Greetings Brothers and Sisters,

Day 2 began with a video about a story from our Western Territories. The story was about women leading the way in the Western Territories. From organizing to working at Boeing, we believe in empowering women to take on leadership roles. Women are encouraged to become more active within their locals. The video also talked about the current negotiations between District 751 and Boeing. Our slogan is "When We Fight!! We Win!!”

Next, we had the president of the New York AFL-CIO and he spoke and one slogan that stuck was, “My Union, It's not about me, it's about my family. It's not about the present, it's about the future.”

The next speaker was the President of the Labor Council of Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) workers Evelyn DeJesus. She spoke of encouragement of working hard and working together with our diversity to move forward. If we all work together we can all succeed. We are the strongest together.

The Appeals and Grievance Committee spoke next. We heard an Article L brought against an Executive Board Member in a Local in Canada.

Next the Resolutions Committee presented a few resolutions to be voted on.

After a Short Break for a “set” change, we moved to the Committee on the Future where we started with a video of the work they have been working on and then started going through the questions in which they asked our members when they held 45 town hall meetings in 29 cities across the country. Unfortunately, our Local didn’t have a meeting for us to attend.

One of the things they addressed was many of the members in our Union have no idea what the different levels of our Union do. From a Local to a District to the International many of our members don’t even know or understand what the Business Rep does. What or who the GVP is or what do they do? I feel even our membership can relate to this as well.

One positive with that is that while our membership might not understand everything they are more than willing to address their issues and were able to give solutions. An example is an organizational chart or more education about our Union. Utilization of technology also helps improve all of this. Personally, I feel like we accomplish this very well here on our Local’s Website, however, I know we still have a long way to go. We need to get our membership involved and the “Want” and “Drive” to be involved.

The next big topic they discussed was "Dues.” How and why are dues are what they are? The Dues Structure we have works great for some and makes it hard for others. When it comes to organizing, it makes it tough to sell with the current structure we have. Some of the solutions that they heard were about making the dues income-based. Many of the Average members have no idea how their dues are calculated. Where the calculation comes from and why is it so high?

Some other things around dues were the membership wants more transparency with how dues are spent. They want to know more about how the money is being distributed to Locals, Districts, and Territories.

After a recess for lunch, we started with a video of the representation of the 35,000 members in Canada. The video’s contents were many leaders from Locals all across Canada expressing their values for why being appear of the IAM is so valuable.