MEET YOUR INEPT EVP

This is Kathleen Sims. She has damaged GSEU since the early 1990s. Here are some of her "accomplishments" over the years.

� As Treasurer of GSEU in the mid-90s, Sims oversaw the union's finances: By 1997, when Sims took over as GSEU President, the union went into receivership because she had failed to balance the books, had forgotten that the union needed to file with the IRS, and had quite simply mismanaged funds.

� As chief negotiator for the 1995-1999 contract, Sims negotiated severe limitations on the rights of GAs and TAs: one side-letter offers the state the ability to force GAs and TAs to work on designated holidays in exchange for comp time. Still worse, Sims negotiated the elimination of the joint labor-management Campus Advisory Committee that resolved grievances replacing it with the absolute power of the state to resolve grievances. Finally, Sims introduced the predetermined and largely inadequate remedies for contract violations that has left the grievance procedure meaningless in many respects. According to one member of GSEU's negotiating team, the predetermined remedies were Sims' idea, and she proposed them to the state without the approval of the GSEU negotiating team. As with the current contract, Sims, as leader of the negotiating team, took approximately two years to negotiate the contract.

� As Area Vice President (position is now Business Agent) of Albany in the late 90s, Sims and then President Monazir Khan helped orchestrate a merger with CWA 1112 and 1104. While one may debate the merits of the merger, it was clearly bad that as part of the merger agreement, Sims and Khan extended their terms of office and gave themselves raises while brokering a dues increase for members. Around the same time, Sims, as a voting member of the GSEU's Decision Making Body, along with Khan, helped remove Buffalo AVP Michael Rozendal and Buffalo chief steward Laurie Ousley (after they had pressed charges against Khan's questionable use of members' dues) and helped ensure that these positions remained vacant for two years, leaving one quarter of the bargaining unit without local representation. Similarly, the DMB under the Khan-Sims regime refused to recognize the Stony Brook Steering Committee and its nominee for the position of Stony Brook AVP because they, like the officers in Buffalo, had been agitating for Khan's removal; Sims and her other DMB accomplices bypassed a democratic, member-driven process and instead appointed a largely uninvolved Ramon del Castillo to the position (leaving Stony Brook in virtually the same position as Buffalo). This suggests that Khan and Sims' primary interest has been maintaining their own incomes rather than maintaining member representation.

� In 2001, a group of Buffalo members were threatened with dismissal. Since they had no local rep (thanks to Sims and Khan), they contacted then EVP Khan who hung up the phone on the members and refused to talk to them. The members then called current 1104 President Bob Lilja who sent Sims to help the members. Sims did show up to a meeting, but she did nothing to help these members who were forced to cave to management. Management, of course, learned a valuable lesson about how well GSEU's "leaders" would handle labor disputes.

� As Albany business agent, Kathleen Sims managed to more than double her income from the union from a reasonable $19,252 to $49,067, and she somehow spent in one year over $22,000 of members' dues on so-called union business even though no other officers spent close to this amount that year. We want our officers compensated, but the pay should not be so much higher than the average pay within the bargaining unit. We also believe that Sims needs to be honest about her pay: The minutes of Decision Making Body meetings show that at three different meetings she was asked how much she was paid by the union, and on each occasion she gave a different answer, none of which matched the amount listed in CWA 1104's own financial statements. The dishonesty only belies Sims' feelings of guilt for doing so little for so much money.

� In 2002, SUNY Buffalo proposed the position of "Teaching Associate" be added to the GSEU bargaining unit to add additional years of funding for graduate student employees. It meant higher pay and better benefits than adjuncting, the usual route when funding runs out. The DMB under Khan-Sims-Pearson etc. rejected the proposal without conferring with members in Buffalo. SUNY Buffalo ignored the DMB and went ahead with the program much to the satisfaction of members at UB. According to Scott Oldenberg, when SUNY Buffalo decided to phase out the program, Sims would not help him prevent the retrenchment of these positions.

� In 2002-2003, Kathleen Sims, as chair of the GSEU Decision Making Body, failed to convene a Decision Making Body meeting for nearly 11 months, during which time the Decision Making Body should have been developing bargaining proposals and negotiation strategies. The meeting was held only after a group of DMB members threatened to halt negotiations should the obstruction of democracy and basic union functioning continue. It comes as little surprise that the contract took nearly two years to settle.

� From October 2003 to September 2004, while most officers including those of other divisions of CWA 1104 were reimbursed for less than $8,000 in expenditures on union business, Kathleen Sims, as Executive President of GSEU, was reimbursed for over $37,000, over $100 a day every day for that fiscal year. Given that negotiations took place in Albany, where Sims lives, we wonder why Sims's spending so out of step with the rest of the union, and what did she do with the money? Is she eating on members' dues every day?

� In 2004 , a majority of the GSEU's Decision Making Body, made up of the EVP and all GSEU Business Agents and Chief Stewards, voted to remove Kathleen Sims from the position of Chief Negotiator for the GSEU contract. Rather than recognize the lack of confidence as a sign that a new negotiator was needed, Sims fought to keep her chief negotiator position by referring to an ambiguous area of the CWA 1104 bylaws.

� According to William Wharton, in February 2005, the state offered a $600 lump sum for all GAs and TAs as part of the 2003-2007 contract. As chief negotiator, Kathleen Sims bargained the state down to a $500 lump sum resulting in a $100 loss to every GA and TA in the SUNY system.

� Sims' most recent gaff was to arrange a Decision Making Body meeting to approve the tentative agreement with the state, a perfectly fine thing to do, except that she arranged the meeting in such a way that those members of the DMB who wanted to reject the agreement were excluded from the vote: hence the statement that the agreement received the DMB's "unanimous" support.

She must be stopped!