Communication Workers of America

February 10, 2007

Bruce Nigro, Director
Essex County Division of Welfare
18 Rector Street , Floor 9
Newark , NJ , 07102 00

Re: Grievance Response

Dear Mr. Nigro:

CWA Local 1081 is in receipt of your response of February 7, 2007 to our Union's attached Step II Class Action Contractual Grievance submitted to you to "protest the managerial concoction and propagation" contained within the initial incarnation that is the attached flyer, entitled "Special Notice to Clients". The additional intent of our grievance, you will recall, was to "protest the divisive and dissonant disposition of the document that apparently is designed to pit our Family Service Worker members against clients of the Essex County Division of Welfare." The flyer, which provocatively proclaimed "If you are advised that your Family Worker is not in the office today, you still have a right to be serviced by another worker or by a supervisor. It is your choice!" we found "an anathema of administrative common sense and conscientiousness"

Your grievance response was accompanied by the attached revised version of the "Special Notice to Clients" flyer which, while found by our Union to be minimally more tolerable, nonetheless remains representative of a superfluous interjection of administrative hubris into the client/worker interactive process.

We do note, however, with the type of sensible satisfaction Unions secure from successfully soliciting management to alter its wayward ways, that the revised flier was composed sans the seditious "It's your choice" pronouncement which many of our members found derisory and distasteful.

It is the fervent desire of CWA Local 1081 that such untoward managerial measures as was this will be avoided by the administration exercising an enhanced degree of prudence before issuing injudicious invective, this so our Union may eschew having to dissipate treasured time to remonstrate in response.

Sincerely,

David H. Weiner, President, CWA Local 1081