Ever wonder what would happen if parts of your contract was used and enforced?
Just not sure who to blame on this one. Kroger, the union or even the members for falling for this garbage. Time to push the issue and have local 540 and kroger answer what to do about this agreement. But then it will be smoke and mirrors for what should have been 90 days and now pushing 5 years.
Now on our contract ( letter of understanding J-1 ) it states Meat Training Program A committee of (3) consisting of Mike Krell or his designee, William Yelderman and Bill Sturm for the company and a committee of Three for local 540 will meet to discuss a new hire training program for associates that will be assigned to process meat. Such meeting will occur within ninety ( 90 ) days of November 20,2010 of the labor agreement.
Once the committees have had time to discuss and agree upon the contents and specific objectives, the training program will be implemented during the life of this agreement.
Now is this just a case of both sides blowing smoke up the ass of members and placing something on paper that they know will never happen? Seems that one of the few things I was always told , by our union leaders , is that language is one of the most important things you can get in any contract. Now we have this language in our contract but nothing done about it. Now here is the sad thing about this letter of understanding. It is not new to this contract. It was in the past contract and both sides ignored it totally. This time around Kroger at least named names to their side of the committee past union meetings and I still do not think the union has a list of candidate for their side. This was to have been done 90 days after ratification but we are now almost 5 years into this agreement and nothing from either side about it. Comes a time where one has to realize that neither side gives a damn about quality trained workers to staff the meat departments. Now we are less than a year away from our next contract and I have to wonder what garbage will come out of it as far as language and training issues.
Now to Kroger`s point they do have a silly little cutting or training issue in out district and although it is inadequate , it is an attempt to do something. But then when will the union push it or will they be content to just say we have an agreement to start a training program and leave it at that. What will truly happen when all the members do finally understand their contracts and realize there is agreements and items in it that is never enforced and thus needs to go away or made to happen.
That is ridiculous. Have you brought it up at a quarterly meeting? Especially if there are other people concerned about this...it's also a good way to discuss what is happening in other stores with their rank & file members.
I wonder what this LOE came out of - if it was borne out of arbitration, it's absolutely absurd that nothing was done about it. That's a lengthy, expensive process to go through without having anything happen.
