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BACKGROUND THE REMOVAL MY APPEAL THE ELECTION THE AFTERMATH
Since the 2002 elections, my Local had a full Executive Board for the first time in my administration. For the most part, the new officers approached their duties cautiously, while the Vice-president continued in his practice of doing as little as possible. The Treasurer never took the time to read the Treasurer’s Manual, did not bother to process membership adds and drops, and made deposits about once a month, if we were lucky. Her main contribution was that she checked the mail about every other day. The Secretary resigned a few months after taking office, never having published a newsletter, and seldom attending membership meetings to take notes. The Chief Steward was completely incompetent at training the stewards, and could not even run a stewards’ meeting. The work of running the Union once again fell on my shoulders. Even though we had a full Executive Board, I was still doing most of the work.
Soon after elections, the reason for the Executive Board’s refusal to do their jobs had begun to become apparent, as their management-friendly nature had surfaced just under the radar, and I had begun to hear echoes of management propaganda coming out of their mouths. They accused me of trying to “get out of doing (my) job” by hiding in the Union office - despite the fact that it was the Vice-president himself who wrote the proposal in contract negotiations that would guarantee the President 100% official time (We settled for 60% official time for the President or designee, and 40% official time for the President to assign to whomever they saw fit.) They berated me for not going to dayshift where I would be “more accessible” to management - a chronic management complaint for the past three years. They accused me of being “combative” and “unreasonable” - management’s sympathies exactly. They insisted that I had too many active demands to bargain and that I needed to let some of them go - management’s words again. On every issue where they should have showed their support for their elected President, the Executive Board instead sided with management, even assisting them in stalling negotiations when I refused to drop demands to bargain.
I had developed a twitch in my left eye, and I was constantly tired, but suffered from insomnia. I made an appointment with my doctor because I was having heart palpitations, was short of breath, and felt panicked. An electrocardiogram failed to show any heart disease, and the doctor diagnosed anxiety caused by stress, and mild depression. She prescribed Paxil©, which set me on a wild emotional roller coaster ride, causing me to sink into a deep depression while at the same time, making me moody, irritable, and subject to crying jags without warning. I was in no state to continue working in that stressful environment, and asked the Vice-president to come into the office to take turnover so I could take leave. He refused, and I had no choice but to continue bearing the burden, because my only other option was to resign -and the thought made my blood run cold, because I knew that if I left the Union in the care of the Executive Board, they would destroy everything I had built up in the past three years.
The Vice-president bragged that he would tell any supervisor how to get rid of employees. He is of the opinion that there are “pieces of crap” in Civil Service, and they deserve to be fired. Never mind that, in the majority of disciplinary and adverse actions taken on Altus AFB, I find that the supervisor practiced favoritism, set arbitrary standards and then changed them without notice, did not properly counsel or train the employee, and when the employee is caught doing something wrong, the supervisor’s first instinct is to punish them, not rehabilitate them. Never mind that our job as a union is to ensure that the employees’ rights are protected, and that management does their job. The Vice-president was having none of that - it interfered with his “relationship with management” - which he established by rolling over on the employees and giving management what they wanted.
The Chief of Civilian Personnel, the Labor Relations Officer and the Human resources Officer for NAF all cried on the Vice-president’s shoulder about how “mean” and “unreasonable” I was, and he did his best “knight in shining armor” impression and vowed to “save” them from me. He showed his loyalties toward management in a hundred different ways, such as when I instructed him to use 20% of our allotted official time, and he refused, saying that he had a “good relationship” with his supervisor, and he didn’t want to jeopardize it by using too much official time.
The Treasurer, while incompetent at her own job, nonetheless loved to second-guess me when I did mine. I tried to give her other work to do, such as negotiating an Alternative Dispute Resolution policy with Management, which formalized a mediation program on Base. When I assigned her the job, she couldn’t even spell ADR, but before all was said and done, she wanted to become a mediator, herself. Ironically, when my relationship with the Executive Board became strained, and I asked them to participate in mediation, they all refused. Apparently, the Treasurer’s credo is “Do as I say, not as I do.”
The Chief Steward, in an unbelievable display of ignorance, told me that filing OSHA complaints would close the Base. Shocked beyond the ability to think coherently, I could only reply that she didn’t know what she was talking about . In a huff, she stormed out of the office, returning a few minutes later with her signed letter of resignation. In her letter, she called me “inhuman”, accused me of violating my oath of office, and other irrational, insubstantial rhetoric, citing no specific instances of wrongdoing. I informed NVP Kelly of her defection, and told him that I would subject myself to an investigation of her insubstantial accusations. He assured me that wasn’t necessary, and advised me to give her “a couple of weeks to cool off.” The Vice-president and Treasurer also said they wanted to “hold on” to her resignation for two weeks to see if she would change her mind.
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