Editing § 15.3.i NA2022

==== LOI Letter on Article 15 Issues ====
<blockquote style="background-color: lightgrey; border: solid thin grey;">
John F. Hegarty</br>
National President</br>
National Postal Mail Handlers Union, AFL-CIO</br>
1101 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 500</br>
Washington, DC 20036-4304</br>
Dear Mr. Hegarty:</br>
During negotiations over the terms of the 2006 National Agreement between the National Postal Mail Handlers Union and the U.S. Postal Service, the parties reached the following understandings with regard to the changes made to Article 15.3D and Article 15.4D2.
<ol style="list-style-type:upper-alpha">
  <li>Any dispute initiated by the Employer at the National level under Article 15.3D shall not include any issue that previously has been appealed by the Union to the National arbitration docket.</li>
  <li>If the parties are unable to resolve a dispute initiated by the Employer at the National level under Article 15.3D, then the Union has the option to accept the Employer’s position on that issue or appeal the issue to National arbitration within existing contractual time limits. The Employer has no right to appeal any dispute or issue to National arbitration.</li>
  <li>If either the Employer or the Union, or both, do not opt to elect priority scheduling to the top of the National arbitration docket for up to two cases in any given calendar year, then those available arbitration hearing dates will revert to the dates subject to the preexisting scheduling standards — i.e., cases on the docket will be scheduled for arbitration in the order in which appealed, unless otherwise agreed to by the parties.</li>
  <li>Cases on the National arbitration docket will be scheduled for arbitration with no less than one hundred and fifty (150) days notice to both parties measured from the date of scheduling to the date of the initial arbitration hearing, unless the parties mutually agree to expedite a particular hearing date.</li>
  <li>Any local grievances filed on the specific interpretive issues pending on the National arbitration docket shall, upon mutual agreement, be held in abeyance at Step 3 until resolution of the national interpretive dispute. Said grievances should not be referred/appealed to Step 4 merely because the parties cannot agree on whether the specific interpretive issue is fairly presented in the local grievance.</li>
  <li>Ordering of those cases elected for priority scheduling shall be accomplished in the following manner: during each calendar year, the first case to be heard of the possible four such cases will be that case which has the earliest appeal to arbitration date. If this first case was selected for priority scheduling by the Union, the second case will be the Employer’s priority case with the earlier appeal date, the third will be the Union’s remaining case, and the fourth the Employer’s remaining case. If the first case (the case with the earliest appeal date of the parties’ four cases) is a case selected for priority scheduling by the Employer, the ordering process described above will be reversed. Unless the parties mutually agree otherwise, any priority cases remaining on the docket from prior calendar year(s) shall remain in their respective positions on the docket, with the newly-selected priority cases scheduled behind them in the above-described order.</li>
</ol>
Valerie E. Martin</br>
Manager, Contract Administration NPMHU</br>
U.S. Postal Service</br>
</blockquote>