Join us for our CPW-UAW Local 4100 Picnic this Sunday
We are holding a picnic this Sunday, 8/2 starting at 4pm in Riverside Park (next to Ellington in the Park, Riverside Dr & W 105th St, New York, NY 10025), to celebrate winning our first contract and moving into the next phase of building our Local Union, CPW-UAW Local 4100. If you can join us, please plan on wearing a mask and maintaining a safe social distance from others. This is a potluck, but the important thing is getting together. If you do not feel comfortable consuming food or drink provided by others please feel free to bring your own or buy at the nearby restaurant Ellington in the Park. If the weather on Sunday turns against us we will reschedule, but you can RSVP now and we will make sure to let you know the new date.
Summary of Next Steps for Our Local Union:
Thanks to everyone who attended our meeting Monday night regarding next steps in building CPW-UAW Local 4100! Below is a summary of suggested next steps we discussed in our meeting. Since not everyone could attend, we want to share this and allow for additional questions or feedback.
In short, in addition to maintaining our Organizing Committee, we now need to have a committee start to draft Local Union bylaws, have elections for officers to run our union, and elect an elections committee to administer the officer election. Below are suggestions for the structure and timelines for each of these.
Organizing: As we move into the next phase of our union, maintaining strong majority support and participation will be as important as ever. The Organizing Committee will continue meeting to help coordinate efforts as Postdoc and Associate Researchers now start signing up as members of CPW-UAW Local 4100. Strong majority membership will help us enforce our new rights under the new contract and help us have a strong voice beyond the contract. The more of us that participate in organizing, the more efficient we will be. If you are interested in helping out please sign up here.
Elections Committee: Local Union officer elections in the UAW must be administered by a democratically-elected elections committee. Members of this committee serve a 1 year term and administer each election for officers (example duties include sending out nominations and election notices, confirming eligibility of candidates, overseeing elections, counting ballots, and announcing results). We plan to send a notice of nominations and election for a 5-member committee next week.
Bylaws Committee: All Local Unions must have bylaws that lay out the democratic governance structure of our union. Bylaws address things like how often membership meetings happen and how they are run, the number of stewards, how officers and stewards are elected and can be recalled, how future bargaining committees are structured and elected, and how members can amend bylaws in the future. An example of bylaws from a similarly-sized academic UAW Local like ours can be found here.
The bylaws committee is a significant time commitment, probably limited to August and early September. Committee members will draft bylaws (for example, by reading other Locals’ bylaws as examples and customizing them for our unit), present them to membership and incorporate feedback, put them to a vote by the members, then submit the approved bylaws to the UAW. We plan to begin seeking volunteers for a 5-member committee next week.
Election of Officers: While Local Unions like ours have regular open membership meetings, we also must elect executive board (“E Board”) officers: President, Vice President, Financial Secretary, Recording Secretary, Sergeant-at-arms, Guide, and three Trustees. Once finalized, our bylaws will also outline the number of, and process for electing, Stewards. Stewards organize and help workers enforce rights under the contract along with the E Board.We plan to hold elections for our E Board in mid-September, and elections for Stewards after completing our bylaws. Notice of nominations for E Board officers would likely go out in the second half of August.
We are excited to move ahead with establishing the democratic governance structure of our Local Union and encourage you to consider getting involved. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback, and join us for our Picnic this Sunday!
In solidarity,
The CPW-UAW Local 4100 Bargaining Committee