ratboy

Hell yeah, idk why I forget that bean burritos are SO GOOD. I used to make my own refried beans from scratch, should make a fuckton one day and love off them

Fenriz being a chonker

It's been a thing since 2020 at least if I remember correctly, but it's not always used, just like IA are not always used

I don't get the hate tbh, I'm nervous to ever ride one myself but you can get going SO FAST, and they're cheap and easy to maintain. I think people used to hate on brakeless ones as a hipster thing tho. I used to ride a single speed and had someone yell at me from their car something stupid because they thought it was fixed lol.

Dang I thought I wrote a reply to this buy I think it got deleted!

Since these edits were made at pretty much the last 2 hours of bargaining, do you think it would be too much trouble to try and tell them that we don't accept any of their language and we continue to argue our original proposal? I realize that a good 4-6 people would quit, if we did they would be unable to adequately train up new hires so I figure that's pretty good ammunition if they were going to call that regressive. My manager could not even finish the training for my position lol

Thanks for that, I think from here on out we are.going to try and pre write a bunch of arguments and will show them to our rep and making a point to tell him beforehand during caucus is a good idea if anything comes up mid bargaining.

I think I just realized, management hasn't put down any proposals really besides a couple, probably so that they can whittle us down to nothing and never be accused of regressive bargaining. Like I think all they've really put down is labor relations committee and will probably put lockout strike down. Our rep included the strike clause in the set of proposals that WE were going to introduce until I said "um, that goes against all morals and dignity I have, if it's introduced they have to introduce it" then he told us that he didn't realize that it wasn't already on the table

I have one question about regressive bargaining which i think i kinda mentioned before. We put down an article yesterday; they struck out a ton of language and included some new stuff and were told that managers have sole discretion to bargain the location of the workplace so put that in, and we ended up countering some other language but left that part alone and our rep only included like half of what we thought he was.going to add so I personally was surprised when he passed out the rewritten proposal. Can we now go back and strike out all of that language? We wouldn't be changing the initial proposal to something more robust but just fighting their position after we already submitted a counter

The "handlebar" isn't a handlebar, but a seat post lol

Oh, we do TA them together, so nothing is decided without the BC, he just has not given us copies to keep track of what we have and so that we can compare language in them to newer proposals which is super frustrating. I really do feel like he's bargaining against us at this point; trying to rush us to TA everything, not questioning anything the agency lawyer has to say, or calling her put on flip flopping her reasons and he hasn't helped us identify her strategy at all. He doesn't even keep up on NLRB cases, I had to explain to him Wendt & Tecnocap multiple times and asked him if it applied to a situation we have going on and I get blank looks, it's awful.

The huge majority of our coworkers fully appreciate and support what we do, but mobilizing them has been like pulling teeth so we just kinda stopped trying to organize bigger group meetings because it's so exhausting. They are always invited to our weekly meetings but no one ever comes because they trust that we're handling it lol. Everyone is down to strike though if it comes down to it, but we don't have anyone else who seems down to help us plan and coordinate and it definitely feels like the rep won't at all.

I am trying to keep my morale up but I don't know how yall do it in the face of constant crises/union busting/little support, I'm about to just kick rocks and get another job

So it's kind of a weird set up; I organized a union drive with my department and one other within a larger agency and we unionized with a local of a large union. This union never really provided us with any professional organizers or anything, its just been 6 employees who knew dick about the inner workings of a union trying to get this thing off the ground. We successfully won our union vote and have been assigned a union rep who is our chief negotiator. Within our bargaining unit, the same 6 of us were basically elected as the bargaining committee, along with our union rep/negotiator. We are very much isolated from the larger local; we are social service workers and unionized with more of a trade union and have had little to no contact with anyone else besides him, and there is either only one other rep, or none that I know of in our town.

We the BC all have a Google Drive with all of our proposals. We write them up, edit them and finalize them with the rep, and then he prints out the proposals to pass out over the table. During caucus he will send the agency lawyer electronic versions of.our proposals to edit and write their counters, they get printed, passed out, then we counter, and so on. So he ends up having the final signed TA document and has not provided us copies of them :(

He has felt like nothing short of a roadblock, it sucks. I'm extremely proud of myself and my comrades having put SO MUCH WORK into this. We organized our coworkers, have done tons of research, written every proposal so far, met almost every week since March 2023...but it's hard not feeling like we don't even have one competent/knowledgeable person fighting on our side.

Sorry for sending novels, today was especially demoralizing and it's just been such a struggle!! I'll hit up the AFL-CIO that's a great idea

Our rep has only ever consulted the lawyer like maybe 3 times on our behalf for things that we've been extremely adamant about getting confirmation whether they were ULPs or not, and it's usually taken 3 weeks or more for him to give us a response from her. He hasn't even given us copies of our TA's yet and we have 13, and we don't even know what they are beyond the titles right now. We've requested them multiple times. Figure it would be important to reference our prior TA's while creating new proposals, right? Since the beginning he's tried to kneecap every single proposal we've written. His angle had always been "I don't think management is going to go for that". Today, the agency lawyer cut him off while reading a proposal and she said he didn't need to read it and he just kinda sat there.

The agency lawyer also strong-armed us and lied today that hybrid work is a permissive subject of bargaining, and they added language to our telework proposal stating that management has the discretion to determine work locations... I'm pretty sure are BOTH mandatory subjects (webe been engaging in hybrid work since 2020)....and our rep didn't say anything about that; he pretty much directed us to keep the counter language that she wrote.Thank God we haven't TA'd, so I'm hoping after reading about it I can go back in and strike all of their counters to get it close to our original proposal and HOPE it's not regressive bargaining.

I think we have a ULP already (we're in the middle of negotiating a first contract), if not multiple, but my union rep never mentions them to us. He did a while ago mention that we should keep them in our back pockets but has yet to mention using it as a strategy again. We're just cracking economics, so I hope we can use that but we have pretty much just been walked all over so far.

The agency lawyer told our rep to stop reading one of our proposals mid-sentence because she said they would read it in caucus and he just acquiesced lol

Thanks for that info! We are bargaining our first contract with a unit of about 30 employees. The lawyer used by the agency is very skilled; she added this language to an article. As we were discussing it with our union rep, he said it doesn't really mean anything, but why would the businesses lawyer want to include it if it didn't give them an edge? Idk, the local we decided to unionize with is weak and has shown to be pretty fucking yellow and unsupportive, it's been really demoralizing