By Liam Russertt, Package Car Steward (Maspeth)

The Executive Board has canceled the summer general membership meeting. The summer meeting is usually canceled, but not always. Last year, the summer meeting was held because of the contract.

This year’s summer meeting could have been used to address the pension issues that have been drawing a lot of questions from the membership.

Members turned out at the April meeting to overwhelmingly pass bylaws changes to require our Executive Board to report on our pension and welfare funds at each meeting.

Three weeks before that meeting, fund actuaries certified that our pension plan was in Endangered Status (the “Yellow Zone.”) No one on the Executive Board made any mention of this at the meeting except a vague announcement that we would be receiving a notice in the mail.

The Executive Board already had the information. Why didn’t they share it at the meeting when members could have asked questions and gotten informed?

This summer’s meeting would have been an opportunity for the Executive Board to explain what being in the Yellow Zone will mean for our fund and our benefits.

Most other UPS Teamsters will see pension improvements over the course of the current contract. Will our Local 804 pension stay frozen at the 2002 benefit level? Members would like to know. But we won’t be finding out-at least at this summer’s meeting.

Maybe Local 804 members really prefer for the meeting to be canceled. One sure way to find out would be to have put the issue to a vote at the April meeting. Then the membership could have spoken for itself.

A membership vote along these lines is actually required by the Teamster Constitution which states that summer membership meetings can only be suspended, “by action of the membership at a meeting after reasonable notice of the intention to vote upon such question.” (Article XIV, Section 2(a)(1))

Our local’s practice of canceling summer meetings without a vote goes back some time. It even happened when Ron Carey was in office.

But putting the question to the membership is not just right by the rules-it’s right by the membership.

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