Brothers and Sisters at CenturyLink,
Today the Executive Board and the company meet to discuss the massive amounts of forced overtime and how it is affecting the working conditions and life style of the bargaining unit.
With the Overtime data that company provided us prior to this meeting, the union was able to calculate the total Loaded Labor Rate by district and the numbers were staggering. This information was provided to the company as a visual aide to open the discussion.
|
Year
|
District
|
Total OT to Aug
|
Estimated Cost
|
Potential techs for hire
|
|
2015
|
Ocala
|
53,577
|
$6.4 Million
|
26
|
|
|
Winter Garden
|
44,597
|
$5.4 Million
|
22
|
|
|
Winter Park
|
17,848
|
$2.1 Million
|
8
|
|
Year
|
District
|
Total OT year
|
Estimated Cost
|
Potential techs for hire
|
|
2014
|
Ocala
|
71,304
|
$8.6 Million
|
34
|
|
|
Winter Garden
|
59,496
|
$7.1 Million
|
27
|
|
|
Winter Park
|
17,362
|
$2.1 Million
|
8
|
|
Year
|
District
|
Total OT year
|
Estimated Cost
|
Potential techs for hire
|
|
2013
|
Ocala
|
75,323
|
$9 Million
|
36
|
|
|
Winter Garden
|
53,502
|
$6.4 Million
|
26
|
|
|
Winter Park
|
22,537
|
$2.7 Million
|
11
|
Because of these numbers we discussed several different issue and the Union made several suggestions to try and provide some short term relief such as:
-
Hire more employees
-
Move to a volunteer overtime per day instead of a mandatory overtime.
-
Ex. “volunteer OT until 8pm”
-
Moving back to Dynamic Dispatch
-
This will allow the techs to only get one job at a time that way they can focus on just the one task instead being mentally fatigued by having an unrealistic workload being loaded at the beginning of the day.
-
Moving of technician’s.
-
Technicians that clean up in their work groups can volunteer to move to other areas by calling dispatch.
-
Technicians may volunteer to their managers to work their lay days with the understanding that they will be assigned work in areas that need additional technicians.
-
The company proposed a schedule to where a few techs can go home at “end of day” and others stay to work some of the load, not all of it.
The union stressed very strongly the fact that technicians are mentally fatigued and have reached a breaking point because of the lack of support of their fellow technician’s to assist each other, the lack of support from management not giving clear direction of what needs to be worked first, and denying techs time off on their non-schedule day to conduct personal business. We explain that because of these issues, there could be potential for work place confrontations or “blow-ups” within the work groups that could be easily avoided. We also pushed home the fact that our membership’s home lives are drastically affected by members not seeing their families and having time to decompress around their loves ones, thus improving the family bond.
The company stated that they understand and appreciated the fact that the union came to them with additional information from the membership to help them express up to Eric Genrich the need for additional people. The company also informed that the man power model that they use to determine the amount of employees for each area looks at a 10 year history but does not include attrition rates and increase of work load within a growing area.
We, the Union and the company, both feel that by working together shows that both sides are striving to work together to achieve relief to our members and that we are looking forward to addressing other issues in the future.
In Unity,
The Executive Board
