Uncle Ken: Between your half dozen or so posts on the subject of the Christmas lights, I seem to have lost track of the chronology of events, but I think I've gotten it straight now. As I understand it, you have submitted your petition and the board has agreed to take its survey. So when are they going to take this survey, or have they already done it? You might need to stay on their case to make sure they are not just stalling until it's too close to Christmas to do anything about it.
I remember "winning" one of my grievances at the paper mill. They agreed to do something, but they still hadn't done it a year later, so I filed another grievance. The plant manager said that he didn't understand the need for the second grievance because he had already agreed to do what I requested in the first grievance. I tried to explain to him that I didn't ask him to say he was going to do it, I asked him to actually do it. This college educated executive looked me straight in the eye and claimed that he didn't know what I was talking about. Funny thing is, they actually did start doing it the very next day, but they never admitted that it was because of my grievance. When I got my written answer a few weeks later, the plant manager still insisted that the issue had been resolved a year ago and there was no need to discuss it any further.
There is a back story to this that I wasn't going to tell you but, the more I think about it, I think I will because it's relevant to another point we have been discussing. Each department had a written, negotiated, and signed overtime procedure agreement that was ancillary to the main contract. This means that, although it wasn't printed in the contract booklet, it was nevertheless as enforceable as the main contract. I had been working in another department for several years and, when I returned to the papermaking department, I found that our procedure had not been followed for some time and nobody seemed to remember that we even had a procedure. I dug up an old copy, reproduced it, and posted it all over the place to no avail. That's when I filed the first grievance. My contention was that, if nobody wanted to follow the old agreement anymore, we should negotiate a new agreement, but nobody on either side of the table wanted to do that, so that meant the old agreement was still in force, like it or not. Yep, that's the kind of prick I was in those days, and some would say that I still am, but I won my point nevertheless, and that's what really matters.
Meanwhile, back at the border:
https://a.msn.com/r/2/AACrYer?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare
https://a.msn.com/r/2/AACrSVA?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare
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