and another contract to honor. Our efforts continue with these other offices but that struggle will be slow.

We also are expecting to get a hearing or two in this year on some of our jurisdictional cases. It appears that our initial push will be to have the cases dealing with the operational changes in the GMF be heard first. These cases represent 11 of the 19 cases we currently have pending this docket and represent the largest amount of work to our craft. Keep in mind that we have not been able to get an RI 399 hearing since the ones we had in 1994 in Colorado Springs, so our expectation may be too high.

Our Local had been complaining about the inactivity of the RI-399 Regional Committee and our member who sat on that committee for sometime. Earlier this year our National President agreed to find a replacement to that committee but had no luck. After some discussion I agreed to submit my name and was selected shortly after in April of this year. Since that time I have met on RI-399 cases several times and it appears that we can make the committee move a little better than it has. Anyway it is hoped that later this year we will be able to meet on those cases currently pending a meeting of the RDRC from our Local. Some of these cases have been pending a meeting of this committee for ten years or more. As movement in this area is seen for our Local you will be kept abreast of these activities.

Pocket calendars for the year 2000 are currently being distributed to the membership. If you have not received yours yet, please feel free to obtain one from your steward.

 

There is additional information, which I would like to disseminate to you at this time but this posting has become long enough. I will be disseminating additional information in my next posting, which will be released immediately after the first of the year, so keep watching your bulletin boards. Also don’t forget to read your newsletters as they carry considerably more in-depth information on various issues than can be produced here.

In closing I and the other representatives of Local 321 would like to wish you and yours the very best Holiday season. Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year.

David E Ross

President Local 321

NPMHU December 17, 1999