Well, the dog days of summer are upon us. With high temperatures and humidity, it makes everything you do an effort. Be sure to drink plenty of water and take breaks as needed. At Local 1600 we are getting back to normal with more face-to-face meetings happening. We had our Ephrata negotiating committee here to review survey’s and start to create proposals. The members of the committee are myself, Jane Biever, Wendy Stover, Ron Fashnacht, Jai Howard and Adam Schuman. Rusty and I also met with PPL HR to discuss next year’s contract negotiations. We discussed the time frame, location and costs, details will be released when we have some confirmed information. We have a lot of grievances waiting for arbitration, the arbitration process moves at a snail’s pace, we have been plagued with this for years and nobody has an answer as to why. I can tell you, Local 1600 is always pressuring AAA for arbitration dates. The PPL WEEVE arbitration has been held and we are waiting for the award. We’re also wrapping up the CCC settlement, when it’s signed it will be released.
In Talen, the meals grievance has been submitted to arbitration. I am as frustrated over this one as all of you are. Myself, Ron and Mike had discussions with the company and felt we were moving in the right direction, well that was quite some time ago, then it died on the vine. I reached out to Talen headquarters in Texas for some help, that got pushed back to HR in Tower 6, who pushed it to Susquehanna’s management team to meet post outage, the outage came and went and yet no meeting no discussions, Nothing! Wait for it, now I am told its not appropriate to discuss because we submitted it to arbitration! If we hadn’t submitted it, we would have been charged with time limit violations! Local 1600 is always willing to discuss settlements up to and including the day of the arbitration.
At any rate that’s a snapshot of what’s going on in our Union.
Stay strong, stay safe,
President Frank E.G.
