My Employer's Potential Financial Scandal

I have been a certified lifeguard working at a New York State Park for the last four summers now and have continuously been drawn back to this workplace thanks to the higher rate of pay they offer. Being a college student, money is a constant need for me to pay off all my expenses and have something left over for myself. But regardless of what they offer for pay, their actions and treatment of employees has to be told. I know a lot of people would be skeptical about one person's take on the events, but ask anyone who's worked as a lifeguard at any state park in New York, and they'll complain about the same thing: It's been four years since we were promised a raise, and they took illegal maneuvers to make sure we never got it.

Since these parks are operated by the state, the lifeguards had for a long time been placed in a union known as NYSCOPBA, which stands for New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association. For whatever reason that still eludes me, someone in the State decided to make the State Park lifeguards part of this union so they could receive some of the same treatment of the police officers throughout New York State. Four years ago, a motion was passed through the union that all the employees under it receive a raise in their salary due to the climbing rate of minimum wage and the growing prices of many products due to this. However, the proposition of the raise sat untouched for a long time, and it took some time for the police officers to ever see a cent of it. They have, however, since then gotten their raise from the union after a long delay, but the lifeguards never saw even the slightest bit of it. Whenever someone attempted to contest the fact that the lifeguards had not gotten what they were promised, the supervisors and head lifeguards kept saying the same thing: there was no representation. The union hadn't given us representation within their organization in years, and there was no way thus for us to argue against the fact that we hadn't gotten what we had been promised.