Do what my company does, you get Paid Time Off (PTO). If you get 80 hrs PTO and use 80 of it for sick time, then you get no vacation. Vice versa, if you don't use any sick time you get 80 hrs vacation. It is a simple way to solve the problem.

Congratulations to UFCW 74D for taking a stand for their workers, even though they knew that it would be difficult times ahead. The sticking point discussed in the media is the attendance policy. Corporate states that it is to deter attendance violations. The Union states that it is due to massive amounts of overtime and people reach their breaking points. Folks…it is both, but why? Because when Corporate “trimmed” positions, the positions were primarily in the plant itself, and not those in the corporate office.

When my husband was hired many years ago, he was told the job would have “some” overtime. What he wasn’t told was, the job BECOMES your life. The first year he worked there, it was common place for his posted schedule to include 3-4 twelve hour shifts. Then at the end of his twelve hour shift, he would find out he was now stuck an additional four hours. A normal eight hour shift was a rarity. How our marriage survived the first year, I will never know.

There are workers at the plant who purposely take on the overnight shift, for the simple fact of reducing child-care costs. With as little as twenty minutes notice (sometimes less), you could find yourself stuck over until noon to “clean a bag house” or if something ran over and made a mess. Now your spouse, who tried to find a job to accommodate your crazy work schedule has to call in to their job to tell them they would either not be there for the day, or would have to be in to work later.

And the worst part of this? The employees are not even permitted to call anyone to explain that they won’t be home. There is no “do you want to work it” if you are low on the seniority list. And if you have previous plans that dictate that you can not work it (doctor’s appointment, child care issues, etc) and you walk out anyway? That is grounds for instant termination.

I know at times, my husband would call in sometimes if he knew he was going to be “stuck over” because I quickly exhausted my vacation time due to his crazy work schedule. Finally, because both his points became low, and I ran out of vacation time, I was forced to resign my position, because unfortunately, my husband made a great deal of money more than I did.

The workers at MGP work in some very extreme heat and cold at times. Being sick is a fact of life. The summers are unbearably hot, and the winters are unbearably cold in the plant. Workers can be on top of the plant in these extremes. But they do it, every day. But corporate has refused to even grant something so small as one day per quarter to be ill. That is THREE days per year!

Now, say that you have finally secured a shift that accommodates your life. Things are going pretty good. Then, the company decides that they need to “reorganize” the shift schedule because profits are down or to “increase productivity”. You may now find yourself with different days off or even a different shift altogether with very little notice. What if you had finally earned your days off that you needed, your life was going along pretty well, you had signed up to be your child’s baseball, soccer, or football coach. Now, after committing to coach a team, you now find that with a week or two notice, those days off are no longer yours, with no way to work around it and now your child has to suffer because of your job.

Your wife, who took employment around your schedule is now forced to quit, because the shift you were placed on with very little notice is the exact same shift as she is working. So, again, her life takes a back seat to MGP.

So far, I have just touched on the struggles of a married couple. Now imagine this? You are the single parent of a child with medical challenges. After much struggling, you find someone who can care for these needs, but they work a job in addition to caring for your child. You are stuck over, day after day, for whatever reason (and contrary to what the corporate office is stating, a lot of overtime has nothing to do with attendance, but random problems that seem to crop up every day, or cleaning before inspections, or whatever reason the plant has for the day), now your sitter has to call in to their regular employer.

Or, imagine planning a terrific vacation around your shift that you were on. You were lucky enough to get the vacation days that you had requested (which has to be done for the year in January for the year’s lock-in vacation dates), and so you booked non-refundable airline tickets and made your hotel reservations. Then with no notice, you are moved to a different shift, and someone already had some of all of your vacation dates locked in on that shift or the shift change also changed your days off, so you didn’t request certain days in the middle of your vacation. The other person had seniority to you, so your days were “bumped”. There is no option to fix this problem, so there is no choice but to call in, or give up a hard earned vacation.

MGP pays very well. I can honestly agree with that. The problem is this…they know they do, and unfortunately, they believe that with the higher wages, it entitles them to “own” not just you, but your family as well. For the 5+ years that my husband was employed there, I often became the sole caregiver of our children. For many years, my husband got to see none of our children’s activities, because of the company he worked for. From time to time, so he could just see one activity, he would call in. Sports and activities are important to our children, the same as they are for many of the employees’ children.

Often, when my husband worked at MGP they would talk so much about “family values”. But, they had no qualms doing things to the workers that would interfere with family. I guarantee that the 8-5ers in the corporate office are able to take care of family when they are sick. They are able to coach their kids in sports if they want to without fear that mid-season they will be forced to give it up. And I guarantee that they can take a planned vacation.

The bottom line is, without the plant workers, there is no MGP. The Union has bent many times to accommodate the company. This is one thing they can’t give up. Family values are important, and this change in the attendance policy is unreasonable to the staff and families. It is time for MGP to realize that, and come to an agreement that benefits not only the corporation, but the employees as well.

I am not attempting to show the plant workers as more valuable. But unfortunately, those in the corporate building think they are superior. Comments such as "We (those in corporate office) are the thinkers, you (the plant workers) are the doers. If you wanted to be paid to think, you would have gotten a degree." This comment (by a very high ranking person...) shows the amount of respect that the corporate officer has for the staff that is in the plant. They have no qualms working their staff to death (16-20 hour shifts in a day), but have problems treating them like human beings. Numerous corporate people speak to the staff like they are necessary evils. And now they want to blame the mess they are in on the staff, blaming overtime abuse on the employees, when in a lot of cases it is a vicious cycle. The employees are worked to death and they burn out, only to take a day off because after working 60-70 hours a week (scheduled to begin with, not always due to overtime that comes up that day), their workers get sick or burned. There is no accountability on the part of corporate, and that is what ticks me off. They are placing this all on the Union, while trying to look like the good guy. Personally, until this company, I hated unions in general. My former boyfriend's father was a high ranking union official and my disagreement with him over union's place in society was a real problem in that relationship. After dealing with MGP for over 5 years, that viewpoint has changed. The employees work in horrible conditions, keep the plant going, and deserve better. Right now, there are more staff positions than plant workers. To someone who knows business, that is poor business. Cut some of the unnecessary fat in the CO, and get enough workers to eliminate the unnecessary overtime, and you will find this whole problem will eliminate itself.

Correction to my previous post...they have no qualms working their employees 12-16 hours in a day (you max out at 16 hours).

AND........MichaelH has been dethroned for longest post ever that award now goes to "something mom of 3".

Maybe next time she should write the article.

Ha ha. Sorry...I just think the facts need to be laid out on the table. Bear in mind...my husband quit earlier this year, so I have no vested interest. I just hate to see the employees go through this. The sad thing is this...this is going to kill our economy. MGP is one of our largest employers. At a time where the economy is in a tailspin, this is terrible. But...I stand by the union on this one.

I used to work at SST and they gave you sick days but if you used them you would be fired. If you or your child was going to be sick you had to give them 3 days notice and then it could be denied. So people came in sick all the time and that just made the rest of us sick but management did not care because they could and would stay home without any problem. One time all of us got pink eye and all had to go to the doctor and pay co pay on the doctors charge and the co pay on the prescription.

I hear what everyone is saying, and understand all points. I have been management and labor. I have to agree we all need to work together. And this means ALL of us. It is not management's fault that your co-worker abuses the system of not coming to work. These are the people that are causing the problems. We american workers are failing because we do not have the same work ethic that our parents and grandparents had. I call us the microwave society we want it NOW. We need to change our outlook and give all we can give not just take what we can take. We need to get back to the basics. Do your job or get the heck out. Would you believe there are people in the work force that actually have too much time on the books and actually lose(give time) time because they like to work. Wouldn't that be a novel idea. That people actually like to work. I say do the right thing and do it correctly and this country and all employers and employees would be thrilled.

Rindom's Quote

“Our intent is to enable employees to maintain a quality of life that, at times, has been negatively impacted by some workers failing to come to work as scheduled,” he said.

The above Quote in itself is misleading; I don't believe the company has any sort of a desire to enable their employees to maintain a quality of life. If they did they would offer sick days to use and let the employees choose to use their vacation as they deemed. They would have offered a pay raise consistent with cost of living increases. Instead they cried on the Unions shoulder about not being able to meet the demands of their creditors and on at least one of the contracts presented to us, offered a pay increase of only 1/2 percent for the first year and in the same contract wanted to cut into the tiered overtime pay schedule by increasing the number of hours worked before double time and triple time kicked in. The tiered overtime was put in place last contract (3 years ago) to discourage the excess overtime. The company dropped the tiered OT issue in their next proposal. The employees thought that it would help the company out to set the monetary issue aside and decided not to make wages an issue. In my mind the decision to set wages aside was a huge concession.
Tim Newkirk stated that with the company’s inventories and other facilities supplying their customers wouldn't be a problem. Where did this inventory come from? It came from working their employee’s overtime while not being able to sell the products being produced. The inventory in the warehouse in Atchison has recently been moved to the KC warehouses and other warehouses.
All of the contracts offered pretty much included accepting one of two boogers and thus whittled down to this sick day policy by forcing us into voting on the lesser of two evils. The company sent out a letter to their employees which I received today with my final paycheck until the strike is ended. It was addressed to me, but I suspect it was written for my spouse to possibly cause a division between us and also maybe and effort to break the Union In the letter was Rindom's spin on the contract accusing the union of being liars and strategically spoke of the price of temporary insurance. Yeah hard to believe a company would reduce itself to a tactic like this, but we see this type of $$###&^ on a daily basis.
Corporate MGP tries to paint a rosy picture of itself in the community by talking quality of life, safety and adapting programs like SEMS but if the community knew the truth and the spin behind these things they would be appalled. If anyone in Atchison is reading this You need to be concerned. If the smoke starts coming out of the stacks before this strike is over it is because most likely management is going to try to operate some very dangerous equipment that could effect your "Quality Of Life".

Toughtimesfade...what you fail to understand is this...the "spin" is that this is over "employee" abuses of the overtime policy. The reality of the situation is this. That is a flat out lie. When my husband was working for MGP, it wouldn't be uncommon for him to come in and see 2-3 twelve hour shifts on the schedule...for them to claim that somehow this was because of employee abuses is a falsehood, since schedules are posted weekly. In preparation for inspections, you could find yourself scheduled for 12 hour shifts, five days a week, and if something happened in the shift, that could turn into 3 or 4 sixteen hour shifts and one 12 in a week. And then they wonder why people would call in. Cleaning in preparation could take a couple months...60 hours a week for two months burns you pretty quickly. And if an inspection was failed...more overtime. My husband called in at times, because I simply ran out of my own vacation time. He purposely worked midnights in order to end our child care issues. With small children, something has to give. If our kids got sick, we had no choice but to alternate who called in. Unfortunately, when you know you are short a day, which almost guarentees you are getting "stuck over", sometimes you call in. If corporate would properly staff the facility, the overtime problem would have shook itself out. But many times, my husband worked in a place where there should have been 3 people, but only two were staffed, meaning they were behind the ball to start out with. Behind the ball means what? You are guarenteed to stay over for something...cleaning, or if something broke, or whatnot. I am sick of hearing it is employee abuses. I don't know how many times my husband stayed over, and I would always ask, who called in, and he said, no one. We just didn't have the staff we needed that night. I would like to see the company admit that some of the overtime problems were caused by their own ill scheduling and staffing.

Oh by the way Dave, you better make this contract negotiation last a long time, because Tim will cut your throat when it is a done deal.