Why we should care about the reorganization:

This being one of the first few days of our (hopefully brilliant) blog's existence, I want to take the opportunity to introduce a topic that I think is central to our decision making over the next few months- Will this new service delivery model work? If not, then what will happen to us. If it does work, what will that mean?

The union's main job is to ensure that the people it represents all have the best pay, rights, and working conditions possible. We all agree on that much, but still, shouldn't we worry about the prospect that the new system will be worse than the current one? Think, for instance, of what would happen to the average FSS ( or WFPS, CSS, SW2, etc) if the reorganization fails and is widely perceived as a failure by the public. Not only would our jobs become more stressful, but more employee's would be disciplined, fired, injured on the job and so on. The public would, of course, blame us and by extension our union, and we would lose ground in Washington's politics because of it.

So we should try and make sure CSD works, and we should try to convince our leadership to do what makes sense to make it work too, right? Having said that, shouldn't we ask ourselves what would happen if this thing works great? In other words, do we want the FSS job class to be a phone center based job class?

Typically, way they evaluate your salary depends on what other people who do the same work in other parts of the economy are paid. I wonder what other phone center employee's are paid, and if we wouldn't rather be compared to "case managers" or "financial specialists." We may not want to become disconnected from the communities we serve, either. For many workers, the people they serve, and the satisfaction they get out of helping them, are the reasons that they get up in the morning. There is something sad in the march toward automation, something is lost, and we may not be gaining much in return.

I frequently wonder what the average FSS worker thinks about all this stuff. My fondest hope for this blog is that we might be able to come to some consensus on this subject, along with a few others that I won't get into here. So what's up FSS people? Is this change good for us or bad, and should we go with the flow or not?