December 23, 2024
Winning your union recognition vote is a reason to celebrate! Not only does it certify that you successfully formed a union, it also legally forces management to negotiate with you in good faith. For the first time, you and your coworkers officially get a seat at the bargaining table, where you can secure real workplace improvements with a union contract for years to come.
However, management won't give up without a fight. They'll be prepared with high-paid lawyers and consultants on their side of the table. So make sure your side brings something management can never have—your collective power.
Bringing your collective power directly to the bargaining table with big, open, and transparent negotiations is the best strategy for winning big. Unions that incorporate all three of these qualities into their negotiations have a proven track record of winning major improvements for their members.
In the following sections, we'll explore practical steps to implement this strategy. By the end of this comprehensive guide, you'll be fully equipped to beat the boss. So let's get started!
Hopefully you'll win your union recognition vote with enough margin that it's clear your coworkers want union representation. However, if results are close, management may use legal challenges to delay the NLRB from certifying your election by claiming that some 'yes' votes were fraudulent or coerced. Don't let legal delay tactics put you on the defensive. Waiting for things to play out in court will just cause your drive to lose steam.
As discussed in 5 Union Busting Strategies and How to Stop Them, your best bet against legal delay tactics is to fight back with supermajority action, where 90% or more of your coworkers come together to display your collective power. If company lawyers are saying you don't even represent 50% of your workplace, continue organizing and running your escalating campaign of structure tests until you have enough support that the legal objections become laughable.
You won your election fair and square, so start acting like it! Immediately after winning your election, you should begin preparing for negotiations. As you'll soon see, there's a lot of research and legwork required before negotiations can begin. So it's a good idea to tackle those preparations in parallel with your supermajority organizing push and with any legal delays you face. That way you stay on the offensive and moving forward instead of stalling and falling behind.
After the NLRB officially certifies your union, you gain a superpower—the legal right to request any company documents, data, or facts related to your working conditions. This means the company is required to give you any company information that could help you with negotiations.
For example, you can request that the company compile a spreadsheet with information on each of your coworkers such as hourly pay, hire date, prior years of experience, years of work for the company, benefits, overtime hours worked last year, number of canceled shifts last year, and so much more. For more info, see What Can You Request? on the UE's Information Requests page. For an example of an information request, see this PASNAP Negotiations and Information Request.
Information requests are a great way to show your coworkers that all the hard work everyone put into winning your union vote has quickly made a real difference. Plus, the information in these requests is usually pretty damning for the company—there's a reason they didn't give it to you until legally required. For example, you could use the info to shine a light on pay disparities between different groups at your workplace. This would not only help you at the bargaining table, it could also help with your efforts to continue organizing toward supermajority support.
Furthermore, if the company ignores, refuses, or unreasonably delays your information request, you can file an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) against your employer. ULPs are powerful because it's illegal for the company to permanently replace workers who go on strike over a ULP. So if you and your coworkers decide to go on strike over a ULP, you can feel safe knowing that you'll still have your job when the strike ends.
Before negotiations can begin, you must agree with management on where they'll take place. Management is likely to propose a big expensive hotel, far away from your workplace to make it hard for workers to join. Don't allow it! Remember that you want to encourage high-participation in negotiations by making them big, open, and transparent. That just isn't possible if workers need to drive an hour away to attend.
Instead, push for a big space close to your workplace, so that many of your coworkers can easily join. If your company has an on-site auditorium or other large meeting space, suggest using it. Holding negotiations at your workplace is ideal because 1) it costs nothing to use the space and 2) workers are already there. If nothing like that exists on-site, propose somewhere nearby like a community center or house-of-worship. If your union members work at many different work sites, try to find the place that will allow the largest number of them to easily drop by.
The location must also have a smaller room nearby where management can meet to discuss things privately. Whenever either side calls for a caucus—an official break for private discussion—management will leave union members in the main room and head to their smaller room. The nicer management's private space, the more likely they'll be to agree to your location.
You also need to decide what time negotiations will occur. Proposing that they take place immediately after work usually allows the largest number of coworkers to join. Plus, it encourages management to bargain efficiently and avoid unnecessary stalling tactics, since everyone wants to get home as soon as possible.
However, if your workplace is 24/7/365 instead of 9 to 5, then no matter when you schedule it, some coworkers on the big negotiating team will have to miss shifts in order to attend. In this case, schedule negotiations so that the lowest paid negotiators can attend without needing to miss shifts, since it'll be less burden for higher-paid employees to take the hit.
Finally, you'll need to determine how frequently negotiations will occur. Management will try to schedule many back-to-back negotiation sessions months in advance to simplify things for their lawyers, who often fly in and out just for negotiations. However, holding sessions on back-to-back days usually doesn't give workers enough time to process and discuss the previous session with coworkers who couldn't attend. One to three sessions across five workdays is usually a good baseline, but always schedule sessions for whenever works best for workers, not management and their lawyers.
Before you can begin bargaining over a better contract, company negotiators will try to get you to agree to their ground rules. Be careful! Ground rules are frequently weaponized by management to weaken your leverage and lower worker participation. For example, management may present you with a gag order—a confidentiality agreement that prevents discussing negotiations with absent coworkers, the media, or your community. Management may also propose ground rules like a worker sign-in sheet or penalties if any member of your negotiating team is late by even a few minutes.
Management usually presents their ground rules as though you must agree to them. They know this is your first contract negotiation, so they assume you won't know any better. Don't be fooled! Blindly agreeing to their ground rules will put you at a major disadvantage. If you work in the private sector, you can legally reject management's ground rules altogether, since ground rules are considered a permissive subject instead of a mandatory subject of bargaining. For more info, see Mandatory, Permissive & Illegal Subjects of Bargaining.
On the other hand, you may need to discuss ground rules if you work in the public sector. That's because some state laws upgrade ground rules to a mandatory subject. Even in this case you should not agree to management's harmful ground rules. Instead, only agree to ground rules that are harmless. For example, you might agree to ground rules like "we will be polite to each other" or "we will try to be on time and not cancel sessions at the last minute." Before agreeing to any ground rule, make sure it won't put you at a disadvantage or hinder your big, open, transparent strategy.
As veteran union negotiator Jane McAlevey says in Rules to Win By, "our ability to execute and sustain a supermajority strike [is] the bedrock of our power in negotiations and beyond." That's because each day your coworkers can successfully shut down production by withholding your labor is a day the company can't make money.
The total amount of money the company could lose if your union goes on strike is known as your disruption costs, and it's a key driver of how many workplace improvements you'll be able to win in negotiations. Why? Company negotiators use disruption costs as the main benchmark for deciding their concession costs—the total cost of the workplace improvements they give up during negotiations. Company negotiators won't let their concession costs rise above your disruption costs, because in that case the company could lose less money by just "calling your bluff" and waiting out the disruptions of your strike.
So if you want to win bigger improvements at the bargaining table, you need to be able to create a bigger disruption. For example, if the company makes $100,000 per day and you could sustain a strike for 10 days, your disruption costs would be $1,000,000. However, if you could double the length of your production-stopping strike to 20 days, your disruption costs would double to $2,000,000, and you could expect to win twice as many improvements at the bargaining table.
Before getting into a fight with the company, you've got to know what you're up against. Corporate analysis helps you better understand the company's strengths and weaknesses by examining its financial situation.
You can get access to the company's financial documents with information requests, but management may require you to sign a non-disclosure agreement first. Similarly, if the company is publicly traded, you can access this info in shareholder reports.
While examining these documents, you may discover that the company has limited cash reserves and high recurring costs such as rent on buildings and vehicles. That indicates the company would have a tougher time enduring a production-stopping strike, since it'd still need to pay recurring costs despite not having any income.
On the other hand, you may discover that the company is well-positioned to outlast a strike. Even so, this is still valuable knowledge to have during negotiations. At the very least, corporate analysis will help you better estimate the disruption costs of a potential strike.
No company is an island, completely separate from the larger economic landscape. Rather, companies exist in a highly connected web of other big players and rely on them to keep things running smoothly. Companies depend on upstream suppliers for raw inputs, downstream purchasers to buy finished products, government agencies for permitting, media outlets for publicity, transportation firms to keep things moving, financial institutions for cash and credit, faith leaders to maintain a moral image, and many others. Determining which of these big players holds influence over your company—known as power structure analysis—gives insight into new sources of leverage you can use in negotiations.
In order to identify these influencers, you first need to figure out which organizations your company relies on to do business. Next, rank these organizations based on how much power you think they hold over your company. Then determine which individuals hold decision-making power in those organizations—for example, CEOs or board members of a company, faith leaders at houses of worship, executive directors at non-profits, and governors/mayors/city council members of government agencies. After that, estimate how pro-union, neutral, or pro-company each of those individuals is.
Once you've done all that, present your findings to as many coworkers as possible. The main goals of the presentation are to 1) educate everyone on how your company fits into the larger economic landscape and 2) get them thinking about ways to convince those influencers to support your union and pressure the company into meeting your demands.
Often you'll discover that some of your coworkers already have close ties to a few of these influencers. Perhaps a coworker goes to the same church as one influencer. Maybe a different coworker serves on the same parent-teacher association as another. Or it could be that one of your coworkers volunteers at a non-profit with one of them. None of these discoveries would be possible without a power structure analysis.
For more info, see 5 Tips for Creating Community Allies.
Before you can start negotiating a better contract, you must determine what everyone wants to be in the contract. The majority contract survey is a tool that helps you and your coworkers understand what everyone enjoys about working at your workplace and what everyone wants to change about working there. Then it helps you democratically decide which improvements matter most.
There are many different ways to conduct a majority contract survey depending on the specifics of your union. Some unions use online tools like Google Forms, such as the L.A. Times Guild bargaining survey, while others opt for traditional pencil and paper. Some include many multiple-choice questions that drill down into specifics, while others include just a few open-ended write-in questions, while still others directly ask coworkers to rank predetermined issues by order of importance. Finally, some are filled out during 1-on-1 conversations or in small group discussions, while others are emailed out to everyone at once. You have to decide what format works best for your union.
Regardless of which format you choose, surveys should include space for the coworker's name, job type, department, and shift. While you might think it'd be better for surveys to remain anonymous, including this info makes it easier to recruit coworkers to help out in the campaign to address their biggest issue.
But why is it called a majority contract survey? We'll answer that in the next section.
As mentioned above, you want to have a big negotiating team with representatives from every workgroup. (A single workgroup contains workers with the same job type, department, and shift.) So how do you decide who makes the team? That's where the majority contract survey comes in.
Before sending out surveys, decide on a target level of survey responses needed before each workgroup can elect its negotiating team representatives. In order to be a majority target, it must be at least 50%. A good baseline is to use your overall percentage of coworker support. So if your most recent structure test showed that you have the active support of 65% of coworkers, you'd target 65% survey participation for each workgroup.
Setting this requirement helps reinforce that you can only win real improvements through active participation. It also helps leaders emerge in each workgroup who encourage stragglers to complete their surveys and help reach the target as soon as possible.
Different workgroups naturally have different levels of union support, which means that some will reach the target survey participation before others. As a result, the majority contract survey becomes a structure test of its own, illuminating which workgroups have solid support, and which need additional organizing effort and better organic leader identification.
Once a workgroup hits the target level of survey responses, its workers can begin nominating and voting for their negotiating team representatives. Being a representative is an unpaid position which requires significant time and effort, so nominees should sign a pledge stating they understand the job description and responsibilities beforehand. This sets expectations and prevents misunderstandings later on.
In addition to the main representative, it's a good idea to have least one alternate representative for each workgroup. That way if the main rep can't attend a bargaining session, an alternate can still join. Similarly, if the main rep must drop a work shift to attend, an alternate can pick it up. A good baseline is to have about one negotiating team rep for every 10 members of the workgroup.
As new workgroups reach their survey response targets and elect their negotiating reps, consider sending out an update. This can be a major energizer for other workgroups who are falling behind, since it shows that parts of your union are pushing ahead and making real progress toward achieving a better contract, with or without the stragglers.
After a workgroup elects its representatives and alternate reps, those reps begin reading and compiling all of their contract survey answers into an outline of the workgroup's top priorities and goals for the contract.
Once a few workgroups reach this stage, their reps and any other interested workers begin meeting about once per week to turn these priorities into a contract proposal. First, workgroup reps share and compare their major goals and top priorities. Then similar goals are grouped together into larger subject areas—known as articles—such as holidays, benefits, health & safety, salaries & wages, discipline, promotions, layoffs, etc.
After that, everyone splits up into article committees which each focus on researching and writing up the language for one article of the contract proposal. It's often inspiring to search online and learn what other unions in similar workplaces were able to achieve in the corresponding article of their union contract. Over time, the members of each article committee will become subject-matter experts on their particular section of the contract.
Each article committee is led by a member of the negotiating team, but any worker who's interested can join an article committee. To help recruit article committee members, it's helpful to look back at contract surveys to see which workers were most passionate about which issues.
As new workgroups reach this stage, they either join existing article committees or create new ones, depending on their main goals and top priorities. After the vast majority of workgroups have reached this stage and incorporated their goals into articles, you're ready to combine all of the articles together into a single contract proposal.
Once you've created your contract proposal, the final hurdle before negotiations can begin is to ratify your contract proposal. This involves negotiation team reps presenting the contract proposal to members of their workgroup for an approval vote. Assuming reps properly incorporated their workgroup's goals and priorities into the articles of the contract proposal, you should have no trouble convincing members of the workgroup to vote 'yes' to approve the proposal. Otherwise, you'll need to create an amended contract proposal that addresses their concerns and hope they approve it on the next try.
The ratification process has many benefits. First, it reinforces the idea that workers are in full control over what will be negotiated. It also serves as another structure test to show how union support has changed in each workgroup since the start of your contract campaign. Furthermore, it helps educate uninvolved workers about the contract that they'll soon be negotiating (and potentially going on strike) over. Plus, it helps develop a democratic governing structure in your workplace. Finally, it serves as a powerful symbol during negotiations that workers are ready to fight for their contract.
Once your contract proposal is ratified by at least 50% of your coworkers, you're ready to focus on the specifics of your first negotiating session. The first session sets the tone for every bargaining session that follows, so it's crucial to start things off right!
In order to keep sessions running smoothly, big negotiating teams must choose a single lead negotiator. Depending on the size of your union, you could have between 10 and 100 negotiating representatives at the bargaining table, which is just too many people to keep on track without a single designated leader.
Negotiating team reps should nominate and vote for the representative who they think will be the most effective leader of negotiations. This person should be highly responsible, organized, charismatic, and persuasive. During negotiating sessions, the lead negotiator won't be the only worker talking, but they will have the floor until they specifically call on another worker to speak. As such, they effectively control each bargaining session, similar to how a union president controls regular union meetings.
Some unions also opt to hire an outside consultant, labor lawyer, or veteran negotiator to work alongside their elected lead negotiator. These people can bring a lot of experience to the bargaining table, but many of them charge a considerable fee. Only your union can decide whether it's worth it to hire an outside professional or stick with just an internal lead negotiator. If you're affiliated with a national or international union, they may be able to provide a lead negotiator at a reduced rate or free of charge.
Open negotiations—which encourage every worker to attend—can easily get out-of-hand unless certain rules of the room are followed by every union member in attendance. The negotiating team is in charge of deciding these rules, but here's a good starting point:
With so many workers in the room, it's important that everyone keeps a poker face whenever management is present. That means not reacting to management's remarks with visible surprise, anger, joy, or other emotions that could reveal your union's strategy or weaken your bargaining position.
Preventing cell phone use keeps everyone focused on the important task at hand. Plus, banning cell phone usage ensures that neither management nor workers record the session's events. This is important for legal reasons—nearly all unions and employers agree that neither party has the right to record negotiation sessions.
To minimize disruptions, every worker is required to stay silent during negotiating sessions unless specfically called upon by the lead negotiator. However, that doesn't mean that workers can't contribute. On the contrary, every worker should feel free to pass a note forward to the lead negotiator at any time. To encourage this, hand out 3x5" index cards or sticky notes and pencils to every worker in attendance. This practice allows any worker to silently "speak up" whenever management says something false or misleading, or whenever a worker has something relevant to add to the discussion.
It's essential that every worker in attendance understands and abides by these rules. So at the entrance to the negotiating room, volunteers should require each worker to sign a pledge to uphold your rules. Workers must understand that breaking any of these rules, even a single time, is grounds to be removed from the bargaining session.
With your contract proposal drafted, your lead negotiator selected, and your rules of the room decided, the only task remaining is to prepare your opening presentation. An opening presentation is a slide deck about each of the main subjects that you want to address during negotiations. Subject-matter experts from each article committee should create and present the slides relating to their subject, and give personal background on why the subject is important. For an example, see the AEMC Opening Power Point. Strong opening presentations set the tone that workers are thoroughly in control of negotiations.
When determining what to include in your slides, imagine how you'd explain why the subject is important enough to be included in the contract to different groups like union members, company negotiators, or community leaders. Including stats and quotes from your contract survey results can also help show that your union is united in wanting to address an issue.
Be sure to include any scholarly studies that back up your stance. For example, nurses might include a study showing that better nurse-to-patient ratios are correlated with better patient outcomes, teachers might include a similar study for teacher-to-student ratios and student outcomes, or city transit workers might include a graph showing how the city's rent prices have increased over time.
Emphasize any subjects where workers and management share a common interest in finding solutions, like improving student and patient outcomes in the example above. This establishes that win-win solutions are possible so long as management bargains in good faith.
Once you've created your presentation, don't forget to practice it together until everyone can confidently deliver their part. It's also smart to role-play different ways that management might react to your presentation. For example, anticipating scenarios where management's reactions are especially rude, charming, or funny can help everyone practice maintaining a good poker face and upholding all your rules of the room.
After the fanfare of the first session's opening presentation, each follow-up negotiating session falls into a familiar rhythm. Basically, one side proposes language for an an article of the contract, then the other side either agrees to it or makes a counterproposal. This back-and-forth continues until both sides either agree on the article's language, or they decide to shift gears and focus on a different article for a while, revisiting the initial article in a future session.
Since the contract has so many articles and each article can have multiple counterproposals, it's important to stay organized. Negotiators often use 3-ring binders or large folders to keep track of each article's proposals. While the lead negotiator often tracks the proposals for every article, other members of the big negotiating team are more likely to just track the proposals related to their specific article committee.
Staying properly organized also helps when alternate negotiators need to swap in. In this case, the main and alternate negotiating reps meet up sometime before the session to hand off the binder and discuss any relevant info that could help the alternate continue bargaining effectively.
In addition to big binders, an article checklist is another tool to keep all of the counterproposals organized. An article checklist is a table that keeps track of each article's union proposals and management proposals, along with when they were proposed, their current status (introduced, countered, rejected, accepted, etc.), and members of the relevant article committee. For an example, see the Einstein Nurse's Article Checklist.
Article checklists not only keep negotiators on track, they also help union members in the audience follow along during negotiations. They're similar to a program at a baseball game or a playbill at a theater. Encouraging audience members to pick up an article checklist and the text of the most recent article proposals on the way into a session helps keep them interested and engaged throughout the session. As a result, article checklists are essential to holding big, open negotiations that union members want to continue attending.
As mentioned earlier, a caucus is an official break for private discussion during a negotiating session. Either side can demand a caucus at any time. Regardless of which side calls the caucus, management leaves the main room and heads to their private room, so both sides can talk privately. Since management isn't present during a caucus, the rules of the room are suspended too.
When management hands over a new counterproposal, union negotiators usually call a caucus, so that they can examine and discuss it without management listening in. Once management leaves the room, everyone breaks up into article committees, which each focus on a single article of the new proposal. Each article committee compares their updated article to its previous version and discusses the changes. Then the committee comes up with a recommendation to accept, reject, or amend the article. This system is impressively efficient, since each article committee can work on its specific article in parallel. Finally all of the article committees reconvene into one large group to share their recommendations with everyone else.
However, in order for that system to work well, members of a specific article committee must attend any session where management could propose changes to their article. As such, near the end of each bargaining session, it's important for union and company negotiators to agree on which specific articles will be discussed at the next session. That way, members of the relevant article committees know which bargaining sessions they absolutely must attend.
Since neither side can refuse a caucus, management frequently abuses this ability to unnecessarily delay things and create a sense of futility. For example, immediately after opening a bargaining session, management may call a caucus, retreat to their private room, order in dinner and drinks, and reconvene moments before the session is scheduled to end.
If you're unprepared, these underhanded delay tactics can cause major frustrations and discourage union members from attending. However, if you come prepared with meaningful work to do, management caucuses can turn from boring snooze-fests into high-participation, high-efficiency organizing sessions. There's always lots of organizing work to do, so be prepared to tackle as much of it as you can during these breaks.
Negotiations bulletins are simple updates on what happened at the previous session for anyone who couldn't attend. They're a key tool for keeping negotiations transparent and for recruiting any remaining anti-union holdouts.
During each bargaining session, a volunteer takes notes on the key points of the meeting, snaps a few pictures during a caucus to capture the energy of the room, and writes down a few quotes from attendees to add a personal touch. After the session, volunteers assemble everything into a bulletin and make copies. For inspiration, see Issue #1 and Issue #2 of the Einstein Nurses' Negotiations Bulletin.
The next morning after the session, workers pin the negotiation bulletins onto bulletin boards throughout the workplace. In addition to keeping things transparent, this helps your union to publicize how things went before the company has a chance to put its spin on things.
While some unions opt to use social media or email blasts for their negotiation updates, paper negotiation bulletins offer a better opportunity to recruit the remaining non-supporters in your workplace. That's because non-supporters are unlikely to see your social media posts or email blasts. On the other hand, physical bulletins give you a chance to strike up a conversation with any remaining non-union holdouts and discuss how your union is already fighting on their behalf for a better workplace.
As negotiations continue, it may seem that management is less and less willing to compromise on your proposals or bargain in good faith. This is when it's most important to have a supermajority of at least 90% of your coworkers ready to spring into action. Remember that the root of your negotiating power lies in your ability to create a big disruption for the company. So when negotiations seem to have stalled, it's time to turn up the heat in your escalating campaign.
An escalating campaign helps your coworkers build confidence in your collective power through a series of structure tests that grow in size and scope, the largest of which is going on strike. With each additional structure test, you show management your growing support and your growing ability to create a big disruption.
You can't win big at the bargaining table until you can create a big disruption with supermajority support. So if you only have 70% support among coworkers at the start of negotiations, it's crucial to continue recruiting the remaining 30% of non-supporters through 1-on-1 organizing conversations and organic leader identification.
To achieve supermajority support, focus on the biggest worst. That is, identify the workgroup with the lowest union support, and then concentrate your organizing efforts on converting its organic leader to your side. It won't be easy, but it will unlock the biggest leap forward towards a supermajority. Unfortunately, this workgroup was probably your biggest opponent during your recognition vote. That means you'll need to forgive them for working against you and for anything hurtful they may have said. Just remember, union busters win when they successfully divide your workplace. But by recruiting your biggest worst, you'll be more united than ever and ready to finish strong, together.
Early in the negotiating process, the company's lead negotiator is likely to reach out to your union's lead negotiator to try to establish an informal line of communications by phone call, email, or text message. For transparency, your lead negotiator must make it clear that negotiations can only happen in negotiating sessions, not over private back-channels.
Later in the negotiating process, the company's lead negotiator may reach out to your lead negotiator with a message saying they have a comprehensive settlement offer to help wrap things up. This is great news! It means that your escalating campaign is working and your collective power has the company on the ropes. However, the same message will suggest discussing the settlement in a sidebar—a private, off-the-record meeting, away from the bargaining table.
Sidebars are often necessary because anything said at the bargaining table is on the record, meaning it can be used later in legal disputes over interpretations of the contract. In contrast, sidebars are off the record, allowing the company's lead negotiator to propose experimental offers before getting full approval from company higher-ups. This helps the the company negotiator determine whether your union would be open to accepting an experimental offer, before he puts his neck on the line and requests formal approval from the company.
As a result, an offer proposed during a sidebar is often far better than the the previous offer at the bargaining table. Sidebar offers exemplify what's known as the 90/10 rule—that 90% of concessions in negotiations happen in the last 10% of sessions.
So there's a lot to be gained by allowing sidebars, but they must be handled carefully to ensure transparency is upheld. Specifically, your lead negotiator must make it clear to the company negotiator that you won't attend any secret sidebars. So the following conditions must be met:
Management's lead negotiator is likely to reject your conditions and take the sidebar off the table. Stay strong! If your collective power was strong enough to prompt a settlement offer, it'll be strong enough for the negotiator to cave to these transparency conditions too. This is a high-risk, high-reward standoff, but winning it is a clear sign that you're close to victory.
Regardless of whether you reach a tentative agreement in a sidebar or at the bargaining table, big, open, and transparent negotiations ensure that your coworkers won't be surprised by anything when they're asked to ratify it, because they've been a part of every step of its creation.
Even so, before asking everyone to ratify it, give them a day or two to read through it, so they can truly understand what they're approving. Write up and distribute a summary of the contract—including both the highlights and the lowlights—so busy workers who can't read the whole thing can still make an informed decision. Plus, you should hold a meeting so that anyone can ask questions about the contract to coworkers on the negotiations committee.
In a sidebar, the company's negotiator may threaten to take the settlement offer off the table unless you hold a ratification vote with a deadline shorter than 48 hours. Do not give in to these hardline demands, even if you're certain your coworkers would overwhelmingly approve. Failing to do so risks damaging the trust of your coworkers who fought so hard throughout the negotiations process. Demand 48 hours so everyone can make an informed decision, vote 'yes,' and finish strong!
Winning big in union contract negotiations requires a strategic approach that capitalizes on your collective power. By following this comprehensive guide, you'll maximize your leverage at the bargaining table with big, open, and transparent negotiations. Each recommendation helps you build unity, foster participation, and ensure transparency. With all these tactics in your toolkit, you'll be well-equipped to beat the boss and secure a better contract for you and your coworkers. So get out there and win big!
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