Vice President's Report, Spring/Summer 2008

I would like to thank our Eastern Region Coordinator Mike Gallagher for resuming the educational conference April 17 and 18. By having this at a local place we were able to send 11 stewards for training seminars. I am a firm believer that attending these educational classes is money well spent by the local.

I would also like to commend AJ Jones and his Eastern Montgomery County Area Local for doing a fantastic job in overcoming all the obstacles thrown at them at the last minute and still having a great conference. Plus anyone who attended the banquet on Saturday night got to see some history in the making - AJ had a sports coat on. All of you that have ever attended a function with EMCAL know AJ in his t-shirt without sleeves. Yes, his sport coat had sleeves.

I attended the Function 4 class and picked up on a number of things to help us save minutes and clerks. First of all, window clerks, you must start hitting the buttons for non-retail sales. If someone wants directions, to pick up vacation mail, box overflow, etc we must be hitting the buttons for these and showing we are working. Not hitting these buttons shows down time. Swipe when you are sent to do something else on your timecard. If you can’t get to the time clock, write down what you were doing when or keep form 1260 with you and fill that in, give it to your supervisor or whoever does your time and attendance and they will be able to put all your moves in for that day. When you go to break or lunch you must sign out, not just use stand by. If you are relieving a clerk for break or lunch don’t sign in till they sign out. The window times are measured in ½ hour increments and if a clerk is signed on before a clerk leaves for break or lunch that shows an additional clerk on the window for the ½ hour not the couple minutes the clerk signed on. Clerks should not be going on the window to do one or two transactions. Give these transactions to the window clerks already on the window and let them do it on down time when possible. I know this next statement you have already heard from your supervisor, PM, whoever but we do need to UPSELL. This takes more time on the window and will help in the long run. We have got to start saving our clerk jobs and these examples are just some of the ways to do it but we must all do it each and every time if we want it to work!

I also attended a class on the Office of the Inspector General which are the people taking over the Postal Inspector jobs. The first thing you do BEFORE speaking to any of these people no matter how nice they are to you and no matter what they promise you is tell them you want a union steward before you’ll talk. Also, I learned that the steward doesn’t have to be your normal steward it just has to be a steward from the APWU. You are entitled to talk to the steward alone before talking to the OIG. Stewards one of the first things you would want to ask your member is can this lead to criminal prosecution. If they say maybe or yes advise them to stop talking and tell them to get a lawyer. You don’t want the member spilling his guts to you on what he did criminally wrong so you won’t be able to testify against them later.