January 25,2014
Christine Robinson
Sarasota County Commission Chair
1660 Ringling Blvd, Second Floor
Sarasota, Fl 34236
Dear Ms. Robinson,
We recently learned that Sarasota County is the owner
operator of four movable span bridges in FDOT District One and as such is a
stakeholder in our labor actions against ISS. Please consider this letter a
notification and a request for your kind intervention on our behalf. This is
also a public information request please email us copies of your executed
movable bridge contracts now in force with ICA (and/or ISS/C&S). Your
cooperation is appreciated and our email address is exploitingtenders@gmail.com.
We regret the cloak of secrecy under which we currently
operate, it is necessary due to our distrust of ISS, their illegal firing of
one of our organizers and our employment being “at will”. We are simply trying
to protect our jobs until we have union representation in place. While the NLRA may afford
broad protections now, we found ISS to have little historical regard for this
act and have been forced to file charges against them.
It seems your contract with ICA allows their subcontracting
of operators through ISS. Southwest Florida bridge operators have long suffered
exploitation, profiteering and wage theft under ICA and ISS. Our claims and
efforts to reach an equitable resolution are well documented at www.bestbridge.blogspot.com. Please review the detailed historical
effort starting with the oldest post and working forward. If you prefer we can
print out each page and send it to you and each of the commissioners (at a cost
we would prefer to avoid).
The record will show our many attempts to avoid polarization
and reach agreement starting in April 2013. We brought the ISS wage and benefit abuse to the attention
of ICA but to no avail. ISS illegally confiscated our petition, repeatedly
prevented circulation of our organizing information, recently fired an
organizer and we have filed charges against them. In spite of the adversity our
ten months organizing drive has led to two NLRB elections now underway, one of
them on behalf of the operators of your bridges.
We ask for help preventing future exploitation and
profiteering by your agreeing to include bridge operator wage and benefit
safeguards in future contracts. The spirit of the Davis Bacon Act should
prevail and we should be paid no less than the wage rates and benefits in the
locality as reported by the Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Please bring our request to the commissioners’ attention and do have a word
with ICA. Thank you for your kind consideration and we look forward to your
response.
The Organizing Committee
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