Protesters Point to the Straws That Broke the Camel’s Back

Ella Waight

At the core of the problem is the collective bargaining agreement, which according to the CWU reps, the S.S.B. has refrained from discussing. That CBA includes salary adjustments for the employees. According to union reps, they are asking for sixteen percent across the three-year period 2014, 2015, 2016.  The issues of the uniform and the actual breach of the CBA are the straws that broke the camel’s back.

Ella Waight, Deputy Chief Union Rep., S.S.B.

“When it comes to our CBA…our CBA is basically a contract between us the employees of Social Security union members and S.S.B.  It is basically a contract as in any other contract in this country. If you have a contract with somebody and they breach that contract, you go to court. We don’t go to court; we go to our union and our union advises us and directs us on how to take action and that is through industrial action. Our last CBA expired thirty-first of December, 2013. Since over the past nine years, the employees of social security board got one raise of five percent in 2011. Because the last negotiations took about four to five years to complete, our members directed us to go into negotiations beginning with financials. We did that. Our first meeting we told them that we wanted to begin with financials, but because the financials of the board was not completed through the process it had to go through, we decided okay, we leave the financials for now, but we continue with the wording because we want to continue with this process. They are many people saying that we are doing this because we want to jump and get this finished before election. We had already gone into negotiations saying that we want to begin with financials and when it comes to financials we want to deal with our salary adjustments because that affects every single employee of our organization.”