While we do have other negotiations set for this week, we do not have any negotiations scheduled on the one percent owed from the last contract.

We have to assume the Mayor is busy with the election. He's right, that is very important.

The Organization of Staff Analysts would like to run a telephone campaign on behalf of our candidate for Mayor. If you are willing to help on this campaign, we are planning to make calls to our own members this Thursday and Friday evening, on the weekend and Monday and Tuesday to follow.

If you are willing, please call George Morgan at the union office for details and so we can schedule you on the phones.

If you can give one evening or a few hours on the weekend, we will be most grateful and you will be doing a good deed for yourself and your union.

There will be coffee and cake and each volunteer who helps out will be given an OSA mug to take home as a symbol of their electoral effort.

Our candidate for Mayor is, of course, Freddy Ferrer and since he is not able to match the incumbent dollar for dollar on TV, we can only try to add ourselves to the equation. With your help, we will do so.

Please call George Morgan to volunteer.

There is no news yet on our negotiations for the one percent, so we are going to assume the Mayor is awaiting the election before serious negotiations go forward.

Retired members who are Medicare-eligible recently received notice from the City of changes due to Medicare D. The basic message was, as expected, that members who are covered need take no action in order to continue drug coverage under their current health plan. Left unstated were the details of the new drug coverage rules for those plans. Instead, members were referred to the website for each plan for those details. One point that was made was that the cost of the drug premiums was decreasing for each of the plans due to the support of government funding.

Check back again in mid-week, just in case we get some more word on negotiations.

The short Columbus Day week was uneventful at OSA. The City, having completed the teachers' contract, did not rush to give us a new date for our negotiations on the 1% owed us.

Check back next week when, perhaps, there will be news of significance.

Happy Columbus Day.

Negotiations on the one percent advanced, sort of, last week. The City has calculated that OSA would have to identify 82 positions in the Police Department that would be less expensive if staffed by an Analyst in order to begin to qualify for the one percent in productivity savings. In addition, OSA was asked to specify areas of contracting-in that would occupy the time of 102 on-board Analysts rather than outside vendor employees. Finally, the City rejected our offer of voluntary furloughs as a mutually beneficial aid to productivity.

The union negotiating team is not sure if the City is serious or just suffering from a severe case of mayoral election fever.

On the off-chance the City is serious, our negotiating team cited numerous offices in each uniformed agency that are currently staffed by both Analysts and higher ranking uniformed employees. We are also prepared to review every contract offered by the City to nail down the hundreds of jobs given out to politically well-connected vendors every year.

Speaking more seriously yet, the union noted that the joint committee established to seek productivity savings never did meet during the entire duration of the now-expired contract.

We also noted that there is an arbitration clause available to us in the side-letter that talks of the one percent from the last contract. The only condition we need to meet to proceed to arbitration is the inability or unwillingness of the City to bargain fairly with us. A quick glance at the calendar confirms that the City is making our case for us day-by-day, with their continued inaction.

The next session is not yet scheduled, but now that the teachers' deal is set, there is no valid excuse for further delay.

One bit of good news came last week. A report was received that four appointments to Associate Staff Analyst were made at DOT. If the report is correct, that is some help.

We would like to report on the results of last week's contract negotiations, but we can't, because the negotiations were cancelled at the last minute. Apparently, the United Federation of Teachers' negotiations took precedence.

Okay. We're on again for this Friday. This time, follow the newspapers this week. If the Mayor settles with the UFT that might be good.

Next week we may have some progress to report. We certainly hope so anyway.