| Conoco Group NEGOTIATION UPDATES |
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| March 21-24, 2002 |
| March 21, 2002 |
| We have now finished the second of two days scheduled for talks with the Company. We still have not met with the Company. The bulk of the time appears to have been consumed with Representatives of PACEIU talking with a spokesman from the Company. The remaining time appears to have been spent with various combinations of management and PACEIU representatives meeting with guys from the Denver refinery. We have extended the talks for one more day (Friday) with hopes that we will get a chance to talk with management. We believe that the talks on Friday will give the Company the opportunity to show that they are as serious as we are about getting a fair contract. Expect a full report, good or bad, soon. |
| March 21-24 |
| March 23, 2002 |
| IMPORTANT Informational Meeting At The Union Hall Wednesday, March 27 at 4:30PM Plan To Attend!!! |
| March 24, 2002 |
| This will be the first in a series of updates geared toward bringing you all up to date on the situation in Billings. These updates will probably be painted as rhetoric by those who are amazed that you would actually believe this stuff, but you will have to gently remind them that what has you all riled up is not the “rhetoric” of your Committee. Those who would have you believe that this web site is the reason you are all ticked off seem to have forgotten who circumvented the Committee and the process by presenting the Company offer to this membership. They seem to have completely overlooked the possibility that you all read and understood their contract offer. It has always amazed us that Conoco strives to hire the smartest people they can find and then they act shocked at the possibility that the people they hired are actually smart. Let’s see if we can get up to date on what happened in the latest round of talks: A few weeks ago, representatives of PACEIU met, in Tulsa, with a couple of Human Resources people from Ponca City and Denver to see if there were any misunderstandings keeping both sides from getting back to the bargaining table. A common theme emerging from these talks surrounded the “Zipper Clause” and “Management Rights”. At issue was totally unacceptable language proposed by the Company coupled with verbal explanations of the intent of the language that, to put it kindly, has been very inconsistent. Something that has been very frustrating for your Committee during the entire course of these negotiations has been the number of times the Company has altered the stated intent of their language and then refused to put the modified intent in writing. They seem to be willing to say anything to get us to sign on the dotted line, but don’t want to have some stuffy legal document holding them to it later. Those present in Tulsa agreed that some conceptual progress had been made and resolved that the discussions could move on to Denver and include the Local Chairmen of the Denver and Billings groups. Two days of talks in Denver ended with some conceptual agreements by both parties on language changes that could move the talks further forward at meetings scheduled for March 20th and 21st in Billings. In Billings, your Committee was subjected to sitting two long days in a stuffy hotel room while the Company insulted the guys from Denver. At the end of business on Thursday, the guys from Denver headed for home to report to their membership that the commitments the Company had made at the previous meetings in Denver had been withdrawn. It had become apparent, based on what the Company had done to the Denver guys, that this round of talks lacked leadership with the authority to make a decision. Therefore, Friday morning, your Committee contemplated sending your Chairman to the refinery to look up the Plant Manager to see if the two of them could sit down and have a little heart to heart talk and find some way to get these talks back to a meaningful level. Your Chairman called down to the plant to find out if the Plant Manager was even in the plant in case we felt it necessary to try to look him up. Less than ten minutes later, the HR guy from Ponca City informed our PACEIU Representatives that the Plant Manager absolutely would not meet with your Chairman. He said that any discussion your Chairman might wish to have with Jay Churchill had to go through him. Let’s see if we have this straight, if your Chairman wants to talk to the Plant Manager about the people he represents, he can’t! Instead, he must route all correspondence through some guy in Ponca City who has no stake in the affairs of this plant. The next time one of the frontline supervisors spews some dribble about the Union not wanting to talk with Management, please be patient with him and try to remember that he is only repeating what he has been told. Friday morning also brought the opportunity for the Company to renege on the commitments they had made to us two weeks earlier in Denver. True to the erratic form they have shown so far in these negotiations, they denied they had made any conceptual commitments to us in Denver. Pay very close attention… the only reason we were having the talks in Billings was because of those conceptual commitments made in Denver! Friday also found the Company sticking to their demand that we accept their last offer intact and refusing to listen to any common sense improvements (read: our issues) that would make this a workable agreement. In our next installment, we will examine some of the things the Company is refusing to consider. Be sure to check back for tomorrow’s update! |