Friday Update 4-9-21
Updated On: Apr 30, 2021


FRIDAY UPDATE 
 


Sisters & Brothers,
 
Today is Home Opener for our World Champion Los Angeles “County” Dodgers, and also it is Opening Day for our new IAFF Leadership Team.  Brother Ed Kelly from Boston Fire Fighters Local 718 and our very own Brother Frank Lima from UFLAC Local 112 start their work on behalf of our members and families.  

With Brother Ed Kelly as our new General President and brother Frank Lima as our General Secretary-Treasurer, we usher in a new era of “value-added” Secretary-Treasurer with Frank’s vast experience as a West Coast Fire Captain and Union Leader who will not just keep the books, but be an added asset to President Kelly’s presence in our DC Office. 

The IAFF is an important component of our Union work with regard to federal elections and federal legislative and administrative action affecting our members.  Key IAFF items are federal firefighter laws and governance, retirement law, retiree healthcare law, health and safety issues, social security, staffing, UASI, FEMA / SAFER funding, and more.  Additionally, many EMS regulatory issues are at the federal level affecting fire-based EMS systems versus the private EMS provider systems.  

GST Lima and President Gillotte have worked together both at the California Professional Firefighters (CPF) and at the LA Federation of Labor, the largest and most powerful labor council in America.  Brother Lima will continue to serve as a Vice President along with Gillotte.  

The Executive Boards of both UFLAC 112 - LA City Fire Fighters and Local 1014 LA County Fire Fighters have been close allies in virtually all of our work at the local, state, and federal levels.  President Freddy Escobar and President Gillotte, along with CPF President Brian Rice and GST Lima have already been meeting and laying out a California and LA County regional strategy for the issues and work needed on behalf of our members.  

We have a lot of work to do! Congratulations to Brother Kelly and Lima and the entire IAFF Executive Board on their elections and may we find East Coast / West Coast Solidarity in both Canada and the United States and Territories of Guam.  Let’s get to work!!
The Performance Net is Here to Stay
By Director Pat Dolan 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a Friday Message article regarding the Department’s use of The Performance Net and how they will be using this platform from now on to document an employee’s Annual Performance Evaluation.  If you used the program for your subordinates PE, you came to realize very soon that the program certainly isn’t “fire-friendly” and most of the bullet points used to denote what should be documented in that particular category didn’t exactly fit into what we do regularly.  I know I certainly realized this within the first 2 minutes of the very first category.

As supervisors, I feel we should be evaluating our team members as fairly and reasonably as possible.  The team members who go out and lead by example, who “give back” to the organization, and who regularly go the extra mile should be graded as such.  

This isn’t a new concept, but have you tried to fit these extra job duties into the new Performance Net?  It’s not exactly easy, and it will certainly not be easy when it comes to using the PE as documentation for a future Appraisal of Promotability (AP).  I cited this in my last article when I said that supervisors who write PE’s should not be writing that PE for just what the Team Member did last year, think about when that Team Member is going for a possible promotion, and he/she is using this document to verify their Work Activities 5-10 years down the road.  Will it hold up as sufficient documentation?  Does the wording you used match up correctly with the AP language?  The person reviewing it hopes so, as does the person using it as verification (trust me on this).

What am I getting at?  I’ve been doing exam appeals a very long time, and NEVER have I had an experience of exam appeals as we did the last exam process.  I hope to never have to do it again. Last month Local 1014 filed a “Cease and Desist” letter to the Department regarding the Performance Net, because it does not mesh with the AP Packet for Fire Captain or Battalion Chief.  You may find this hard to believe (or maybe you won’t) but there are individuals within the organization who never knew that the PE’s were used to verify documentation of the AP’s.  What?  It’s near 100% of your verification on what you are documenting on your AP’s. This is the disconnect and where we run into problems.

So, to help alleviate future issues, Jason Cervantes and I had a preliminary meeting with Deputy Chief Bill McCloud and Deputy Chief Chris Anderson to discuss our concerns and what we hope to accomplish.  Both Deputy Chiefs were receptive to our concerns, and in turn, both assembled staff to “Meet and Confer” over what Local 1014 feels may be future issues as it pertains to the Performance Net, future AP documentation, and language which we hope to use to make the document more in line with what we do on a daily basis.  This meeting is scheduled to take place later this month and we are unsure if we will need to schedule more meetings until we feel the language is more parallel to the AP. 

I will try and keep you, the membership, updated regarding where we are in the process, but as I’ve said before in several of my articles, the pace at which change comes is glacial at best.  Keep doing what you’re doing, and remember to document everything.

In Solidarity, 

President Dave Gillotte and the Local 1014 Executive Board 

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