| Conoco Group NEGOTIATION UPDATES |
| They Just Don’t Get It! Its been three weeks since the boss blessed our holidays with the announcement that the Company intends to force us to agree to give up the rights afforded to us by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). So what has happened since… Since starting the official negotiations process on January 3rd, the best way to describe the process is to say “labor intensive”. We have been presented with a huge document that attempts to unravel the fifty-year evolutionary process that has resulted in our current Contract Agreement. While the Company would have us believe that they presented us with only seventeen proposals, the actual number may be as much as one hundred. For instance, Company proposal 5 (Hours of Work and Overtime) appears to have 35 separate proposals included in its eleven pages of changes. Several days were spent with line by line questioning by the Committee trying to find out just what the Company really means in some of its proposals. This has proven to be a very frustrating process. One huge problem has been the inconsistencies in the Company proposals compounded by the inability of the Company spokesmen to give consistent, meaningful answers. This has only added to the frustration. On a couple of occasions during the question and answer sessions, the Company had to call a caucus to regroup because three different spokesmen were giving three different explanations of a Company proposal! Frustrating? Indeed! Though the Company has had trouble keeping their story straight while trying to explain their real concerns on specific issues, they have been crystal clear in other areas. They made it abundantly clear that they intend to be able to make unilateral decisions (that means without any input from us!) on things such as what hours we will work, the start time of work and who will work overtime. They intend to be the sole authority on who will be allowed to bid jobs, what criteria will be used to select people for jobs, when we can take vacation and what our rate of pay will be. They have made it very clear that they want the ability to rob us of time off and deny us quality time with our families without the burden of having to pay penalties or pay attention to the scheduling process. They have been very clear of their intent to be the only ones who decide what benefits we will have or won’t have. The list goes on and on. What really baffles your Committee is all the previous Company rhetoric about OE (Organizational Excellence), teamwork and CSI (helping us all learn to get along better). Remember all the heartwarming stories of empowerment and shared responsibilities at the PACE represented Harley Davidson manufacturing plant? One must ask how dumb people can be when they are trying to get us on board with a series of programs that require trust, and then they dump a huge proposal on us that just screams of their distrust of us! To make things worse, no matter what the final outcome of this process, they may have already done long term damage to themselves. As one person put it before the proposals were ever exchanged… his relationship with the Company will not be based on the final settlement, but rather by what the Company proposes, for that is how he will know what they really think of him. To put this in broader perspective, the Company seems to have been planning this maneuver for quite some time. Remember their attempt to make our Conoco Challenge contingent on this negotiation process. To refresh memories, if we didn’t agree to their contract demands by January 31, 2002, we would lose our money. Nice try! The NLRA governs the relationship Companies and Unions live by. If the Company wishes to make changes to things like the wages or working conditions (hours of work, vacations, bidding, overtime etc.) of its represented employees, it must bargain those changes with the Union. What the Company intends to do during this negotiations period is to get us to agree to a contract where we would give up those rights. They smugly sit across from your Committee when we tell them that the Membership of this Union will not stand for this attack on working conditions governed by a contract that has been fifty years in the making. They act as though the Committee is the only ones willing to take a stand. We think they are mistaken We will try to update this sight every few days. Be watching for breaking news! Your Committee |
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| January 13, 2002 |
| January 13 |