What is sexual harassment? How can you create a safe and welcoming work and union environment? Find answers and learn how to engage in active bystander intervention when you witness sexual harassment. Through role-playing exercises, gain hands-on experience using realistic scenarios for the building trades work environment that can be adapted to any workplace.
When management is breaking the rules left and right, quietly filing a grievance won't cut it. Fighting grievances isn’t only about how well you argue your case. It’s also about organizing members to build pressure on management. This workshop for stewards and union reps will focus on how to win creatively without going to arbitration. We'll hear from health care workers who took collective action, fought back against discipline and an unfair firing, and won.
Fighting grievances isn’t only about how well you argue your case. It’s also about organizing members to build pressure on management. This workshop for stewards and union reps will focus on how to win creatively without going to arbitration—or sometimes without even filing a grievance. We’ll discuss the do’s and don’ts of settling grievances, as well.
Build your contract interpretation skills in this hands-on workshop, especially useful for stewards. A co-worker comes to you with a workplace problem, but how do you determine whether it's a potential grievance, and what kind? We'll look at real contracts and example scenarios to practice identifying and analyzing the relevant contract language.
Stewards often find that regular conflict with supervisors is part of the job. But sometimes you come up against particularly difficult supervisors who try to undermine the union at every turn. Meet with stewards from a variety of industries to talk about strategies for handling bad management, and learn some new ones.
Stewards are the backbone of the union, defending co-workers when they need it most. We'll review how stewards can use their special rights and protections to most effectively advocate for their co-workers in investigatory interviews—and how to handle supervisors who are trying to put you off or trip you up.
We can learn a lot from our mistakes and those of others. In this workshop we’ll follow a grievance handling from beginning to end and ask: What went wrong? What should have been done? We start with the initial report of a disciplinary suspension and follow step by step, identifying mistakes which could have been damaging to the union’s case. The goal is to be persuasive and have a principled settlement. Come laugh and leave reminded of what to avoid. Presenter Richard De Vries confesses to having made all of the mistakes.
