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.
Shop stewards are the face of the union—the ones members see day to day, and rely on for everything from basic questions about the job to handling complicated grievances. But stewards are also in a great position to strengthen the union by getting more people involved: by thinking like an organizer. Meet with activists from different unions across the country to learn about how to be more effective stewards by organizing.
When it comes to grievances, is your local stuck pushing paper more often than winning “instant justice”? Are grievances bottlenecked in the hands of a veteran steward or solo staffer? Hear from activists who are changing their unions’ grievance culture with direct action, group grievances, and mini-campaigns, and drawing more members into solving everyday problems on the job. We’ll also review the challenges, and how to avoid slipping back into well-worn grooves.
Burnout—emotional, physical, or mental—is a fact of life for many of us in the labor movement, whether it's due to our jobs, our union activism, or both. Join us for a thoughtful and compassionate discussion of how we can address burnout on an individual and a group level, and how we can organize ourselves so that our work can be sustained.
Union 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.
Grievances are a lot more than what you write down on a form or what gets said in a hearing. Some of the most important work that goes into winning a grievance happens before you even file, and pays off big time if the grievance ends up going to arbitration. Join stewards and officers from a variety of industries to discuss strategies for grievance investigation and share best practices.
Open shop conditions don’t have to be a death sentence. We'll cover strategies for building and maintaining stronger unions even under so-called “right to work,” particularly in the public sector.
A health and safety committee can transform the workplace: jump-starting your organizing with action that gets a lot of people involved, and victories that people really feel. We'll explore committee models that both union and nonunion workers can use, and the structures and strategies that make committees effective.
Burnout—emotional, physical, or mental—is a fact of life for many of us in the labor movement, whether it's due to our jobs, our union activism, or both. Join us for a thoughtful and compassionate discussion of how we can address burnout on an individual and a group level, and how we can organize ourselves so that our work can be sustained.
This workshop will start with a short poem by Katie Giede, Union of Southern Service Workers.
Which sources of information can you trust? How can you involve members? Workers often are, or feel, excluded from investigating incidents, but they shouldn’t be. Avoid traps: “blame the worker" is often used to avoid finding out what actually happened, but that’s the key to preventing future dangers.
