Communication Workers of America

TO: All CWA Local 1081 Members
FROM: David H. Weiner, President
DATE: March 20, 2007
SUBJECT: Westside Office Rehabilitation

With the recent rehabilitation of the Westside Citizen Services Center, the management of the agency, along with the landlord of the privately-owned 18 Rector Street site, has a responsibility to maintain a safe, clean and comfortable environment within that office while preferably separately at off-hours, and less desirably concurrently during the work day, effectuating the improvements to that floor within the site occupied by the Division as required by the latest iteration of the landlord's lease with the County.

Similarly, and concurrently, the employees of the Division of Welfare now assigned to the third floor have a responsibility to do their part to agree to work only within a clean, safe and as comfortable set of office conditions as is possible.

To that end, considering the landlord's operatives' activities of removing old, and replacing new, carpeting and the fact that process has made safely breathing the air within the Westside office untenable for nearly all members of CWA Local 1081 assigned and visiting there, our Union is strongly urging all of our so ill-affected members to request immediately to be transferred to different agency offices located within the same building.

Were management to deny such temporary transfers, and/ unnecessarily dally in approving them, CWA Local 1081 directs our ill-affected members to simply notify their office's titular superiors that they are transferring themselves to an environmentally safer office. Were management to attempt to threaten or cajole any of our members requesting such a temporary transfer, contact me ASAP and the Union may well decide to take such strident action as rendering inoperable the entirety of the building.