Dental Subsidy Issue 

A date has been scheduled for a vote that will in essence allow our members to 

participate in the company Dental Plan. The company has a strategy sunilar to that which was used to get us out of the medical insurance business. Right now the subsidy we pay towards our Dental insurance is $10 more than the non-represented folks. It is the company's intent not to match further increases in the cost of our insurance with a corresponding increase in the subsidy (for represented folks). While distasteful this is not as large an issue as was our Medical Insurance. The reason is that your union plans both the low plan and the high plan in fact are better plans. Attached is the spreadsheet we had our insurance agent put together to help you in deciding which plan to choose. The only question on the spreadsheet I had was where the three-dollar amounts are located under the deductibles. There are three numbers that represent the deductibles for the first year of participation in the plan, for the second, and in the third year of participation you can see there is no deductible. In an attempt to gather a little history about our Dental Insurance we pulled together some interesting facts. It took some input from Ken Evans and none other than our former Union President and Exxon Annuitant Richard Lucas. I had to track Richard down as I discovered he spends his time between the East Texas Piney woods on his deer lease and his beach house down in Bolivar. I'm sure we're all happy to see Richard is enjoying his retirement. Richard told me that in the early 1980's the company did not even have a dental plan here locally for either represented or non- represented employees. What happened was that we negotiated a better rate for our medical plan than the company had and we had a little money from the medical subsidy left on the table. What YOUR UNION did for YOU was it utilized the left over medical subsidy money and provided a Dental Plan through Mutual of New York. The company was irate at this and tried to with hold the left over subsidy even though it was already bargained over. The GCIWU filed and injunction to stop ExxonMobil withholding the already agreed upon subsidy. We won an injunction in the courts in Houston. Well the company then appealed this decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and once again lost. Approximately two years later the company was shamed into providing similar Dental coverage for its non-represented employees. The bottom line here is that the company was shamed into providing this coverage for its supervisors. I personally thanked Richard for providing me with this information and for providing the leadership that enabled us to provide Dental Insurance at no cost to our members. Insurance ~ still to this day benefit from.