January 17, 2012
The meeting was small, mainly because of the weather. 7 people attended. Don Marable facilitated the meeting as the Alternate Chair.
TEA General Monthly Membership Meeting moved to January 25, 2012. please inform your work units.
Please send an email to your group to have them follow the Council of Representative Meeting Summaries on line at www.teaseattle.org and to forward their issues and concerns to their representative.
Council Chair has made a request that TEA Board members attend C of R meetings when they are able. Adé Franklin attended the meeting and was very informative in speaking generally about the status of TEA.
Communication
Timely and favorable contracts for its members
Enforcement of the contracts
The Board believes that it has done well in the area of communications and Contracts in 2011 and will work to improve the timeliness of the TEA Times.
Another area of priority for 2012 will be enforcement of the contracts’ provision. Concern has been expressed over county hiring practices or promotion practices. As mention above, Adé came to the meeting as a request for some of the board members to be there. He informed us of the process of how the board is still improving the commutations to the members. Doing timely and favorable contracts for members such as transit members.
They did hit on the topic of enforcing the contracts. Such as hiring, communications to all, and timeliness of notices that may not allow all TEA members a chance to compete.
There was a request to the board about having a sit down to re-go over the exempt and non-exempt different. In transit there seems to be a disconnect again why exempt have certain things vs. non-exempt. A member from the transit group asked this request.
Don asked about the ADR process for Transit PMs. I really did not know what that meant. So Ad´ took some time also to explain this to us. Very good info.
Don relayed the message to who all was there about transit contract. Adé felt we are doing much better with this talk than others. We have been pushing forward faster than most years with transit contracts. So he felt this was good news.
Transit initiating an ADR process for Project Managers/PM Management to address issues around improving working relations. Admin classifications - petition by Teamsters. Hearing on 1/18 tentative.
Adé said there are some grievances coming soon. But we cannot discuss what they were in particular.
Transit Bargaining status: Arbitration is scheduled with Mr Beck for Dates in late April and a couple additional dates in June if needed.
We are meeting with the county on January 23–24 to see if we can settle any of the outstanding issues.
– Elizabeth (by email)
We have received a proposal from the county. Wages and COLA are the issues. Several other issues have tentative agreements.
Any feedback on Regence Blue Shield or problems with Healthy Incentives? TEA should be documenting any problems members have been having with the new administrator.
Don asked about the admins moving over to teamster. Looks as if they have 30% of admins have express interest. So we just have to wait. There was question about what have we (TEA) have done wrong to cause this; there was a general discussion about that. There was no feedback about the Regence Blue Shield or the health incentives
Adé said there are some coming. But we cannot discuss what they are here. Just kind of say how’s things going. So far so good.