Dear Pat- A response to your email

Dear Pat,

    Thank you for that really touching and heartfelt email.  It's great to see you stepping up to address some of our concerns.  I guess Ed was too chicken to do it himself this time. 

In regards to your thoughtful letter we also have a few comments:   

You mentioned “We want to emphasize how important our cooperative relationship is to us”.  Yes, we saw how you emphasized that when you RIF'd anyone that voiced any concerns over the sick time and workday changes.  Or when you dumped 30-50% more work load on us.  We tried to cooperate with management last year using our workforce engagement team and we saw how you responded to those concerns.  If this is your version of “cooperative”, we think maybe it’s best that we don’t cooperate so much from this point forward- don’t take it personally.

You also mention “Open dialogue and treating each other with mutual respect”.  I suppose ‘mutual respect’ means different things in different cultures- but in the culture of us dirty people in blue coveralls respect starts and ends with one word:  TRUST.  And having your HR lady LIE TO OUR FACES doesn’t equate to trust.  It wasn’t even a year ago that there were promises being made that Workday wouldn’t change our 40 straight/44OT pay or any other ‘blended rate’ situations.  What happened to that? Lies. HR lady also sat right in the same room as us and expressed shock that we were upset with some of the sick pay changes and said “I only just found out about this”....even though we’d been engaging our bosses and HR runts for over a month.  That’s only two of many examples.  And as far as ‘open dialogue’— we did have an “open dialogue” with your boss once in regards to our pay; He directly stated “why should I pay more for a service than I have to?” immediately after comparing us to Doyon employees.... I guess that IS open dialogue, but I’m not sure that’s what you had in mind.  But!....We do have an answer for Ed-  You won’t be paying more for ‘our services’ than you have to but you seriously miscalculated what our services are worth.  Luckily there’s a solution, we will use OUR VOICE to explain what we’re actually worth when we’re seated at the negotiating table with you hammering out our collective bargaining agreement.

In your letter you go on to talk about our 40 year relationship- and how we were one team.  We were, we truly were, we've been here most of that time. Have you?  A lot of us have been here for a large portion of those 40 years and MOST of us would have never believed that management would EVER treat us with such contempt.  Killing premiums, slashing benefits that really matter to slopers, messing with our hitches and schedules.  Why?  Why?  How much money did you save by capping the night differential at 12 hours? Is it really that much of a burden to pay a guy an extra $1.50 for staying up part of the next day after he’s already been up all night? Was it worth pissing off a workforce for less than the cost of a coffee? Only a moron who has never worked a nightshift would come up with that.  Killing premiums without a word of input from your leads or supervisors is insane. Your HR clowns kill 40 years of ‘relationship’ for less money than you piss away on traction devices.

You mention a “sense of family that exists across our workforce”, you’re damn right, we have that-  and you just shit-canned some of our family because they spoke their mind.  Those guys WERE our family, we spent Christmas eves in the control rooms with them, shoveled them out of snowdrifts on Easter morning, showed them pictures of our newborn babies that we couldn’t get home in time to see being born.  And where were you?  Where was HR Lady? Not on the slope with us, but home for every holiday or busy scheming up ways to fuck us out of holiday pay.  WE are a family and THAT is the reason we’re standing together.  We see how you’re trying to screw over our little brothers and sisters by paying them less than the starting wages we made almost 15 years ago. It’s painful to know they’ll just be using this job as a stepping-stone to a better career elsewhere.  We’ve spent years mentoring them, teaching them, and fretting over where they put their fingers and tools; now we know they will NEVER MAKE OUR PAY, they would be fools not to look elsewhere and it hurts to know they won’t stay.

You ask us a ‘fair question':  “if a union is formed on the slope, will you lose your individual voice and ability to work on opportunities with your team?”    We have an answer for that too:  WHAT VOICE? Every single concern we’ve brought to you over the last year has been met with complete indifference, deflection or straight up lies.  Emails to HR go unanswered, meetings with bosses produce bullshit misdirections or empty promises.  Concerns about staffing levels and deferred maintenance get brushed off or blamed on “town”.  What voice? What voice?

You go on to express concerns that ‘unionization’ is creating distractions and division.  No.  YOU did that.  You did that when you messed with our pay and our schedules, don’t blame that on unionization.  Did switching 3x3 schedules to 2x2 save you a dime?  No. But you did it anyway because you can.   95% of us would have been more than happy to finish out our careers as happy non-union employees but you and your bosses thought they could squeeze more work out of us and pay us less to do it.  YOU created the distractions and division, the unionization process is creating UNITY.  We’ve seen more co-workers having deeper heart-to-heart conversions about what really matters to them during this process than any time in the last 18 years.  The serious discussion surrounding our futures here and those of our younger coworkers have truly been a bonding experience….perhaps we should thank you for that.  So Pat, we mean this with heartfelt sincerity:

Thank you for bringing us together,

Workers First.