[nfbmi-talk] a short clarification

[joe harcz Comcast]

Colleagues,

You have seen some salaries exposed here for MCB personnell and I'll get more and expose more. Now, this said I do value public employees and their rights to civil service protections, protective bargaining, and good wages in general. In fact I am personally more than liberl for lack of better words. This said these things are of public interest and are required to be made public. 

Moreover, we people who re blind are not exempted from the rights to know about such things and to hold public officials and public employees accountable.

Personally, I've long felt for example that all public employees are judged by merit. In fact that is precisely why we have civil service today for patronage was the rule of the day in prior generations.

The systems of checks and balances and measuring merit and giving due process have been savagely distorted however here in Michigan as the cases of Christine Boone and Dave Robinsion alone sadly attest.

I alledged that incompetance and malfeasance if not outright corruption is and has been rewarded in fact and deed here and elsewhere in the realm of MCB.
In short, however I do not criticise salaries of personnell per se, but actually I contend that they are not inline with either credentials or merit or performance which is documented in so many cases.

In fact it seems the more consumer freindly a person is within MCB the more he or she is attacked or arbitrarily fired and the more culpable one is the more likely that person is to be promoted and to retain a high salary that is not commensorate with demonstrable and merit based criteria.

Just look at the record of the likes of Cannon, Zanger, and Hull to name but a few, let alone the performance of the likes of White and McNeil as anti-consumer advocates rewarded with key supervisory roles.

And don't try calling the likes of many a so-called CRC in many regions and expect even the courtessy of a phone call back, not within forty eight hours but in months or even years.

No we have to have some oversight and some accountability.

Our sister agency MRSand it's oversight agency MRC (akin to the MCB board) conducted a "mystery shopper survey" in 2008 to ferret out lack of response and lack of required services to MRS applicants. Yet, to this day nothing like it has happened with MCB. No, it is all ad hoc and we get picked off one by one in isolation and without recourse or civil rights or due process.

It is time for revolution in my mind. And, quite frankly after the sickly performance of monitoring and enforcement I think we need to hammer away on other fronts until this stuff gets resolved.

I will be darned however if I will let the year in and year out threat of consolidation with the general agency that Cannon has used to keep us at bay be used this year. Beleive me he'll pull that rabbit out of his hat. Frankly, we wouldn't be any worse off than now. Believe me we don't have a trully separate agency of the blind anyways and we sure don't have one whit of compliance with the Rehab Act in practice, nor accountability of the powers that be.

As the worst culprits have chosen not to take early retirement for some insane reasons known only to themselves I suggest that we force the issue, again on a variety of fronts.

Joe