IAFF: Kelly and Morrison Axe Del Re
Dishonorable discharge
President Ed “Edzo” Kelly and “right hand man” Pat Morrison sacked Elizabeth Del Re last week, she was a senior IAFF manager.
The Edzo/Morrison action is reminiscent of the Schaitberger days when managers or other “at will” employees would be called in, as if to a Kremlin trial, never to be seen again.
Except there’s no trial, just the verdict.
Kelly is reported to have said that he “wants to go in a different direction.”
But he couldn’t say it to her.
The dirty work was left to Morrison who is reported to have told her that it was the “hardest day of his career.”
Del Ray surely felt better at hearing that, rather like the executioner expressing regret as he probes for a vein.
If Del Ray had to go, and she had served the IAFF well, she should have been accorded a proper and professional exit.
Kelly and Morrison give new meaning to the phrase “dishonorable discharge.”
How a union separates from employees matters — a lot.
No doubt Kelly will go out and march on a picket line somewhere decrying how firefighters have been summarily laid off while he does much worse to his own employees.
More to the point, he makes a mockery of convention resolutions decrying anti-labor fire chiefs. He continues the Schaitberger tradition of out-scabbing the scabs.
The irony will escape him on both counts.
Morrison is paying back the god of good fortune by being Edzo’s hatchet man; where’s the gratitude in that?
Kelly and Morrison further degrade the IAFF, if such a thing is even possible, by robbing someone of their dignity while instilling a culture of fear in those that remain.
So much for a “different direction.”
