To:       All Local 749 Members
From:   John Ondusko, President
Date:    July 3, 2011

Below are the 2011 SEBAC vote totals for our Local:

SEBAC: 513 in favor, 763 against; Judicial contract: 547 in favor; 637 against; DCJ Contract: 26 in favor; 62 against

After Our Local voted “no” on June 15th, I had my previous letter to you concerning the vote taken down from the website. It was simply no longer immediately relevant.  I have asked Ian, our Secretary / webmaster, to put it back up for reference purposes. If you have not read my previous letter yet, I encourage you to do so.  If you will notice, I clearly pointed out that our representatives at SEBAC (yours and mine) secretly developed the agreement behind closed doors, with no input from me or you!

So, please be advised, if you have or had any misgivings about the SEBAC Agreement, neither I, nor any member of your Executive board, had any direct say or access to SEBAC. The E-board of Local 749 did not negotiate the concession package.

This past week, on June 29th, AFSCME Exec. Dir. Sal Luciano called a special meeting of all the Presidents of the state employee Locals. He was trying to see if the agreement could be tweaked in order to satisfy the members. All the presidents expressed their opinions. One thing was clear and that was that there was no consensus on potential tweaks to the concession package being offered. It was not even known, at this point, whether the Malloy administration was willing to re-work the concession package.

So, we commissioned Sal to find out. We also made it clear that if the answer was yes, that their needed to be “Local” involvement at the construction phase and not just at the ratification phase. The meeting ended and I left with little hope.

At this point, I have no specific knowledge of the plan for layoffs or which members in Local 749 will be affected.

So now, we wait again…

Sincerely and trying my best to serve you in these dire times,

John O