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| Posted by Darryl (darryl) on Sep 08 2008 |
| News >> AMHS BU |
Your Negotiating Committee did not go through this process with a mindset of accepting any losses to our contract; we had every intention of making gains to our contract that would benefit our membership. On Saturday morning, the day after the night before, I awoke at 0400 hrs and I couldn’t stop my mind from going over the events that brought us to our TA. In the back of my mind, I could hear Mick Jagger singing, “You can’t always get what you want, but you just might find you get what you need.”
In the end, we were not successful in reaching all our objectives but our team did the best we could do to bring the best possible TA back to the membership. In the process of negotiating a collective bargaining agreements there are no winners or losers, regardless what the non-participants say. I for one was one of those non-participants, sitting in the Crew Mess complaining daily about the Union and its leadership. It doesn’t really take much energy to sit and complain all day but it takes commitment, effort and dedication to stand up and do something about making our union better
Without the entire TA out, some of our members have already begun to tear apart our recent TA. There are a few misguided Deck Department members who even believe our Stewards are paid too much and Deck Department members deserve a higher hourly wage, their misguided effort to defeat our current TA will hurt all of us and they will never achieve their objective. By dividing our membership is the best tool our employer has, please refer to Chief Steward Mark Listberger’s letter posted on our web site.
Third Tier of Vacation versus Personal Leave
Some of our members expressed their distaste in “eating our young” with the third tier of vacation. The thought of having our future members having one less week a year after five years of service may seem appalling to most, it pales in comparison when over 317 members have requested Individual Letters of Agreements for leave cash outs since January 1, 2007. When our own senior membership refuses to take time off, it inhibits our less senior members’ opportunities to work. By taking less time off prevents our “younger” members from working at all. In this year alone from January 1, 2008 to August 31, 2008, over 90 individual members’s requested cash outs of over 10,000 hours of vacation/A-Days. How many of our “young” could have been working if those 10,000 hours were actually used for its intended purpose? The benefit of the third tier allows our new members to accrue vacation in six months versus one year. Our new members will be able to accrue vacation sooner and we still have the sick leave benefit. The Palin Administration simply didn’t buy our argument of how valuable our vacation time off was for us when over 10,000 hours of leave was cashed out by our members in only eight months.
Kenny Rogers’ song not so long ago gave us the unsolicited tip of “knowing when to hold’em and knowing when to fold’em.” When discussing our Healthcare benefits those words came to mind, yes we did have Standard Healthcare for one year and then a lump sum payment to compensate the increases to that amount in year two and three. Our Negotiating Committee held the line until the end after trying tirelessly to keep the benefit we had over four years ago. The Palin Administration was adamant that they would not be paying for the cost of the Standard Plan to ANY state employee union bargaining unit and they refused to budge on that issue. But as in any other situation it helps to see things from your opponents’ eyes. The Palin Administration had their back against the wall and they were not budging in their position. Palin was never going to pay any bargaining unit more for healthcare then the Economy Plan cost and that was that. It was then your Negotiating Committee could not force the state into changing their position. I went ahead and researched our healthcare coverage for our bargaining unit and here is the breakdown:
Standard Plan 34% Standard Plan 33%
Economy Plan 50% Preventive Plan 48%
From the percentages we can see that 50% of our membership will end up paying out of pocket for their healthcare coverage and 50% will not. Unfortunately, the Palin Administration stated time and time again that they would be flexible on anything but paying for the Standard Plan Healthcare,
In taking a look at last years’ IBUP Annual pay roll of $31.9 million, the total benefit of the Split Wage Rule to all our members amounted to 1.6% of the total pay roll. According to the state’s bargaining team, overtime is also a penalty for sailing short and therefore the hammer to get a replacement on board will continue to be a priority. Yes, Split Wages works for us vessel employees, but the Palin Administration has made it clear that they would not back down on paying more per hour to an employee simply because the vessel is shorthanded. The argument between the Negotiating Committee was do we go to the wall on an issue that affects our membership just 1.6% of their collective annual wage?
For years the state has attempted to remove the language that provides pay to an injured crew member till the end of their voyage. A hold over from the Jones Act, we all saw abuse from some of our brothers and sisters regarding this benefit. Once again we reviewed the impact of our membership and when we discovered that the impact of Unearned Wages was 0.6% of the entire pay roll, we had to ask ourselves the question, should we go to war on an issue that affects less than one percent of our collective salaries? The bottom line is Unearned Wages still exists in our collective bargaining agreement but the enrichment will be less.
In the end our Negotiating Committee was not able to bring home the whole pig to our bargaining unit but, we did get some bacon out of the deal. Now it is up to you, the union, to decide if this TA is acceptable or not. Negotiation is not a pretty situation and there is no right, wrong, black or white. It is never a clear clean path and in the end it is a messy process. Just as much as the state cannot control what do neither can we control the actions of the state. Just because we demand something doesn’t mean we get what we want. I will not sugar coat any of my statements, the TA is not perfect for either side. There was compromise on both sides and the state is not happy with our TA either. The state agreed to back off the annual pass, current employee leave benefits and the Layup and Yard work jurisdiction. We took into consideration all comments from our members and focused our strategy to accommodate your concerns. It will not be up to your Negotiating Committee to decide to accept the state’s proposal, it is up to the rank and file members to make that call and all those that vote on this TA will have an opportunity to make that choice.
The process of negotiation is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
In Solidarity,
Last changed: Sep 08 2008 at 9:01 AM
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