LOCAL 207
ORGANIZER
OFFICIAL NEWSLETTER OF AFSCME LOCAL 207
Issue #3, February 26, 2001
Time to Get
Busy
The Fight for a Good
Contract Begins Now!
Contract negotiations are just about to start, and now is the time for the membership to step forward and demand the good contract we deserve. On January 27 the members voted on our local’s contract demands for the Master and Water Department Supplemental Contracts. At that same meeting we elected a 23-person Contract Action Committee to organize the contract fight. Committee members can be recalled at any general union meeting by a simple majority vote.
Committee members are: James Anderson, James Bates, Eleanor Bennett, John Brandao, Marlene Bruce, Bruce Conway, Milton Derrickson, John Elie, Mike Ermler, Coletta Estes, Willie Gibbons, Wayne Hardaway, Bryan Hardy, Peavy Horton, Kenneth Mackie, Nathan McKinney, Michael Mulholland, Charles Murphy, Chuck Remecz, John Riehl, Susan Ryan, Eric Scott and Ricky Whitfield.
On Monday, February 19, Local President John Riehl officially requested negotiations on the Supplemental Contract between our local and the Water Department. Our local’s Supplemental Contract with the Public Lighting Department will be negotiated soon also. The negotiations teams are John Riehl and Coletta Estes for the Master Agreement; Bruce Conway, Nathan McKinney and Michael Mulholland for the Water Department Supplemental Contract.
On February 8, six members of the 207 Executive Board spoke at a City Council Public Hearing. We opposed water and sewerage rates increases for residential customers, saying that big business should pay for the long-overdue improvements to the Departments infrastructure. More increases to residential customers is just a way to siphon money from the pockets of ordinary citizens to the bank accounts of the same corporate contractors who are stealing our city jobs. The Executive Board sees our fight for a good contract and the rebuilding of our unions as attached to the rebuilding of a new civil rights movement in this country.
Our fight to stop Archer from selling off our jobs and city services can only be won with the active support of our community. We are not in this fight alone, and any tendency to see this as purely a “union issue” is a mistake. The black community is our natural ally and Archer’s Achilles’ heal. Archer’s policies do not have much support in the community, and we must give that dissatisfaction a political direction.
We start this fight on Thursday, March 15, at 4:30pm, at the Larned Street entrance to the City County Building. Local 207 is calling a rally against privatization, contracting-out of our jobs and the selling off Detroit’s city services.
But our union cannot be strengthened by the Executive Board alone. That requires the members showing up at the meetings and directing the rebuilding of our local and guiding the fight to win respect from management.
Come to the meeting on Wednesday, February 28, at 5 pm and help plan the rally for our jobs, and help our union lead all city workers in the fight for good contracts this year.
We Demand Real
Negotiations!
Management is asking union contract negotiators to take part in so-called “Interest Based Bargaining” (IBB) this year. 207 rejects this scam which is designed to give management more control over negotiations. We need real bargaining this year for real contract gains.
IBB involves having a professional consultant “facilitate” the negotiations. It is classic two-faced Archer politics—his phony “cultural change” taken to a more dangerous level.
Management hopes to use IBB to confuse and disarm union members by getting their leaders to say that “management and workers have the same interests.” In fact our interests are diametrically opposed! The clearer our union’s leaders and members are on this point the better.
Recognizing this fact, we must not allow Archer to stall the negotiations beyond the the June 30 contract expiration date. In the past such stalling helped management screw us. This year our local will make early strike preparations to push Archer to bargain. And if the members decide to strike, these preparations will be necessary to win.
IBB is designed to benefit management. That’s why they suggested it. In IBB unions are expected to promise not to strike even before negotiations begin! This would leave us defenseless, and reduce negotiations to mere hypocrisy.
IBB encourages unions to adopt management’s problems as our own. But management’s problems are caused by their short-sightedness and corruption, and Archer’s efforts to reduce corporate taxes by cutting public services to our working-class neighborhoods.
The members must insist that officials from all AFSCME locals reject Archer’s invitation to attend “indoctrination” sessions to learn IBB methods. The members deserve union leaders who will remain independent of Archer, who will demand real bargaining take place this year, and will lead a genuine fight for real gains.