Reminder - LOCAL 771 Bargaining Forum Tomorrow

Local 771 is having its first of two bargaining forums tomorrow in Bangor. The meeting starts at 10 am. It is located at the blue Maine DOT building on the Hogan Road. Both bargaining units of 771, Alpha One and Home Care for Maine, will be negotiating contracts in the upcoming months. Home Care for Maine's contract is due to expire on June 30th. Alpha One's expired last year. For our union to be strong, and have a powerful voice at the bargaining table, we need members to come to both meetings. We need members with ideas and proposals that will make working conditions better. We need members to put forth these ideas to get them into the contracts. I urge members in the Bangor area to come out to this very important meeting tomorrow. Here's an example of how our union is working for us. Recently there was a problem with Home Care for Maine workers not getting their February stipend in the last stipend payment. This was brought to my attention. Apparently the agency had under 1515 billable hours for the month of February, and thought it was not bound to pay its workers the $0.30 stipend per hour worked for that month. I passed this information on to our field representative, CJ Betit. CJ looked at the contract. His stand was that the additional $0.15 per hour was paid only when the agency reached that 1515 billable hours. If the agency was under the 1515 billable hours in any given month, the agency was still to pay the $0.30 per hour for that month. CJ got in touch with Mollie Baldwin, Home Care for Maine's CEO. She took another look at the contract and saw Article 12, the article pertaining to wages and how the stipends are paid, and realized that a mistake had been made. She is going to make good on the error and workers should receive their February stipend in the payroll run today, payment available on Monday, May 18th. Please see the May 12th post on the stipend issue. Without our union working for us, we wouldn't have the stipend much less the means to resolve this issue. The stipend doesn't seem like much, but to many workers it is. They count on that extra money they receive every quarter for their hard work with the people they serve.