Good Morning MSLEA Members,

First, I need to apologize for not communicating well with the membership. I have no excuses and will do better. 

Second, I want to update everyone on the status of negotiations. 

As most of you may know, the bargaining unit represents members of the Judicial Branch as well as the Executive Branch of state government. 

We negotiated a tentative agreement with the Judicial Marshals and submitted it to membership for a vote. The voter turnout was good and the majority voted not to ratify the contract as submitted. 

We scheduled a zoom meeting with the membership and discussed some of the issues with the proposed contract changes. Some of those issues were that there was not enough of a salary increase up front, no back pay on the increase to July 1 and a much lower salary increase than was expected. 

I have communicated these concerns to the Chief Judicial Marshal Ted Ross. 

My recommendation was, and is, to stand by until we are able to determine what it is that the Executive Branch is going to be offered for a salary increase. After we have that information, we go back to the states bargaining team and ask to reopen negotiations to address the salary increase issue. 

As for the Executive Branch, the state was been very slow coming to the table. We have had two bargaining sessions over the past three weeks with a third planned for May 19. We have given all of our proposals up front and have been clarifying our position with the state over the past two meetings. The Chief Negotiator for the state is Scott Helmke from OER. We hope the May 19 meeting will be more productive. We have asked to address the salary increase piece first, but have not been given an answer. 

To make communications better and more efficient, I am going to work on getting a MSLEA Facebook page up and running. I will need help managing this page. My plan is to limit it to members only for now. We can pursue a public section to highlight all the good things our members do and profile a group to bring light to what it is that each of the member groups does, that the public may not be aware of. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please reach out to me. 

Jason Laverdeire of Capitol Police has inquired about creating an online store of MSLEA merchandise  that members can purchase like mugs, shirts, sweatshirts, etc. Jason as volunteered to spearhead this project. Thanks Jason!

MSLEA has been active in handling grievances on a variety of work-related issues and continues to push them through the process. Timelines continue to be a problem during the process for the state, who, like most other agencies in state government, is short-handed. The Office of Employee Relations has hired an additional staff member which should help relieve some of the bottleneck we are experiencing at step 3 of the grievance process.

For those who attended steward training, I have the Greivtrac software up and running and have started making entries. I am working on putting a link to it on the website. I can send individuals the link as you need it, just email me or call me. 

We have received our order of new critical incident cards with updated names and numbers on them. These cards contain the cell phone numbers of your legal counsel and the Executive Director in case you find yourself in a critical incident and need assistance. The cards are hard plastic and are credit card sized to fit in your wallet.  Your board directors should have them after the next board meeting in June to hand out if they do not have them already. 

Please reach out to your board directors with any issues as they are your elected representative. 

If there are any other questions or concerns for me, please feel free to reach out to me at (207)557-0435 or by email at mydirector@mslea.org.

Stay safe out there!

Sincerely, 

Kevin Anderson