Landmark Win for CWA Local 4502 in Zupp/Smalls lawsuit against City!!
For over two decades, CMAGE has tirelessly fought to defend the rights of its members. Our strength has come from our membership’s dedication and solidarity. The Union is proud to announce that, through this dedication and solidarity, we have won a hard-fought victory in our dispute with the City over bumping rights.
In 2008, the City attempted to limit the bumping rights of our members by prohibiting the bumping of less-senior AFSCME workers. The City claimed that its contract with AFSCME had changed the terms of an earlier contract with the Union. According to our contract, both the City and the Union had to follow the Civil Service Commission’s rules dealing with layoffs. These rules allowed employees to bump less-senior employees in the same job family. However, the AFSCME contract said that AFSCME workers could be bumped only by other AFSCME workers. The City claimed that AFSCME’s contract amended the Civil Service Commission’s layoff rules and thus amended our contractual rights. As a result, several of our members were denied the right to bump AFSCME workers on the basis of the AFSCME contract and your current CMAGE/CWA leadership stepped in.
CMAGE/CWA fought to defend our contract, first before the Civil Service Commission and then the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, both to no avail. Unwilling to accept defeat, Local 4502 appealed the case to Ohio’s Tenth District Court of Appeals. On June 10, the court decided the case in our favor and upheld the right of our members to bump less-senior AFSCME workers. The court specifically found that “the city ‘negotiated itself into this mess’ by making mutually exclusive and inconsistent promises to AFSCME and CMAGE/CWA with respect to classified employee ‘bumping rights’ in layoff situations, and ‘while that may be a problem for the City, it cannot be [CMAGE’s] problem.”
This victory demonstrates the value and the importance of union representation. Individually, we would have neither the time nor the resources to pursue a legal battle such as this. But, together we can defend the rights that we’ve struggled to establish and preserve our much-cherished quality of life. If you have any questions concerning this case, please do not hesitate to contact CMAGE/CWA President Brien Bellous at (614) 485-1265, or email bbellous@cmage.org.
