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Good morning,
Many of you have received letters that were telling you that your jobs were being abolished. You may have received correction letters. You may not have received them. Unfortunately, the excessing and retreat rights are solely controlled by management. However, the local union does police to make sure the CBA and LMOU is being followed.
In early July, Executive Plant Manager Margaret Ford and I met to discuss the upcoming closure and opening. She expressed her desire to least impact your lives and to give you the most advanced notice of your new bids. I was in agreement. We came up with a timeline to have specific actions in place so that all impacted employees could retreat and/or bid when excessed and know their effective dates of November 16.
Things went smoothly until it came to letters being mailed and town hall meetings. I will not participate in a town hall meeting with management for a process that is not being conducted properly. Neither will any of our stewards or officers as union reps. This would give the impression to our members that we are "on board" with the process when we are not. Management also chose to hold the last town halls with full knowledge that officers and stewards were at the NCCAPWU fall conference from Wednesday through Saturday of last week.
The Local Memorandum of Understanding (LMOU) governs excessing rules in Item 18 for Article 12.5 excessing which is what occurred last fall with the MidC closing. I WILL follow the CBA, JCIM, LMOU and advice of our Nationally elected NBAs concerning this issue. Impassioned emails about solidarity and skill and morale and even threats about reelection to my position do NOT govern implementation of this process. It is SOLELY governed by these items listed and those officers and the knowledge we have of how to administer.
I realize and empathize with you about this entire situation. None of it should be a surprise as I began preparing you in 2022. We did not know for sure the exact timeline or process but we knew changes were coming. Everyday we are fighting for more jobs and to keep the jobs we have. We ask for your help and many of you are helping. Thank you for that! The payouts have been in your checks. More should be coming. We appealed around 400 grievances in the past few weeks so there has been little time for walking and talking but I will answer your calls as I can. Please leave a brief message about the reason for your call however and reach out to your steward first if it is a grievance issue.
We will have our monthly meeting Saturday morning at 9:30am and I will answer your questions about the excessing. Saturday evening at 5pm we will have a zoom to allow anyone interested to ask more questions about this excessing event. You can use the regular meeting link to join. I've attached the flier to this email and the code is there for ZOOM.
On Friday I will be in Raleigh with the AFLCIO and won't be available but will be back for the meeting Saturday. Also, we are planning to upgrade this website to make it more user friendly and will vote on this at Saturday's meeting.
in union solidarity
Miriam Bell, President
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