Page 13 - 2018 July Newsletter

Financial Secretary’s Report
Your grievance checklist
Greetings and salutations, hope all is going well in the field.
A Grievance Committee was held on June 21 with the following results: The committee voted to withdraw eight grievances, defer three and go for- ward with two.
This brings me to the very common complaint regarding secondary employment. When applying to work, let’s say VRI (or what’s left of it), the first thing you must do is write a to-from to the com-
mander of that unit. After that is done and there is no good explanation why you were not put in when others with less seniority got to work, file that grievance. I am also still getting calls regarding VRI not being informed of the officer’s activity from the district or unit – you apply to work and get rejected for insufficient activity when you know you had enough activi- ty. Then you learn the inputs person “made an error.” The only way to prevent this is to make a copy of your activity and send it down to Special Events. This will prevent these small “errors” from costing you money.
It is the time of year that we start gathering information for the next FOP book. I am asking everyone to check the numbers in your FOP book and make sure they are correct for your unit or district. If there are some discrepancies in those numbers, please contact the FOP with the correct numbers. And, please, hold back your opportunity for humor by calling us and say-
ing your unit number has changed and give us a number to the Cook County Morgue instead. Number one, we check these things and number two, you would drive Jerry down at the morgue crazier. Cricket, our FOP secretary, is the contact for FOP book changes here at the Union. Hopefully she is aware of this, otherwise...surprise!
As of this writing, we have had some very hot days; this re- minds me of Sidney Davis’ great words: “Remember to check on your elderly relatives and neighbors to make sure they are OK in this extreme heat.” By the time you read this, the picnic will have occurred and I will have a list of people to thank in my next article.
I had a call in the office regarding restricting time due. In all our responses, we hold to the fact that there is just not enough manpower. No matter how many studies and opinions they have, there is no substitute for a body on the street. This recent policy of cancelling days off for no other reason than having more people out there proves to us that the City reduced the number of police officers so much over the years that it needs to cancel every officer’s day off to bring back a decent amount of officers to properly make the streets safe. No mass hiring is going to correct the manpower problem overnight when it took years to get to the point of being dangerously low.
Finally, be sure to monitor our blog and website for updates. Stay safe.d
MICHAEL GARZA
CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ JULY 2018 13