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BACKGROUND THE REMOVAL MY APPEAL THE ELECTION THE AFTERMATH
I was elected President of Local 2586, Altus AFB, Oklahoma in June 2000. I was as surprised as everyone else that I had actually won. I ran on a platform of change, and promised that I would "give the Union a backbone transplant." I was tired of union stewards who did not adequately represent employees in grievances, and an Executive Board who refused to take issues to arbitration. The Union was no threat to management, and no real benefit for the employees.
In 2000, the Local was under a 1982 Constitution and Bylaws, and there were only three elected offices - President, Vice-president, and Secretary/Treasurer. Nobody ran for the Secretary/Treasurer position, so those duties fell to me.
I had absolutely no experience running a union. I had never even been a steward - not really, I had been appointed to the position, but not allowed to perform the duties. When the Chief Steward chased a member out of the office, calling him a "trouble maker" and telling him that he would get us all fired by filing grievances, I complained to Mike Kelly, who was our National Representative at the time. I was soon fired.
I was so naive in those days - I actually believed that the Union was a calling, and that people made sacrifices for the cause. I put in 24-, 48-, even 72-hour days training myself for my job, and the job of Secretary/Treasurer, as well. I built the Local's library from the ground up - when I took office, we had one outdated copy of Broida, and half of the obsolete Federal Personnel Manual. When I was illegally removed, I had an extensive set of Air Force regulations, US Code, CFR, and scads and scads of reference material - all of them printed, assembled and filed by me and me alone. I had researched case law, FLRA decisions, read trends and conducted exhaustive research, all on my own, and mostly when everyone else was asleep.
In addition to being President, I also had to ensure that the duties of the Secretary and Treasurer were accomplished, although I had absolutely no training, nor even any idea of what I should be trained on. And the books were a mess! I didn't know about audits, budgets, LM-3s, LM-4s, per capita taxes, etc. And I had nobody to give me guidance, because once elections were over, the Secretary/Treasurer hit the ground running, and never looked back. She gave me no turnover, and never even attempted to train her replacement. Since there was nobody to take over her office, I was left holding the bag. When I asked NVP Kelly for help getting the Local's records straightened out, I was given a copy of the AFGE Treasurer's Manual and told "Everything you need to know is in there." If I had been the Treasurer, and those were my only duties, that might have been appropriate, albeit more than a little rude. But I was already working around the clock, and I could not invest the time necessary to become proficient in two more jobs on top of everything else I was already doing! I decided to concentrate on paying the bills and balancing the checkbook.
My complete lack of experience and training for the Secretary/Treasurer duties notwithstanding, I did manage to muddle through somehow, and did a passable job of it, too. In addition to doing the President's job, and the Secretary/Treasurer's job, I also managed to publish the occasional newsletter and establish and maintain the Local's website. And, on top of all that, I also had to process grievances, file ULPs, represent employees in disciplinary and adverse actions - not because I wanted to imitate 'Superwoman', but because the stewards didn't do their jobs. The only reason I didn't fire them all is that I didn't want management to bring up our lack of stewards when the subject came up in the upcoming contract negotiations.
A Chief Steward was appointed, and he, the Vice-president and I tackled contract negotiations - the only substantial contribution that either of them ever made to the Union. Once negotiations were over, they disappeared, like smoke in the fog. The Vice-president actually had more experience than I did, if you could call it that. The President that appointed him never let any of the stewards do any real work themselves, and I guess it had become a habit with him.
In order for you to understand how it came to pass that I was illegally removed from office three years later, you have to understand a little about Altus AFB. In 1995 or thereabouts, Altus AFB was the subject of an A-76 study. The contract for aircraft maintenance was won by Civil Service, but when the Most Efficient Organization was designed, they didn't let a little thing like Civil Service Rules stand in their way - they designed the workforce to mirror the military in many ways. They wrote the position descriptions around "multi-tasking' and deliberately graded many positions one grade below OPM's standards - all to save money so they could underbid the lowest bidder and win the contract. Still, today, the "A-Team", as they call themselves, has employees working under the wrong classification standards, because it saves them money. Management in the A-Team loved to tell employees that filing grievances would spark a rebid of the contract, because they are graded on "efficiency", and grievances meant they weren't efficient. Grievances, management told the employees, would cause the A-Team to "lose the contract", and then everyone would be out of a job. One particularly worthless supervisor loved to tell the employees that "I am a career employee, so if they close this Base, I will get a job somewhere else. But you are all probationary employees, so the Air Force doesn't owe you anything. If we lose the contract, you will all be sleeping under bridges." Naturally, people were reluctant to report violations of civil service rules, file grievances, or stand up for their rights.
The prevailing climate on the base was oppressive, to say the least. Many managers ran rampant over the employees' rights with impunity, secure in the knowledge that the employees would not file grievances -and if they did, the Union wouldn't 'really" pursue them, because the Union believed their propaganda, too!
In 1997, three years before I was elected President, I filed a grievance over the many violations I saw daily, and the Union took it through the entire grievance procedure to placate me. Of course, the grievance was denied at every step, and when it came time to take the matter to arbitration, the Union balked - because, they explained, an arbitration would attract too much "negative publicity" - and that could cost us all our jobs.
What is really sad is that, no matter how many times in the past three years that I have proved the doom-sayers wrong, the employees still believe the lies, and refuse to stand up for their rights - and crucify me when I do.
Next - Promises for a Bright Future