I completed my Steward training yesterday. In my post on Tuesday morning, I made the point that we always fight discipline. A commenter pointed out that doing that made it difficult to get rid of troublesome employees who don’t really belong in the civil service. I asked our instructor, a Local President from another agency, about this, and this is what he said–“The main reason that we fight every time is because we don’t just represent the individual employee, but the whole bargaining unit and especially our members. Any time a discipline is adjudicated and handed out, any time a grievance is arbitrated, it makes precedents. We want those precedents to be as favorable to us and our members as possible.” So that’s why we fight every time. Sometimes, we’ll even grieve a discipline that the employee has accepted for that very reason. But a big part of our job as stewards will be to ensure that employees tell the truth as they know it, and that they take responsibility for their actions. This goes to our individual credibility as well as the credibility of the union. “You’re going to get lied to occasionally,” he said. “You’re going to get lied to by your client, by witnesses, and by management. You’re going to see the real dark sides of people as a steward.” He also told us that “you two new stewards will shortly be subjected to discipline for something. They’ll try to get you on whatever they can get you on.” He asked everybody in the room who had been subjected to discipline to hold up their hands, and everybody but me and the other newbie had their hands up.
I generally try to take people as they come, so the level of cynicism might be a little hard for me. They told me that we’re going to lose a lot more often than we win. I can accept that. It just makes the wins all that much sweeter.
UPDATE–we don’t take every case all the way to arbitration. The clear losers we don’t take, and cases for non-members we don’t take unless we’re pretty sure we’ll win because the duty to fairly represent doesn’t require us to spend money on a non-member as I understand things. Arbitration costs between $2,000 to $3,000. But we do fight the discipline process all the way to the decision point every single time for all employees. Any confusion on this point for you guys is my fault for not being clear.
On another note, the Fort Hood shooting appears at this time to be your garden variety workplace violence situation and not a terrorist attack or political violence. Four dead, including the shooter as of this writing and 16 others wounded. The shooter is described as a Veteran of a recent Iraq tour who never saw hostile action and was apparently a truck driver. He had no combat badges or medals. He had self-reported a traumatic brain injury, but was being evaluated for a “personality disorder.” What the fuck is wrong with this country when a mass shooting could be described as ‘garden variety’ anything?
A note about that personality disorder–Military doctors have been known to diagnose PTSD/TBI victims in the past as having preexisting personality disorders in order to discharge them from the service quickly without eligibility for pension. A couple of Army doctors have had their careers ended and medical licenses revoked and a couple actually served terms of confinement for such. Whether that is in fact the case here, or whether the shooter, SPC Ivan Lopez, 34, was malingering is currently unknown.