Voting on Proposed Scheduling Changes
Good afternoon,
For those of you who don’t know me my name is Nick Wright, I’m the Labor Relations Manager here at MEA as well as the Officer who covers the Police Department and the Communications LMC.
Recently there have been a few suggestions that have been brought to the LMC that require a majority vote, of MEA members only, prior to the LMC bringing the item forward to the Department to further negotiate. Those two items are the following:
- Shift Bidding going back to a points system for Radios and also doing it for Phones.
- Bidding for your shifts for the entire year instead of every couple of months
Points System
For those of you who aren’t aware, we recently negotiated away the points system which included getting rid of Late Graves at the same time. If points were to come back, there is no guarantee that late graves wouldn’t come back with it. Further, the points system that was utilized in the past would need to be revamped. For one, we have no record of how it was first implemented years ago and secondly there have been changes to City Policies/Procedures and our MOU since points was removed that would need to be taken into consideration. Please note that once you move to a points system you are eliminating choice by seniority. For a full explanation of the points system, I strongly recommend (if you aren’t familiar with it) discussing with an LMC member (Laurie Nachand, Rebecca Day, Eleanor Troupe, Jennifer Duffy, Tonya Neal-Taitague) what it is and how it used to work.
Bidding once a year
Another option that has been brought to us is bidding for all three shifts for the year. The example I can use is Fire Dispatch. They bid for their shifts and vacations for the entire year the August prior. So this August 2024, they will bid on their vacations and shifts for all of 2025, and then do it again in August of 2025, etc. You would, under this proposal, bid for all three of your shift rotations once per year similarly to the Fire Dispatch example.
Neither of these plans could begin to be implemented until 2025, and in the case of points it may take longer, however I also need to identify to all of you that you can’t have both together. Points Bidding doesn’t work with a year long schedule, it would be an administrative never-ending quagmire.
FOR VOTING
In order to maintain confidentiality and in order for me to separate the votes on points for Radio/Phone I will need you to do the following.
- Send an email to nwright@sdmea.org
- Identify yourself by name and classification (so I know if you’re Radio or Phones)
- In the body of the email simply note:
- Points Bidding : Yes/No
- Bidding for Shift Once a Year: Yes/No
The voting will run from Saturday March 23rd to Sunday April 7th.
Should you have any questions please reach out to an LMC member or send me an email. Your vote will not be shared with anyone, they will only be collected and counted by me.
Nick