| OSA Newsline -- February 24, 2020
The City kept their word and our next meeting on the contract is March 3rd with more meetings promised for March.
The March 3rd meeting will deal with some thorny problems that developed at the Department of Transportation. This meeting is unusual in that we expect the Agency to support the union's position and demands.
On another front, two of our demands related specifically to our Health and Hospitals Corporation members seem to be on their way to successful resolution even before the contract is completed. That is good.
Finally, we met recently with the New York City Comptroller and are hopeful that an alternate work schedule will soon be offered to many or most of our members at that office.
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We wish all a good Presidents Day holiday on Monday.
At our negotiation session last week, the City ploughed on with detailed discussion of how the contract will effect all of our various titles. Now, that was valuable, but we were actually more interested in how much longer will this process take?
To our satisfaction, the City does seem willing to speed matters up. Deputy Commissioner Lake reported that she is trying to schedule two or three meetings for this March. She did recite the difficulties she has been having getting all of the management negotiating team to the table.
We can be sympathetic to those difficulties. However, the best we can do is to reaffirm our offer for our side to show up days, nights or weekends - if that would help at all. Still, we do like their new desire to complete the process. Let's hope for the best.
Early reports from the Administrative Staff Analyst exam are unfortunate. The exam was too long for the time allowed, and one or more of the questions may have been incomplete and have had no answer at all. Still others report that some of the questions were opinionated rather than objective.
Ouch. No problem except for the distress caused to the test takers.
All candidates can and should register for the protest session so the exam flaws can be pointed out and, hopefully, somewhat corrected.
Members also must remember that this is a competitive exam and if you did not have enough time, probably neither did your fellow candidates.
At the end, DCAS will need enough successful candidates to meet agency needs. Thus, if there are widespread failures, DCAS may decide to curve the exam scores so more candidates score as passing.
But, please, in the meantime, do protest.
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Three items this week.
First, the City has confirmed that our negotiating session for next Friday the 14th is going forward. Since that is Valentine's Day, we are considering bringing candy or flowers in order to speed up the process.
Next, our office will be closed on February 12th, Lincoln's birthday. The unions traded that holiday for a floating holiday, much to our dismay, many years ago. We had to accept the pattern at the time, but for our office staff we continue to honor Lincoln's memory and we close the office on that day.
Finally, our union has just won a major victory.
As members are aware, five years ago OSA was asked to help five hundred Administrative Nurses gain union status and protections. We were reluctant, but when other unions passed up the chore we felt obligated.
Eventually we sent out our organizers and obtained signed cards from a third of the group and were able to petition on their behalf before the Office of Collective Bargaining.
Since then, we have won the MetroPlus nurses and are well on our way to helping all those still waiting.
Unfortunately, along the way, the Hospitals Corporation chose to fire one of our union activists. We were outraged at the HHC tactic and countered by bringing a case on her behalf before the Office of Collective Bargaining.
It was not expected that we would win.
Gabrielle Martinez and Len Shrier, two of our labor lawyers, took on the case. Now, more than two years later, our union has scored a precedent-setting ruling in our favor.
Our activist is due back salary, full reinstatement to the job, pension credit and annual and sick days for the entire period since she was fired.
Major thanks are due to our legal team -- and we are most pleased that we were able to correct an injustice.
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The City has now rescheduled our next negotiation session for February 14th, but they have done so tentatively, so we will see.
On the other hand, the Transit Authority seems to be making some changes and we were informed of this. We reached out to them and asked the key questions.
Will any of our members be affected in terms of title, hours of work, union coverage or anything else that might hurt them? We were assured that there will be minimal effect on our members and none of the points raised will occur.
Now that sounds good, but all of our Transit Authority members should be alert about any changes going on. We did have some issues with the Transit Authority when they opened the business center.
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