UE Local 506 News Supplement

Last Updated on Friday, 15 January 2010 15:27 Written by Administrator Friday, 11 September 2009 16:01

Union Mourns Loss of Fellow Employee

On Monday January 11,William D. Huff, an employee in Building 6, tragically lost his life due to an industrial accident. We the Officers, along with the Executive Board and the entire membership want to express our deepest and most profound sympathy to his family. Please keep them in your prayers.

News- In- Views By President Jim Pifer

Hopefully by the time you read this the jobs bill will have passed in the Senate as far as Amtrak receiving funding to update their aging fleet. The Senate is due to vote around mid January. If it passes the Senate then General Electric will have an opportunity to bid on the Amtrak order.

Thanks to the several thousand people who signed petitions, I believe it had a major impact on the Jobs Bill getting thru Congress. This Union has spent a lot of hours working to get this Bill passed and if G.E. is awarded an Amtrak order we certainly expect whatever work that can be done at this plant will be done here.

We have a grievance on higher serviced employees being displaced from their Business leader’s area when someone with less service either stays or someone with less service is moved into the area via SERO or any other reason. We don’t believe the local agreement that was negotiated several years ago, or the National agreement was intended for higher service members to lose any benefits, whether it be wages [Grandfather rates] or shift preference or any other benefit that comes with being most Senior. Hopefully this important matter can be resolved before going thru all three stages of the grievance procedure. We take the members seniority issues very serious and will go to great lengths to protect them.

We had over 100 eligible members apply for SEROS but did not get the chance to retire because of their class and code. We have asked the company to sit down with us and give those that want a chance to retire to do so.

Clarification: When Jim Martin Quoted me in the newspaper, the paragraph that stated we have no safety complaints was inaccurate. My response was we had no safety complaints concerning that crane. He agreed to run a retraction in the paper.

Happy New Year

We hope this New Year finds you and yours in the best of health. Needless to say, we hope that (2010) will be better. As we all know, 2009 was a nightmare. It surely was a year that none of us would want to go through again.