On September 15, 2010, the World Trade Center Environmental Health Center at Bellevue, Gouverneur and Elmhurst Hospitals - the Center of Excellence treating area workers, residents and students whose health has been harmed by the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks - will be holding an educational forum at the City University of New York's Graduate Center at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street from 6 to 9pm. Doors open at 5pm. If you have health effects from 9/11, you are encouraged to attend. For more information and to register, you can visit this website.

Local 420 of DC37 AFSCME is staging a rally against privatization of services by the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation on Wednesday, August 25th at 4pm in front of 125 Worth Street. Members of other city unions, including OSA, have been invited to attend. You can view a flyer announcing the rally by clicking this link. If you can attend the rally, please do so. It's a good cause - the preservation of public services and public sector jobs.

We had some really good news last week. The Organization of Staff Analysts and Related Titles (OSART), our parent professional organization, has as its purpose the achievement of three goals: analysts helping analysts, gaining permanent status for provisional analysts, and entitling more analysts to be covered for collective bargaining status.

OSART had a major victory in that third goal last week. The Office of Collective Bargaining, after years of hearings, surveys and testimony, has agreed that hundreds of additional analysts, Admins Levels II and III, will be allowed to represented by the Organization of Staff Analysts, the union.

Those affected will now be entitled to paid overtime rather than compensatory time. They will have the right to grieve any mistreatment or wrongdoing by their superiors and will be defended by the union in case of disciplinary charges or proceedings.

As fast as we have a full list of the new members’ home addresses, mail will be sent out with more details about the changeover.

Since the OSA Welfare Fund largely matches the Management Benefits Fund, there should be no disruption or changes in most cases relating to benefits.

We owe a debt to Executive Director Sheila Gorsky, and to our legal counsels, Len Shrier (current) and Joan Kiok (former), to our union lawyers Lauren Shapiro and Adam Orgel (current) and Meaghan Murphy (former), and especially to our OSART members - Administrative Analysts who knew we could and would succeed, even when the process took far too many years. Good job all around. You can read an article about the Office of Collective Bargaining's decision in The Chief newspaper by clicking this link.

Finally, if you enjoy Mott's Apple Sauce or juice products, please think twice about buying them while a strike is going on at the Mott's plant in upstate New York. On May 23, over 300 full time manufacturing workers at the Mott’s plant in Williamson, New York, were forced out on strike after company executives demanded painful wage cuts while Mott's, which is a part of Dr. Pepper/Snapple, enjoyed a record year of $555 million in profits. You can read more about the strike at this link:

Mott's Strike Information

and you can view two video clips about the strike below:

There was no bad news last week, which was news in itself. The Mayor is talking about rearranging all central office areas for more efficiency and cost savings. Such talk can worry those of us around for prior reorganizations, but we will have to let the Mayor work out his details before we can find any fault with the plans. We’ll see.

An interesting and relevant article and editorial from The Chief newspaper published last week can be read at these links: Mayoral Deputy Comes Out Shootin' and The Goldsmith Standard Take special note of the Deputy Mayor's attack on the civil service merit system and his belief that "'merit promotions' - subjective decisions sometimes based on nepotism and cronyism that civil service was designed to forestall - would be better than promotions based on tests." We don't think so.