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Letter from the President
Build good relationships and success will follow
By CHRIS DUGOVICH
Chris Dugovich
Council 2 President/Executive Director
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THE KEY to success in everything Council 2 does is good relationships.
The process starts with building relationships among co-workers and shaping them into a group that is able to negotiate their conditions of employment with their employer. Our bargaining units across the state share the advantage of a common employer, but without relationships among the members and the ability and realization of the need to work together the process will never work to their benefit.
Sometimes the most difficult part of keeping a Local Union or a State Council together and working in the same direction is keeping everyone’s eye on the target. In order to do that, all the members always have to make an effort to solve issues at the lowest level and ideally without fanfare. It’s no easy task and especially not easy when employers or even people on our side are continually attempting to provoke us to keep an argument going.
In these circumstances, when possibly the most trivial of disagreements in your Local are affecting your meetings or your ability to work together, your relationships or friendships will carry you through.
Someone told me years ago that politics is all about relationships; they were exactly right. We need to work hard at continually building and expanding relationships so our bargaining processes will be a success.
Outside of your unit, you must have the ability to discuss the issues with an elected official to keep a set of negotiations from going bad.
The target is a reasonable settlement, not a prolonged fight.
Because Council 2 has more than 220 collective bargaining agreements in Locals across the State it means that somewhere somebody is always in negotiations.
Those negotiations and the contract that results from them will determine extremely important issues for the next three years for all the members in the unit. That process will rise or fall not only on the group’s ability to work together and their relationships, but on the relationships they’ve built with their employer, their elected officials and the community.
Keep your Local Union working together, do your homework, seek Council 2’s advice and assistance, and reach out to your employer. Everyone knows that it’s more difficult in practice than in theory.
Starting a fight may be a lot easier, but certainly a lot less rewarding. |
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