Grievances

Brothers and Sisters,

Today I had a discussion with LR VP Mike DeGirolamo concerning the timely payment of grievance resolutions. He made a very good point of the fact that some of the older grievances that we are resolving do not have enough information on them to elicit the quick payment when a resolve is reached. Some of these grievances are going back 7 or 8 years and a lot of the data is lost or extremely time consuming to find.

Though I made the point that often the information, such as hours worked by junior employees is information that the company has and often does not share during the grievance, I will concede that there are grievances out there that could be a lot more specific in the details.

I believe that the grievance pre-step will greatly reduce, if not eliminate, this problem however I would like to remind you all that when submitting a grievance it is extremely important that you list all the relevant information at your disposal, including, but not limited to, copies of bulletins, awards, seniority lists, all correspondence, names, employee numbers, locations and dates.

I would also ask that you be patient on the payment of grievance awards from the past where the information is not readily available. I realize that you were patient in waiting for these old grievances to get resolved, but reaching an understanding is just the first step to determining compensation. And if the data is sketchy, it may take a while to get it paid. As you are aware, we have been settling a lot of old grievances in the last year and the company has a limited amount of personnel that they can apply to researching each claim, however if a resolve has been reached, it will be paid as quickly as they can gather the info needed.

Fraternally,

Bill Brehl
President
TCRC MWED