September 25, 2004
By Terrence Dopp
gcnews@sjnewsco.com
TRENTON - Girding for a crippling "blue-flu" work stoppage, state corrections officials plan to activate a little-used emergency command center Monday, according to an internal memo.
With contract talks at a stalemate, union officials are expecting up to 1,500 officers to march Monday at the Statehouse.
Union officials denied any attempt to cajole workers into calling out Monday to attend the rally. But Mark J. Salaga, chief of the special operations group, said in a Friday memo the center will open at 2 p.m. Sunday and watch staffing levels at its 15 facilities statewide.
The center directs prison operations during emergencies.
"Every three hours beginning at 3 p.m., (direct staff) to provide staffing levels broken down by supervisory staff and line staff, to include the number of sick call-offs," Salaga wrote.
A spokesman for Department of Corrections Commissioner Devon Brown did not return messages Friday.
Angered by what they called unfair work conditions and bad-faith bargaining, corrections officers accuse Brown and Gov. James E. McGreevey of failing to ratify union contracts and unfair labor practices.
Officers have worked since July 2003 without a contract and the most recent talks disintegrated Friday, union leaders said. Sticking points include medical coverage and pay increases.
"We're just short of an all-out work stoppage. It's getting to that point," said Capt. Donald Coughlan, executive vice president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 187. "We're getting very close."
Coughlan, a Mantua resident who works at Bayside State Prison, denied reports of the "blue flu" but said he expected rally attendance to be very high.
He attributed it to unsafe conditions, such as a antiquated locking system in Bayside that leaves many inmates with unlocked cells, and privatization of halfway houses.
Also cited was an outbreak of the MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) infection in prisons statewide. That staph infection recently made headlines after a high-profile outbreak at the Gloucester County jail.
"We've grown increasingly frustrated," said Lt. Scott L. Derby, executive vice president of FOP Lodge 183, a Bridgeton resident who works at Bayside. Morale is "at a new all-time low."
Protests of working conditions in April united the warring Police Benevolent Association and the FOP, which won a recent vote to represent officers.
This spring corrections unions also accused the DOC of a secret plot to close down Riverside State Prison in Camden and replace it with a privately run prison in Salem County.
Doing so would allow the state to cash in on the current Camden revitalization by selling the land for luxury housing in the nation's second-poorest city, according to union leaders.
The 15 facilities the DOC operates include 8 prisons for men, the state's only all-female prison - the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Union Township - and a central intake facility in Mercer County as well as a sex offender lockup in Avenel.
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