What does it mean to be in a Union?
That is a question I’m sure many of us who have chosen to be involved have wondered.
Then there are the questions we hear from members…
Why am I in a Union?
What does the Union do for me?
Why do I pay Union Dues?
What are my dues doing for me?
So many questions we have heard over our years of being involved and so many times we have had to ponder the answers.
Recently, I watched a video that also made me wonder what Union membership means and it made me realize something about it.
You and I are not customers of our Union. We are members. We are participants. Unions are formed by us for us and it’s about community. The community of coming together to work and fight for what we want and deserve. To work towards a common outcome that is best for us. It’s not what the Union does for you but it’s about what we can all achieve together.
This has been a common theme throughout society today and not just in unions, but Organizations across the country and world, have stopped treating their members as actual members. People stopped being participants and started becoming customers of the organizations they were a part of. This has unfortunately been the shift in society since the 1950s. In the 50s one out of every three adults were in a union and now it’s about one out of every ten.
Now sure, we as a Local aren’t about to change the country or the world for that matter, with the things we do but we can at least work to change things within our areas of our lives for us. Work to build relationships in our community and within our work groups. Work towards building support of our Local and our members as a whole. Let’s face it, if we were to go on strike, what would the surrounding area think of us? Would they support our strike? Would they provide assistance and would your fellow Brothers and Sisters of our Local agree with issues you believe are worth striking for?
Our Local is about us and working together to do things for us. This is where our goals for our new executive board are beginning. We want to build on the community of our members and increase our participation from our members. We are not a service with our membership being the customers, but we are a community and a family and we will work together to help each other. Our monthly meetings are more than just meetings where we talk about business. Our meetings are about all of us coming together and sharing ideas, building friendships, and being a part of our community. We use these meetings to plan events for all of us to share in and it’s so much more than just selling you a service. This is about us. All of us sharing in this experience together. The more together we are, the more we share ideas and needs, and the more we can work together, the better we can make progress towards better contracts and greater events.
Let’s look at our past. How many times have contracts been negotiated and you didn’t feel involved or informed? In this last contract, I can say I did my best to inform and involve the membership as the communicator by providing updates as negotiations progressed. I fought hard to keep our comment section open so our membership could discuss daily each update. During our last negotiations with Lockheed, were the most engaged I’ve ever seen our membership, and unfortunately since that, engagement has dropped.
We as an Executive Board want to bring that engagement back. Bring our membership together as a community and have our membership be there for our membership.
This includes our other bargaining units as well. I know that with the majority of our Local’s membership being employed at Lockheed, our other members might not feel heard or even see the need to show up but that is what we also want to change. We want to bring all of our members together as a community. When we host events, it is for every one of our members. Our Local is made up of so many wonderful people and we want everyone to want to show up.
Please feel free to leave a comment below and let’s have the conversation on what we can all do to make us all want to show up.
