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very weak, that the union is no longer capable of dealing with management. She is always saying that it's the enemies who are dividing us. You know, that kind of thing. She holds on. We begin to do telephone polls to sample opinion.

It's a year ago, already?

Oh yes. We did polling early on. We did polling, sampling, of all divisions, and then had results and answers to certain questions, began to feel what they were concerned about. It was quite clear that the five percent and the inability to solve grievances, and the lack of information were problems.

Who arranged the polling?

A polling outfit did it for us, devised the polling. We, members, got on the phone and did the calling from homes, and that kind of thing. But the polling was important, because it gave us -- we had a reference, because we then did other polling three months later. Then we did more refined polling in the second time to go only after the hospital division members in the five boroughs -- because we know Queens, that we got, Long Island we got -- to see what is happening in the hospital division. We begin to see a noticeable kind of shift, that she still has a slight majority in the hospital division but a large number of undecideds. The guild is overwhelming, in the RN it's overwhelming. Homecare we have no contact. We have no way of finding out who is what in that way.

At the same time, we're pushing for an election. When is there going to be an election? When is the Labor Department going to go to court and push to make them have an election? The DOL spends like a half a year or more asking for the documents for the election, the records, and she is stonewalling them. They don't have the records! They finally end up in a federal court, they have to turn over the records. Alright, so they turn over the records. Then they don't come down with a decision to hold an election until, oh gosh, maybe fourteen or fifteen months after we file the objections to the election. And they say that there's going to be an election in March, and that we'll be informed. Also, they then go to Heaps, before they go to court. “We want a court election,” for obvious reasons. In the court, we become a party to the case. If it's an election that's not court ordered, the union runs the election and DOL supervises it -- it's a very, very big difference. So that's what they accepted, to do that. We then had the problem -- they said March. We didn't want it in April, because the closer you get to negotiations the charge will be it's going to interfere with the unity