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Tom's plan is simple. Local 1040 needs to stop
hiring family and friends of Carolyn Wade. The Local has 7 Staff Reps, 1 Senior Staff Rep, 1 Principle Staf Rep,
1 "Assistant to the President" (a title created and funded without the Executive Board's knowledge or approval),
and 1 Executive Vice President (a total of 11 people) to service 7,200 members at over 50 worksites. One of
those individuals only has 2 worksites...one has 3. The Executive Vice President has more than anyone there with 10
worksites. Everyone else has 5-7 sites, inculding the sites that are the most labor intensive.
By adding
more staff, we will allow the current staff to have more time to devote to fewer worksite assignments. This in turn
will begin to fulfill our primary obligation of representation (one of the three legs of the CWA triangle). If we are
to grow this union, we will need to grow our representation expertise first.
We need to regain our footing with
the political leg of the triangle as well. The Local has not had a fund raising COPE dinner/dance in several years,
and our attendance at political fundraisers has been lackluster on those VERY few occasions when it has occurred at all...
and it SHOWS! We are getting slaughtered by the politicians that used to be eating out of our hands when Tom and Fran
Fiore handled them! Additionally, our members are rarely given the opportunity to meet with politicians from their district
and paying for tickets to fundraisers are an excellent opportunity for the politicain to meet their constituents, and vice
versa.
We need a privatization committee once again. In fact, it should have never been dismatled. More
than five years ago, Tom stated on this very site that then Governor Corzine was calling for the "monetization"
of certain state services, and that was simply a euphemism for privatization. We waited too long in 1994
to stop the privatization of prison health care. Now we have Governor Chris Christie already setting up privatization
schemes all over again! We should have been acting PROACTIVELY and using the best minds that our Local had to offer,
as Tom said more than 5 years ago, also.
Finally, the current Local leadership is costing us greatly.
One area where money has been wasted is training. Spending thousands of dollars to train people to acquire certain
skills, such as organizing or health and safety, only to drop them and retrain new people wastes time, money, networking contacts and
expertise. We need to choose who we want to train more wisely and then stick with that decision.
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