Yesterday your grievance committee met with representatives from the company at the 3rd step grievance meeting and responses from the company went as expected. They weren’t moving on anything. Not only were they not prepared to move on anything there was a number of grievances that upper management hadn’t even looked at until that meeting. They also refused to discuss any grievances on early shift relief, cell phones and the call in procedure. The Union has a grievance in on the call in procedure and has been moved to arbitration.
When discussing the shift relief in general, Brad Forster seems to be under some impression that he can remove the Letter of Agreement in the collective agreement. Well Mr. Forster, that is not how agreed to articles such as this are dealt with. If you want it gone, it goes through bargaining. The company also has some new interpretations of language in the collective agreement such as rate retention. For Mr. Forster to tell your President he hopes that bargaining goes smooth, they sure are doing everything in their power for the opposite.
After the grievance meeting was completed Mr. Forster gave a business update. As we all should be aware, things at this time don’t look promising. With that said, for weeks now managers in the steel division have been spreading the rumor that their will be lay-offs even down to 1 crew. A member of the shift committee confronted Mr. Forster on these rumors being spread and he said they were untrue. Well yesterday they were informed there will be upcoming lay-offs in the Steel Division starting in the middle of August down to 2 crews. The company is looking at a new shift to run on 2 crews that would incorporate running a dead shift. This would be a shift with built in overtime on it which seems odd as that was his reasoning for not running the B15 schedule. Puts into question the real reason why he wouldn’t run the B15?