Eiba posted:

Hello C-SPAM. First post in this subforum, long time lurker. Love you all, but you're kind of scary.

I work in a small town library. Half a year ago I was elected Steward for the municipal employees in my town. No idea what I was doing, hadn't really been involved before, but no one else stepped up. We're a small Union, not associated with any larger organization. I wanted to do what I could.

Immediately I was wrapped up in a consequential grievance- one town department was being asked to do the work of two departments. They tried to reclassify the positions and the Town Administrator sad "lol, no". This issue has been bouncing back and forth between the Town Administrator and the Select Board and the Union as long as I've been Steward here, so I ended up with a pretty solid grasp of the situation.

This last week the town Select Board asked for a meeting. Our Union president said the time for discussion was past, and we should just push through to arbitration. I didn't want to overstep my bounds, but I pressed to attend the meeting anyway. Even if they weren't going to give us anything, we might as well attend the meeting. It would look better during arbitration if we had been consistently open to talking, right?

So thanks to my advocacy, and my advocacy alone, the meeting happened. In the meeting I was able to outline our position cogently, and explain how all the previous offers from Town Administration were bullshit for various reasons. And the Select Board listened. Just tonight we received a counter-offer that gave us everything we were asking for! An entire town department will get paid for their out-of-grade work, thanks to me!

I'm just thrilled, and I want to shout it out into the ether so here I am. This was the only overtly union focused thread I could find when searching the forums, so I hope this is the appropriate place. Unions are awesome!