Here's where you can access the 353-page contract for Wisconsin state workers represented by AFSCME, the nation's largest public employees union.
If you want to hit a few of the high (low?) points, go to page 60 and learn how employees are granted "reasonable and adequate personal wash-up time" prior to meal breaks and at the end of a shift. Obviously this has to be a bargained issue because we can't expect competent workers to do this in a discretionary time frame, nor their supervisors to allow them to do so.
Skip a bit further down the page and learn how, if employees are called back to work after leaving or asked to come in on a day off, they are guaranteed a minimum of 2-1/2 hours of pay or four hours of work with pay. This means that, if an employee is called into work on their day off to locate a file, for example, they get paid for 2-1/2 hours even if the task takes only five minutes. Where else in the world does this occur? If your boss calls you into work on an off-day, what else do you get besides a "thanks" and pay for your actual time worked?
Heard enough? Of course not. Let's go to page 171, where the "Employee Benefits" section starts. Here's where you'll see how state AFSCME employees can get family health insurance coverage for as little as $78 a month in premium sharing!
Don't run away just yet - we still have the "Sick Leave" section, which starts on page 173. Here's where you'll learn how unused sick leave is accrued throughout an employee's career. When they retire, the accrued amount is converted to an account that is used to pay for continuing health insurance coverage! Obviously the term COBRA - well-known to private-sector workers in this hard-hitting recession - is not in the state employees' vernacular.
There's a lot more to be explored here, but be warned: Do so at the risk of your head exploding. And unless you have state employee health insurance coverage, that could be a real problem.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Makes you wonder why everyone doesn't run out and sign up as a state employee.
ReplyDeleteAdd all the government employee union over reaches(add I agree there are many)together, and it still pales in comparison to the abuse some in the financial industry have let loose on our economy. I would love to see an equal amount of outrage over AIG, etc. $160B from gov't so far for AIG and AIG is still paying bonuses. Bonuses for what, just showing up? They clearly did not do their job or AIG would not be in this mess. I wonder how much the bonuses are in a good year?
ReplyDeleteAIGs justification for paying out millions of taxpayer dollars in bonuses is that it helps them retain highly skilled (a definition of which is worth its own blog) employees. Except they forgot to make actually staying with AIG for the following year a clause of the "Inviolable Contract" and a number of executives took their 100's of thousands or their millions and ran.
ReplyDelete