La Blind Vendors’ Grievance: Round 1 ... My wife initiated a Grievance after the Fort Polk BEP facility “satellite manager” position selection.  We experienced such a high level of confusion and discomfort that she dropped it after the Informal Administrative Review. It is my understanding that the grievance process is mint to provide managers a better way than law suits to deal with problems within the BEP; however, for us it was intimidating and left us feeling that the SLA has the upper hand and that there is no use trying to oppose them.

Although the details of the current La. Blind Vendors’ Grievance cannot be discussed at this time, we can exchange comments on how we “feel” and what we “understand” in general about BEP grievances across the nation as this one unfolds.
I understand that managers have the choice to go it alone. It has been my experience that the SLA will let managers represent themselves or have someone of their choice (qualified to practice administrative law or not) to represent them. It is best to have the ECM on the managers side and to actually put forth the grievance. Our experience is that a grievance is clearly an adversarial arena favoring state BEP administrators and their lawyers. Remembering the difficulty we had trying to locate and retain legal representation, I venture to say that no matter how managers are represented, managers can expect a very stressful and intimidating experience from round 1, the “Informal Administrative Review” to the Evidentiary Hearing.