City
of Dallas Employees Home Page
North Texas Association of Public Employees
Steel Workers Local 9479
Printable
PDF Format of entire January 2006 Newsletter
Printable
.DOC Format of entire January 2006 Newsletter
Sign
up Cards in .PDF format
Local Nominations
Sought
April
2006 marks the beginning of a new election term for our Local #9479. If
you have ever wished things were run differently, this is your chance to
make a change. Nominations are sought for all positions. We have many
officers retiring and there are plenty of openings that will be incumbent
free.
Nominations
for officers for three year terms will be accepted at our regular monthly
meetings Tuesday, February 14 or Tuesday, March 14th at our local office,
Suite
411
,
3626 N. Hall St
.
Nominations
must be delivered in person in writing from members in good standing only.
To bring nominations to the office (other than the regular meeting), please
call 214-760-7422 to make arrangements. There is usually someone in the
office during the mornings, but not always. Positions
available are:
Executive
Board President,
Vice President, Financial Secretary, Treasurer, Recording Secretary
Other
Positions
Trustee (3 positions), Grievance Co-Chair(2 positions), Guard (2 positions),
Guide
You
can get more information about what each position does by going to http://cityofdallasemployees.com/codebylaws.htm
See Article 5. The only thing different from what is laid out in the bylaws
is that we share a bookkeeper with another local. So the the job of
Financial Secretary is a lot easier than the discription. :) You can also
call the office and ask for a paper copy of these duties to be sent to your
home.
The
election will take place in April. Your participation is important for the
success of our Local.
Appraisal Talkback
Do you
wish you could tell someone what you think of the current merit appraisal
system and how it is affecting your future? Well the good news is that you
can. Councilman Blaydes has requested that employees write City Manager Suhm
and tell her what problems you are having with the current appraisal system.
He is especially interested in how you feel these budget driven rather than
performance driven appraisals will effect your future. He requests that you
send him a copy of the letters (or emails) you send to Ms. Suhm.
Both
he and Councilwoman Garcia were unaware that employees were not Just angry
about the money, but also upset that these lack-luster performance reviews
will affect their job prospects for years to come. Since it is fairly common
for employees to be asked to provide their last few performance reviews when
interviewing for a new job, this problem can follow us for years. Who wants
to take last year’s review with them to a job interview?
Anyhow, this is your chance to point out the problems as you see
them, or just let management know how you feel about the new appraisal
system. Since day to day
employee supervision is over seen by the City Manager, you must address your
messages to Ms. Suhm and send him a copy of that letter. Examples to help
get you started will be posted on our letters page.
Dallas
City Hall
– Mary Suhm
1500 Marilla Street, Room 4EN
Dallas
,
Texas
75201-6390
mary.suhm@dallascityhall.com
Dallas
City Hall
– Bill Blaydes
1500 Marilla Street, Room 5FS
Dallas
,
TX
75201-6390
bill.blaydes@dallascityhall.com
Employee
Safety Net Needed!
Dallas
City Employees currently have no real safety nets.
If you develop a serious or catastrophic illness you are just out of
luck.
Voluntary short and
long term disability programs being sold by private vendors are essentially
worthless for many employees. If
you have high blood pressure or a chronic disease, you are denied coverage.
You can pay into the company for a year (without benefits if needed)
and they might cover you the next year.
However, if the city changes providers, YOU WILL BE OUT OF LUCK
PERIOD! This coupled with the
fact that many civilian workers simply can not afford to even try to
purchase the coverage, because of long term backwards mobility in terms of
wages.
The short term
disability coverage previously provided by the city cost approximately
$250,000 to cover all city workers, that works out to about $20.00 per year
per employee. It was seldom used as it required employees to use 80% of
their own accrued time before
being eligible. Yet it was discontinued as a cost containment measure.
Why? I am sure the employees would have been willing to pay $20 to
have retained this coverage. It
helped the city and its employees avoid problems like those suffered by the
Police officer who recently died with cancer. Is
employee security not worth this small amount of money?
Civilian
workers with many years of experience are retiring in large numbers.
It is likely to be much larger in the next two years.
Private corporations are beginning to realize that they will have
difficulty keeping experienced personnel.
Currently nationwide, valuable employees are being given raises
averaging 3.8% to as high as 10%. This
was quoted recently in economic magazines.
It takes a large number of employees to maintain the complicated
infrastructure of the City departments, and as benefits gradually get more
expensive and less available, workers will only apply with the city if
positions are not available with other employers.
Makes
you wonder what shocks are waiting for employees this year? Our previous
program was cost effective and provided a needed benefit that should be
reinstated. - Concerned
Steelworker Member
Appraisal Ratings
Available
Let’s
face it, the current appraisal system has gone back to the days of
Boss-Buddy-Ratings. Most appraisals are not being done correctly, nor are
they written to be in any way measurable. Worse employees have reported
getting a rah-rah pep talks about how everyone got average ratings, when in
actuality sometimes the people getting the higher ratings are the ones
telling them we are all in this together.
Do
you wish you knew who was rated what in your department? Well you can. It is
extremely easy to request all of this information using the Open
Records Request system. And it isn’t difficult, nor is this
information provided to only certain select groups of people. Anyone can get
it, and it doesn’t cost much at all.
If you
want to know how to file an Open Records
Request to get last years merit ratings, you can CLICK
HERE for easy to follow instructions and a sample of the letter you need
to send. If you can’t get on
the internet, call Scott and ask him to mail the information to you. If for
some reason you don't want to make the request yourself, you can have a
family member or friend make it for you.
Ratings
for this year will not be available for a few more months, but getting last
years ratings will be great practice and quite eye opening for most people.
Enjoy.
Meet
the Manager
During
the November Meet the Manager Meeting City Manager Mary Suhm reports that
the 911 Operators made major improvements in the time it takes calls to be
answered and achieved their performance goals. She then mentioned that goals
would have to be reviewed, because they were possibly not set high enough.
So way to go 911 Employees! But
look out next year.
Suhm
mentioned that we were fortunate this budget year that there were no
increases on health premiums. Huh? This statement pretty much ignored the 24
percent of the employees who were signed up with the Blue Cross HMO program
and saw rate increases of 35 to 60 percent. When this was pointed out to her
she got a bit testy and said that employee could choose the other plan and
have their payments stay the same.
Hummm,
so all of us who needed to stay with our HMO are responsible for our
premiums going up? She feels we could have taken the lesser plan and not had
an increase. Bad Employees who
did not want decreasing levels of coverage!
An
audience member suggested that the city look at combining Health Insurance
purchasing power with
Dallas
County
. Suhm said that we are so
large our self that there is not much savings there.
Another problem here that she didn’t mention is that the city
contributes less per individual than the county does, even if we were on the
same plans, our rates would be much higher.
The
healthcare pricing structure was then questioned. Suhm was asked why the
person with two kids paid the same as someone with ten. She stated that this
was just a decision that was made to keep health care affordable for the
employees who need more coverage.
There
was no mention of who makes these decisions or why the increased costs were
being paid by other employees rather than being absorbed by the city. After
all, this is something that the city uses as a benefit to entice people to
work for it, so why are individual employees footing so much of the bill for
their co-workers? Also not
mentioned was who decided that HMO coverage for employee with dependants
would have their rate go up 35 percent, but that the heavier hit would be
borne by single coverage employees who’s rates will go up by 65 percent?
(Ed. Note: The HMO increase was apparently news to a couple of
council members who thought that they had held rates steady this year.
Wrong.)
An
employee with 15 years of service complained that the new hires that she had
to train were coming in at a higher hourly rate than she received. Suhm
acknowledged that this was a problem, but all directors trying to bring
someone in at higher than the median rate have to justify it to her. She
also acknowledged that this is not be much comfort to the employees who have
spent years getting to the median rate, but assured the employee that it
seldom happens. And she said it with a straight face. Way to go Ms. Suhm!
She danced around this one a bit more, but it basically comes down to the
fact that due to the all the benefit cuts making it difficult to fill city
positions at normal starting salaries there is not much savings when
replacing older more expensive employees who are quitting or retiring.
When
discussing the merit raises this year Suhm was informed by several employees
that the ‘buddy’ system of merit increases was back in full force. She
became quite agitated when several people told her that they were informed
that last years merit was going to be 2 percent across the board.
She said that this year was from 0 to 6 percent, but did not mention
that the ratings would only be 0, 1, 3, 5 and 6. What is wrong with 2 and 4?
Too much swing room in the middle? No way to make sure that there is not
merit creep? Who knows? Grades will be abysmally bad, normal or very good,
with not a lot of middle ground.
Suhm
also stated that she doesn’t believe in cost of living adjustments unless
inflation increases by ten or eleven percent per year. While acknowledging
that merits alone have
not kept up with rising costs, she has still doesn’t believe in COLA’s.
I guess this means a lot of employees need to learn how not to believe in
being able to afford car insurance, electricity, paid property taxes or warm
houses in the winter. – M.R.
Frey
Snipletts!
End
of year raffle Remember at the last meeting of the year you get one
raffle chance for every meeting or work session you sign in for.
Make six meetings, get six chances. So congratulations to the
members who were present at the December meeting when their names were
drawn for the gift certificates from Target, Best Buy and Chili’s.
Dallas
County
Health Benefits - A recent health benefit costs comparison was made recently with
Dallas
County
workers.
They pay $10.50 a pay for single coverage PPO with a $250 deductible.
What is wrong with this picture?
Currently costs involving utilization of the Lawson System are taken
out of employee benefits. These
are costs involved with maintenance of a computer network.
Why are these costs being taken from employee benefits?
This has resulted in huge increases to the employees and retirees for
health insurance. The City of
Dallas
ranks close to the bottom
in comparison with other cities employee benefits.
A comparison study approximately two years ago confirms this fact.
Appraisal Comments Available –
After those odd statistics that the city manager provided to
the city council about how employees liked last years appraisal process,
many people are curious as to what the employee comments on that survey
were. One of the reasons they were curious is that many of the questions
asked were not indicative of what we would have asked, and many of the
answers that you HAD to choose from were not really what we wanted to
answer. To make things more interesting, if you disliked a question or the
answers you were given to choose from, you COULD NOT skip that question. You
had to answer it to continue.
So a lot of people got very vocal with their comments. Amazingly almost
half of the employees answering the survey on the internet left comments for
H.R. That is a huge percentage
and not surprisingly the reason so many people left the comments was to let H.R. know how bad they thought the Appraisal Process
was. Naturally a copy of these
comments in an easy to sort excel file will be provided to council. Perhaps
this will counter the rosy view that they are being given by management. If
you want to see the comments, you can find them on our website left side
menu or CLICK HERE
Recruitment
Bonus -
Congratulations to E. Horn, H. Lara, J. Scantlan who recently received their
Member Recruitment Bonus at the October meeting. Remember, if you sign
someone up, pop your name on the side of the signup card so you can receive
credit and receive a bonus also.
Workplace
Violence - The
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which now recognizes
bullying as a form of workplace violence, released a study last year that
showed 24.5 percent of the 516 companies surveyed reported that some degree
of bullying had occurred there during the preceding year. Of the most recent
incidents, 39.2 percent involved an employee as the aggressor, 24.5 percent
a customer and 14.7 percent a supervisor.
Former
Member Retires – A Medical Disability Pension has been granted to our own
Billy Gowan, formally of Streets Operations, Flood Control Division. Billy
misses us and is always glad to hear from his former friends and co-workers.
If you want to drop him a note you can mail it to him at 1810 Dewitt, Irving
Texas 79062
Employee
Benefits Taskforce - Meetings
begin the 16th. Low morale especially among the civilian workers due to the
lack of wage increases to cover last year’s increases in health care and
pension will doubtless be discussed. Oh, and the Wellness Centers, gotta
talk about those.
Henderson’s
Chicken is Back!
– Okay, so this is not union news, but it is of importance to a lot of
us who work in South East Dallas! As a lot of you know,
Henderson
’s
has always been very nice in letting us post notices and newsletters at
their facility in the past, so we are happy to assist them in getting
the word out. Their new location is
3103
Grand Ave
,
214-421-1777 – Welcome Back, we missed you!
**********
What have
unions done for me? - The American concept of the weekend has its
roots in labor union attempts to accommodate Jewish workers who took
Saturday instead of Sunday as their Sabbath. The first five-day workweek
was instituted by a
New England
spinning mill for just this reason. Despite a boost from the Ford
Automobile company closing
their factories on Saturdays, it wasn't until 1940 that the two-day
weekend officially began nationwide.
The Time to Join is Now!
Don’t
forget about the 30 day waiting period on certain services for new members.
We don’t want anyone to miss out on assistance should they need it. The
time to join is now, so you will already be a member before any problem that
you need help with occurs.
