Everyone makes bad decisions from time to time and your elected union leaders are no different. The key is to try and do the right thing for the right reason and always learn how to improve. A good example of this was when GFT had our own health plan a couple of years. The good part was 500 families had great health insurance for a while; the bad news was the union lost $250,000 in unpaid premiums which we are still collecting. A more recent decision was when we hired an in-house legal counsel for $90,000 per year for 20hrs per week work. We paid Attorney Somerfleck a total of $222,487+ for services rendered from October 2007 to April 2010. To date, Attorney Somerfleck has only collected $12,766 in Small Claims with an outstanding balance of about $120,000. The thought was that we would get a lot of this money back in legal fees for cases won. Unfortunately, this was not the case and our members were not getting enough services they needed. Consequently, we terminated the arrangement with Attorney Somerfleck so that we could free up money to hire field reps that would be available full-time. We now have 3 full-time field reps ready to help members with any issues and concerns at work.