like the contract when I started contained most everything except someone to follow us into the toilet and wipe our ass when we were done. Alright, that may be a bit of a stretch, but employees and employers have to be realistic on wants verses needs and what is deserved for the job being performed and the risks
Without the union, I could see how the bosses would do whatever they wanted. Even with the union they tried and succeeded getting rid of some good people. It seemed like the union was only able to protect those that shouldn’t have been protected.
HEALTH
There are a few basics that I see as the union’s responsibility in this job.
Protect the good employees and aid the employer in terminating the bad employees. Don’t try to save the bad ones; they are bad for everyone’s interests.
Health care should be 100% free. The diseases, viruses, germs, stress, assaults, constant verbal abuse, etc. tears you down. From the day I started until a few months after I left, I can lay no claim to being healthy during that time. Constantly, I was dealing with trying to perform my duties at a top level when I would’ve been better off at home. I have no idea how many times I had to go to the doctor for one sickness or the other and I never even went to a doctor for my sick mind. Most of us should see a shrink, but if we did, we probably would never return to work. Some good people that didn’t see that shrink resorted to killing themselves.
The vacation time and sick days were far better than anything I had ever had before. You’ll get no complaints from me there.
I should’ve used more of the sick days. My problem was that I was taught that if you could get out of bed, you could go to school; this seemed to apply to work too. Even when I was so sick that I had to call in, I always felt guilty. I rarely called in sick.
Most of the sick days that I used were to take care of my father when he was dying from cancer. This was allowed, which was another good point in the contract. It was sick time I had accrued, but I still felt guilty using it.
When I retired, I had a lot of sick time left on the books that I received no benefit from. Every day you step into that building, you are sacrificing your body and health.
When you call in sick, many of the lieutenants give you the third degree and make you feel like a criminal. A big problem here is the number of people abusing the sick time. If they didn’t get a day off they wanted, they’d call in sick. If a nice day popped up, they’d call in sick. One guy that I knew quite well took pride in calling in sick whenever he got 8 hours of sick time accrued. I asked him how he got away with it all of the time. Primarily he would use his daughter being sick as an excuse. They must’ve thought his daughter was quite sickly. Eventually, it caught up with him and he had to taper down a bit, but he got away with it for 6 or 7 years before he got a boss that put the clamps down on him. I also remember days he came in with a hangover and spent his time hiding out in the sergeant’s office trying to get away from the noise or to try to sleep it off.
In my final year or so, it was getting to be much more difficult for me to stay healthy enough to go to work. I called in sick late one night. I had waited hoping to feel well enough to go to work, but if I didn’t, they needed some notice in case they had to recruit someone to stay from first watch.
There was a time when the watch commander on first watch did not pass on the message to the watch commander on second watch. They called me, but I had left my cell phone in my car.
(I had moved out of my house and in with my girlfriend. This is when I got a cell phone and had my home number transferred to that cell phone. I didn’t carry this cell phone on me partly because of not wanting to forget I had it when I entered the prison; and primarily because I give off so much heat, my body burns them up.
The reasons that I moved out of my house were that my home had been built around the time of the Civil War. The land was worth more without the house on it than with the house on it. The Coon Rapids Fire Department burned it down for their firefighters to practice on. Also, my girlfriend lived much closer to the prison than I did.)
After getting no response, they got worried. My reputation for doing my job, never having been late and rarely calling in sick caused them to wonder if I had been attacked or worse. They contacted the Ramsey County Sheriff and had him check out the situation. When the doorbell rang, I was in bed so it took me a while to get to the door. Surprise! Surprise! Howdy sheriff! I never expected this. He was looking around outside, probably looking for signs of someone breaking into the house, holding a gun on me or my bloody carcass. When I opened the door, he was checking me out, peaking into the house to see if anything looked out of the ordinary. He told me why he was here and I told him that I had called in and talked to them. Everything didn’t get sorted out all of the way until I showed up at work the next day with my doctor’s note. I updated my contact information to include my girlfriend’s phone number. They were able to confirm that the first watch lieutenant didn’t pass on the message that I had called in sick.
WAGES
Pay a wage that is commensurate with the job responsibilities, skills needed and the dangers involved. The pay here was about half of what it should’ve been. Part of that problem was from union representation in the past getting benefits approved that could only be paid for by not increasing the salary. Give us a decent paycheck and we can take care of most other things. Give us a decent paycheck and we will have better quality employees and will need less of them. Give us a decent paycheck and we won’t have to work a second job, so we can be fresher and take care of business when we are here. Many of the officers here had to work two and three jobs, especially if they had a family to support. If they only had one or two jobs, their wife was generally working. I got by, just barely, with this job. If I filled you in on all of the things I did to get by, it would take writing another book. One thing I can tell you for sure. If the inmates had to live the way I lived, there would’ve been a riot.
WE ARE NOT SECRETARIES
Another problem was that the union grouped us in with secretaries. I have no problems with secretaries. I wouldn’t want to have to do their job all of the time. The problem comes when during negotiations, the legislature looks at the cost. Correction officers are a small number compared to all of the secretaries. If they would want to grant us more because of our job hazards and numerous other skill requirements, they would see the cost of the bill skyrocket if they gave these benefits to all of the secretaries. They weren’t going to do it. As secretaries, the contract was great, as correction officers it was lacking.
JACK OF ALL TRADES & THEN SOME
If you compiled a list of all of the skills needed to do everything the state requires to be a good corrections officer, it would be extremely long.
First you would have to be crazy to go in there. This should be stressed to anyone applying for the job. Normal people quit rather quickly. You can identify their level of craziness by how long they stay. The more normal they are the quicker they quit. A lot of money is wasted by the state hiring and training people who just aren’t crazy enough to hang around for a while. The guy that was warden here when I started said that if they got two years out of us, they would be happy.
You have to have secretarial skills. Using computers and being able to type are important, even for those guys with hands as big as a gorilla. If your finger tip touches 4 keys at a time, tough luck, you still have to type up reports.
You have to be part psychiatrist in order to deal with all of the dysfunctional nut jobs in here;
