At a meeting of the Municipal Labor Coalition last week, Randi Weingarten reported that the State AFL-CIO will be seeking pension improvements this year. The two areas targeted both concern the cost-of-living-adjustment rules. As matters now stand, the MLC was able to obtain a COLA for City retirees a few years back, but the formula used only covers up to the first 6% of inflation, only raises the retirement pension by half of the actual rate of inflation and only applies to the first $18,000 of pension. It was a nice victory, but it needs improvement. The goal now is to increase the dollar amount covered and/or to raise the inflation protection to 100%.

In addition, we also learned from Mary O’Connell of DC37 that legislation will be submitted soon to seek a reasonable delay in implementation of the rulings derived from the City of Long Beach case. As members are aware, the City of Long Beach court case has led to some City agencies pushing provisional employees back to their permanent civil service titles. The result, in a few cases, is to have a provisional Associate Staff Analyst, who will be on the list when it comes out, being reduced to Staff Analyst while waiting for the list to come out. That is nuts and, to get even nuttier, another agency is hiring provisional Associate Staff Analysts and warning them that their job will only last nine months.

Mary stated that, unlike the prior bill seeking to provide a reasonable time period to react to the Long Beach decision, the one now being submitted is likely to be signed by Governor Spitzer. If so, the City will have up to five years to give all the needed exams, and this makes sense.

Finally, don’t forget the September membership meeting this Thursday at the union office. There will be an in-depth report on the efforts going forward to settle our contract and, also, a report on the unfair labor practice case brought by us on that same topic.

Our negotiations team is again meeting with the City on the 25th of the month on the topic of the one percent. We keep offering savings; they keep delaying and delaying. Our unfair labor practice is going forward in the meantime.

Usually, at this time, we have a long list of people who marched in the Labor Day Parade and held our banner high. This year, there was, sadly, no parade. Our banner was flying, however, at a demonstration on Saturday at the World Trade Center site and special mention goes to Jay Warshofsky, Janice Sweet, Jonelle Taylor, Betty Lee and Rob Spencer who represented us there.

The union business lately transacted has been minimal, as we awaited the resumption of our old battles with the City. Today, we learned that the City is postponing the meeting on the one percent, which it had scheduled for tomorrow, the eleventh, so we cannot even trumpet that today.

We would like to remind you to look through the Summer mailing and deal with any coupons you intend to use. We have a coupon for drivers ed, a coupon for a writing class, a transfer coupon, a coupon for a stop-smoking class, pre-retirement seminar, political action committee, quality of work life committee, and so on. Look through the mailing and deal with the coupons now before you forget.

If you have already spilled your coffee on the coupon you want to use, you can download a fresh copy from the Member Services section of this website.