We hope your Memorial Day weekend was restful and pleasant.

Mail went out last week and should be received by you soon. If it does not come, call George at the union office and he will check your address and send you a copy. The contents are also posted ont his website as the May edition of the OSA Newsletter.

JOHN LIU FOR MAYOR

Last Wednesday evening, the Executive Board of OSA and OSART voted unanimously to recommend a candidate for mayor. We like a number of candidates running for that position, but one candidate has stood out over the past four years. When the stock market fell, there was a need to increase the pension contributions from the city. Instead, our mayor urged cutting our pensions and issued press releases implying that our increasing benefits had caused the problem.

Our benefits had not increased. The mayor was lying, yet the media repeated his lies over and over again. It took the Comptroller of the City of New York to tell the truth, that the problem was Wall Street’s temporary decline and not our benefits. He told the truth and we like that.

The comptroller also listened when we complained about the wasteful fraud-ridden project called City Time. The mayor kept saying that we were wrong, but as it turned out, both we and the comptroller were right.

For those and other incidents over the past four years, we have come to think very well of the city comptroller and we are pleased to have the leadership of OSA and OSART endorsing John Liu for mayor.

You can read the press release for our endorsement at this link.

Our regular membership meeting is this Thursday at 220 East 23rd Street and there will be a presentation on the Affordable Care Act and other changes that will impact our welfare fund

Good news this week. One of our members, Cheryl Hodge, a traffic manager, received the prestigious Sloan Award from the Fund for the City of New York. A certificate, presented by Mayor Bloomberg, was given at a ceremony at Cooper Union and comes with a $10,000 award as well. Cheryl’s write-up in the Chief-Leader of May 17th notes her 25 years of experience and the fact that she commands 365 traffic enforcement agents. Also mentioned is the work she did after 9/11, a six month period of 14 hour days clearing paths around the wreckage.

You can read the full article from the Chief Leader by clicking on this link.

There is some irony here, since it was the city’s refusal to recognize and compensate Traffic Enforcement Managers at that time that led to their forming a union and joining the Organization of Staff Analysts. It is also sad to note that the mayor who handed Cheryl the award has also caused Cheryl and her brothers and sisters in Traffic Enforcement and School Safety to be the only members of OSA to miss out on the 4% and 4% and 0.1% raises the rest of us received. They are due that money and we expect the next mayor will agree to pay it retroactively but, in the meantime, it was nice that Cheryl did receive the recognition that she deserves.

The Municipal Labor Committee steering committee listened to a presentation by Deputy Mayor Cass Holloway last week. The mayor wants us to have a new health plan. Copies of his proposal will be available at our membership meeting on May 30th.

If you can’t wait to hear the details, the mayor is once again trying to help us be good little civil servants. He is planning to charge a fee for those who smoke or eat too much or do anything of which he disapproves. This is allegedly meant to help us and he is acting out of love, that is out of his love for our money.

Lest we doubt his motivation, consider his famous, personal, widely celebrated, loudly proclaimed crusade against guns.

Last week, the retirement system trustees voted to divest the system of all stock in gun manufacturers. The mayor told his trustee to vote against selling the stock because, after all, it was doing well. (You might wish to read the Daily News article on the subject which can be found at this link.)

Of course, the mayor is supposed to be negotiating any health changes with us, but since we seem to be strangely unwilling to assist him in doing ourselves in, he appears to think he can go it alone.

We remember his earlier efforts to destroy civil service and to fire all the old teachers and, as far back as ten years ago, to get us to give him $600,000,000 recurring.

He is really trying – very, very trying

Mayor Bloomberg is pushing for a new health care arrangement for all City workers. We had a meeting last week with the threatened Emblem Health and we will have one this week with the City Labor Commissioner Jim Hanley, speaking for the Mayor. Basically, the Mayor is seeking to get us to pay for our basic health benefits.

We do not think the Mayor is legally allowed to make these decisions without consulting and negotiating with us and he is running out of time. More, as this develops.

This Tuesday, members of the Municipal Credit Union will get to vote on candidates for the board of directors. Two of those candidates reached out to us and, based upon interviews and past records of accomplishment, they merit our recommendation.

OSA recommends Tom Diana and Beryl Major for the board of directors. Voting will be at the Hilton Hotel at 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue from 1pm to 7pm. Members are definitely encouraged to vote.

Finally, our thanks to those members who were able to make the May 1st rally and march. They were heroes.

P.S. Check out some newly posted material in the "Articles of Interest" section of this website, much of it from an excellent recent issue of The Nation magazine.