Looking for Useful Stuff in Free Brochures and Newspapers

I retired at the end of November last year, but I still get my union's newsletters in the mail, as if I am somehow still listed somewhere as a member.  Let's see...this one is titled "Florida Postal Worker", representing the American Postal Workers Union of Florida.  Good enough, let's open it up and see what's inside. Headline item: Ratification Happens...the new collective bargaining agreement has been overwhelmingly ratified by the rank and file.  On turning the page, there is an article on how to avoid scams, an anti-Trump piece titled "No Kings in America", and an urging for members to contact their elected representatives with their opinions. Then there's list of 30 reasons to thank unions, a section listing general guidelines for emergency preparedness, an article about the APWU Auxiliary, and a few other trailing articles. Overall I found this issue to be informative and potentially helpful, assuming I come back to it and refer to it.  I think this idea of picking up a piece of literature like a brochure or newsletter and determining whether or not it contains anything of value is constructive...future such blog articles are in the works for other publications...

Need to Learn Robert's Rules of Order

I regularly watch the televised proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate on C-Span1 and C-Span 2.  Sometimes, though, I get confused and lost as to what exactly they are talking about...tabling, reconsidering, quorum, objections...these and many other aspects of parliamentary-constructed meetings are obviously necessary, since they are used so much.  Yet I don't know all the ins-and-outs on when, how...and, most importantly...why they are used.  My own union local also uses the rules of order, and having started attending its bi-monthly meetings in September, I am similarly taken a little aback at how the proceedings flow there.  Supposedly, Robert's Rules of Order lay out everything one needs to know regarding how to conduct such meetings, and I feel it's about time I learned them.  Of course, sometimes in these assemblies the rules can get to be stretched or overlooked, and it's always good that the participants go into them with a spirit of comity, which is the attitude and expression of mutual courtesy and respect.  Sometimes this can be difficult with some folks by their nature, and also the degree of familiarity they might feel about those with whom they are attending.  I do know from watching the U.S. Senate for some sixteen years that it is possible to engage in some pretty passionate verbal combat on some issues while at the same time maintaining a sense of at least formally-expressed goodwill toward the opposing speaker, being deliberately generous with praise...and absolutely NO criticism or animosity on a personal level.  So order and civility go hand in hand in formal meetings, be they legislative, labor, or any other kind...it's probably a good idea to become well-trained in both...

Quote of the Week...from Donald Trump

We must have universal health care. Just imagine the improved quality of life for our society as a whole...The Canadian-style, single-payer system...helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans...There are fewer medical lawsuits, less loss of labor to sickness, and lower costs to companies paying for the medical care of their employees.                ---Donald Trump

Yes, our current president, who seems to have gone in the diametrically opposite direction from this 2000 quote with his national health care agenda, at one time was strongly in favor of the kind of universal, single-payer health care systems almost all of the world's developed countries use.  He also stated back then that this is the one big issue that he, although mainly conservative, was liberal about.  The above quote of his I took from a reprint in my bi-monthly union magazine of an editorial article written by my union president Mark Dimondstein.  In his article Dimondstein laid out the reasons for the United States to join the rest of the civilized world and deem health care to be a right and not a privilege...and to free its people from the financial bondage and uncertainty imposed by our current health insurance system, be it Obamacare, Trumpcare, or what we had before.  I would make one correction to Trump's earlier stance on this issue: I believe that universal health care should be embraced by conservatives as being compatible with their political philosophy, and here are some points to make in that regard...

1-Businesses would be shed of the red tape and financial burden of providing health insurance.
2-Universal health care encourages job-changing, risk-taking, and entrepreneurialism by those in mid-life and/or with pre-existing conditions...or by those related to such an individual.
3-Deprives liberals of what conservatives often see as "divide and conquer" political strategy by demographic groups.
4-Gives people a greater sense of liberty with their lives...they can invest their money back into the economy.
5-Insurance companies provide no health services but add greatly to the total cost of care as a middleman between provider and patient.

And how does this all get funded? Well, this is where the "modern" conservative, for whom the expression "raise taxes" is anathema, and I part ways: you fund it by raising taxes. The net effect, though, will be to reduce health care expenses, provide universal coverage, and end catastrophic medical events in people's families leading to personal bankruptcy...

As Mark Dimondstein wrote in his article, and our current president implied with his remark 17 years ago, we need as a nation to decide whether health care is a right or a privilege.  If it is the former, then let's get down to business creating a universal health care system modeled after the most successful countries that employ it.  If is the latter, let's go back to the way it was before the Affordable Care Act and let the marketplace freely determine its financing.  The way things are now is an unholy, messed-up mishmash of both approaches, whether you call it Obamacare or Trumpcare...

Foundational Documents, Their Interpretation, and the Living-Out, Part 1

Back in the late 1980s when I began to work for the post office, whose employees work under separate collective bargaining agreements between management and four different unions, my own union gave each member a copy of the then-current collective bargaining agreement...a compact, easy-to-tote paperback volume.  As I was reading through it one day I noticed what seemed to me to be a rule that was being flagrantly violated as it pertained to certain individuals being eligible to bid by seniority on posted job assignments.  I brought this up to my reluctant union steward, who dissuaded me from pressing the issue and introduced me to the concept of "letters of understanding".  In many sections of the agreement, whenever a dispute occurs over a passage's meaning and application, a process has to be taken whereby the passage is more precisely interpreted and delineated as to how it applies in the real world of management-employee relations.  So going around waving the collective bargaining agreement in people's faces...as if one thoroughly understood the process...is pointless.  Because the collective body of precedent and refinement contained within the massive amount of those letters of understanding...along with laws and regulations that can supersede elements of the agreement...make it all much more cumbersome to deal with: that little paperback book turned out to be only the starting place...

I bring up my old collective bargaining agreement as just one example of a foundational document that, while important as creating a structure of rules and/or knowledge in a particular area, is also in itself incomplete...needing much interpretation as those trying to implement it live it out in the real world.  Our society is full of these documents...our Constitution is a prime example, as are the scriptures on which different faiths are based.  And to be perfectly frank, although these often tend to be treated as original in nature, in fact they have their own precedents from which they were derived.  So a televangelist may casually wave the Bible around onstage or a Senator may thrust out his pocket-sized copy of the Constitution during a floor speech...as if that's the be-all and end-all to everything...but there's a lot more to these works, what they represent, and where they came from... 

I'm not sure whether I'll make this discussion of foundational documents a weekly topic or whether I'll just write about it from time to time...in any event, there's more to come...

Senators Talking Past Each Other in Labor Rules Changes Debate

The National Labor Relations Board, a Federal government agency, recently updated its rules concerning holding elections in businesses to determine whether or not their employees want to form a union and engage in collective bargaining with their employers.  It had been several years since any changes in the rules were made, and the stated aim of the revisions was to bring the Board's policies more in line with the computer technology so prevalent today in communications.  The Republican Party has taken issue with these changes, as I saw the other day in a US Senate debate on the subject (shown on TV's C-Span2).  Speaker after speaker, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, would get up and refer to the actions as authorizing "ambush" elections with their new 11-day deadline for elections to be held once the employer is notified...and that something more reasonable like 30 days would be fair for both sides.  That sounds reasonable to me, but then the Democratic senators got up in opposition to the Republicans' proposed rescinding of these new rules and, instead of focusing on the new 11-day limit, kept going on and on about how important in this day and age unionizing elections need to be electronicized to keep up with how business is now almost universally done...and why do the Republicans oppose the newly-authorized use of e-mail and the Internet for this application?  They also repeatedly recited the history of the labor movement and emphasized how important collective bargaining had been for the growth of the American middle class in the last century...and how the National Labor Relations Board, begun under Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, was instrumental in ensuring a fair process.  Then Republican Senator Lamar Alexander got up and said no, that the new rules were against the middle class because it put the several hundred thousand franchise owners at a big disadvantage...with a different part of the rule changes that seemed to force the umbrella company to unionize if a smaller franchise site did.  H-m-m...

I'm no expert on government regulations and labor law...and I didn't read the proposed Republican Senate bill.  So I'm not in a position to judge the merits of these arguments, although I will say that in recent years, the Republican Party has become virulently anti-union and would like nothing better than to see all unions abolished and the organized labor movement destroyed.  But I do recognize when two sides in a debate are doing little other than talking past each other at the special interests to whom they are beholden.  It seems to me that with this proposed legislation, whose outcome I don't know about, it would have been better served going first to a Senate committee where the two sides could express their biggest objections and a compromise could have been reached that would have received enough votes to pass and get the President's signature...

Union Meeting Attendance Strategy Revisited

Back on 11/21/08 I wrote an article titled The "What If" Fallacy, examining the attendance strategy of my union local. To increase attendance, they have a drawing each meeting, the winner receiving a hefty sum of money. If the one whose name is drawn isn't present, they don't win anything and their name is shown at work on the union bulletin board (I suppose to publicly humiliate them). The amount to win in the attendance drawing is increased with each meeting if not claimed. Once someone succeeds in winning a drawing, the total offered in the next meeting reverts back to a nominal $50. To be eligible for the drawing, all one has to do is be a (local) union member. I examined the flaws in the argument for this attendance strategy in the previous article (hit the link to read it). Now I have some new information on the drawing that, in my opinion, makes it even more flawed.

Union officers and stewards are expected to attend these union meetings. Photos from my local's newsletter reflects this: the attendees are heavily weighted with officers and stewards (and they tend to be the ones winning the drawing), with a few (very few) rank and file members sprinkled in [correction: executive board officers don't take part in the drawing--thanks, Brian]. This is probably just as well, since there really isn't very much room at the meeting site to accommodate more than a handful of people anyway. But to spur greater attendance, anyone attending a meeting gets an extra entry in the drawing for each meeting they attend. So if I, say, attended 5 meetings, then I would have my name in the drawing "pot" on 6 pieces of paper, greatly increasing my odds of winning, a clear incentive to attend. On the other hand, if I attend the meetings and want to win the drawing, then the last thing I would want is for others to start attending since their names would also be multiplied in the pot, thereby reducing my own chances of winning. So what we end up with is a few people faithfully attending meetings while not exactly wholeheartedly encouraging others to join them. I don't think that's what the creators of this scheme had in mind...

Maybe I'm sounding a little cynical about all this. After all, shouldn't we just show our "union spirit" and attend meetings for their own sake? But it wasn't me who concocted and implemented this attendance drawing strategy. And I probably would never had commented on it were it not for the continuing deplorable practice of publicizing the drawings' "losers".

The “What If” Fallacy

I belong to a union at my work place. Each month, my union local holds a meeting for officers, stewards, and any members who would like to attend. Normally, few people attend these meetings (I used to but they were so boring that I just wanted to pull all the hair out of my head). They want to encourage a large attendance, so as an incentive, they hold a drawing each meeting. Any attending member (there are 300+ members) stands an equal chance of winning the prize, which increases each month if not won. Currently, I believe the drawing prize stands at $250.

In order to further motivate members to attend meetings, my union decided to print out the name of the member that was drawn, whether or not they were present to win the prize, and display it on the bulletin board at work for everyone to see. The reasoning for this is obvious: if member “Sally G” had shown up, she would have won the prize, and how oh-so-foolish she was not to attend! So don’t look foolish like Sally G! Attend meetings!

But if member Sally G, who now feels thoroughly humiliated and angry that the union plastered her name on the bulletin board, had actually attended the meeting, would she have still won the drawing? Even if she hadn’t been an active participant and only said “hi” to a few people and sat down in the back, that would have been enough of a chain of events to completely alter the actions of those in the union hall. And by the time that the drawing was held, someone else’s name would doubtless have been picked. And Sally G also doubtless would have said to herself “These meetings are a waste of my time” and someone else would have been singled out for non-attendance.

Plus, who’s to say that someone may not have caused an accident with Sally G on the way to the meeting. There are also remote odds for that happening as well, but it is still almost like taking a drawing each time you go out on the open road. Plus, Sally’s presence at the meeting would have meant her absence in wherever she would have been, and that may have a probability of something bad happening as well.

But the main point is that you cannot surgically and retroactively insert yourself or another into a past situation and then ignore the effects that the new presence would cause on the chain of events. There was a very disturbing but profound Star Trek: The Next Generation episode titled Tapestry. In it Captain Picard, regretting the folly of his youth, wishes that he could go back to a specific point in his past and rectify a reckless decision he once made that got him into a fight and caused him to lose his heart (he “now” uses an artificial one). His “friend” Q pops in on the scene and shows him what would have happened had his wish been granted. It would have completely changed his life to something Picard abhorred. So he came to peace with his past decisions, even the "wrong" ones, and went on with his life (and his artificial heart).

There's nothing wrong with wanting to increase attendance. Just try to be a little more reasonable and respectful of those whose attendance you yearn for!