|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
                 Get to know your Business Agent today!  Find out how the union makes a difference on the job. |
Newsline: February 2001 Local 237 Members Keep City Running Everyone in the City of New York is familiar with the front line troops in the municipal army and their equipment. Who doesn't recognize the gleaming white and blue patrol cars of the precinct police officers, or the huge red and stainless steel vehicles in which the Fire Department rushes heroic Firefighters to save lives in endangered buildings? Also familiar are the life-saving vehicles of the Emergency Medical Technicians who daily aid residents in auto accidents or fires, or who drop in their tracks suffering heart attacks. Less well known, possibly, might be the valiant Emergency Service Units that respond to everything from tipped over cranes in which operators are pinned to unhappy residents seeking to end their lives from the city's many bridges. Lives are saved every day by these brave front-line troops, who are often honored by municipal officials for the risks they take. Little thought is given by city residents, however, to the support personnel who every day report to their jobs to ensure that the city keeps running. As the military realized many years ago, it takes a lot of people out of the line of fire to assure victory over an enemy. Members of Local 237 who hold titles as Stores Workers are the unsung heroes whose diligence to duty maintains the city's many services. Fire, Police, Sanitation, Health and Hospitals, and the Board of Education are just a few of the areas in which Local 237 members ply their trades to provide vital services to the city's millions of residents. Imagine the lives in jeopardy if the Police or Fire Departments ran out of parts to keep emergency vehicles maintained. Or the mountains of garbage that would block the city's streets because of missing items in the Sanitation Department's inventory. The Sanitation Department parts budget alone amounts to more than $20 million. Without the work of Local 237 Stores members at the Health and Hospitals Corporation, there would be no sheets for patient bedding, no food for the many and varied meals that must be served, and no medication to ease patients suffering. If Local 237 members did not make sure that the Emergency Medical Service vehicles had sufficient and proper parts for maintenance, EMS would be unable to transport the sick to hospitals. At the Board of Education, or the many colleges of the City University of New York, educators would be unable to do their jobs without supplies ranging from books to chalk, and schools would be in near collapse without tradesman's supplies. Plumbers, maintenance workers, plasterers or masons could not do their work without the Local 237 stock room workers doing their job. The recent threat of the West Nile virus could not have been challenged by the Health Department without the availability of proper equipment and poisons with which to eliminate disease-carrying mosquitoes. At the Department of Correction, Stores personnel provide food for the prisoners' meals, issue clothing and maintain supplies that help the prisons run. Anyone who has ever had to stop doing some small repair at home, from switching a light bulb to changing a washer, is acutely aware of what happens when parts are not at hand. Think of the job it takes to keep hundreds of millions of items properly inventoried. So, when Sanitation picks up your trash, or fire engines rush down your street to save lives, or you hear a police siren, or your child has a good day at school, give a small thought to the unheralded Teamsters who keep the city running. |
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
 |
|||||
| |||||