Hail the dues paying members
 
Dues paying members afford our collective bargaining unit members (which covers many civil service employees) with the monetary strength this local requires to protect your rights. Many grievances can go as far as arbitration and require thousands of dollars to defend. While it is not required to pay dues under federal law, the membership suffers when collective bargaining unit members choose not to pay, leaving the cost of doing business to those members who realize the necessity of a financially strong union. Grievances are lost when costs cannot be covered and precedents are set costing all bargaining unit members in the long term. Dues at the current time are only 16 dollars bi-weekly and are deducted automatically from your bank account. This also affords you membership in the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union. Contact your local steward or see the list of officers and stewards or click the "Join Now" button at the left of this page to join up yourself. All of the forms and instructions are located there.
 

Why People Join Unions

A union is a group of workers who come together to win respect on the job, better wages and benefits, more flexibility for work and family needs and a voice in improving the quality of their products and services. Workers in unions counter-balance the unchecked power of employers. In recent times a coalition of Federal Unions have accomplished great strides in the fight against the unfair proposals of the National Security Personnel System (NSPS). Bargaining unit members have been legislated out of the system to date. See NSPS.
 

Heart of the Movement—stories from activist and leaders

Armando Ramirez, UAW Retiree

Armando Ramirez learned about the union movement early—when he was a child. His dad, who emigrated from Mexico, was one of the stockyard workers in Chicago who struggled to form the United Packinghouse Workers of America (now a part of the United Food and Commercial Workers). Ramirez saw that the union movement offered a better life for his own family and other immigrant families.

It was a lesson he never forgot. Years later, while working as a machinist for General Motors Corp. and then for Rouge Steel Co., in Dearborn, Mich., he was a proud member of the UAW. Because he knew how valuable the freedom to organize into unions really is, through his union he volunteered to help other workers form unions where they work.

Some of Ramirez’s most dramatic moments as a union activist came two years ago, when he joined other UAW volunteers to help the organizing campaign at Mexican Industries, a Detroit company that made air bags, dashboards and other auto parts.
"We had two days of training by the union," Ramirez remembers, "then we hit the streets."

Jim Tilden, IUE-CWA
 
After graduating from trade school more than 40 years ago, Jim Tilden worked nonunion manufacturing jobs for a couple of years. The way managers treated workers shocked him. “You had no say,” Tilden recalls. “They’d almost expect you to eat lunch and work at the same time.”
So when Tilden had the opportunity to get a job at the General Electric Co. plant in Lynn, Mass., where workers had a union voice on the job, he didn’t hesitate. “I could see the difference” right away, says Tilden, a member of IUE-CWA Local 201, who has made gears and gear casings for the turbines on military ships for 37 years.
But talking to people in nonunion shops today, Tilden says things now aren’t that different from the experiences he had at the beginning of his career, when workers didn’t have any voice on the job and had to put up with unfair treatment. Tilden spends time talking to workers at a nonunion GE plant in Auburn, Maine, where he helps workers come together to solve workplace problems and lay the groundwork for organizing their own union.
Tilden happily admits it was his “big mouth” than got him involved in his union’s organizing efforts. He would speak out at union meetings and talk about how unions had to help more workers form unions if existing union members wanted to stem corporations’ race to the bottom. GE would farm out work to nonunion plants in the United States. “I thought, ‘Let’s get them in the union.’ You’ve got to organize.” Union leaders finally challenged Tilden to put his words into action and help more GE workers form unions.
When he travels to Auburn with several union colleagues, Tilden says, “We fill the workers in on safety and health laws and how a union would help them. We try to help people in the workplace.” Thousands of IUE-CWA workers at GE recently staged a dramatic, two-day strike to protest the company’s erosion of health insurance benefits while it was making billions of dollars in profits. When union members stand up for all working people, as during the strike, or help other workers form unions, “They’ll say, ‘These people are good people’” and become more open to being part of the union movement, Tilden says.
In the early years of unions in the United States, “people were asked to give up their lives” when they fought for rights on the job, says Tilden, a labor history buff. Today, “we’re asked to give up a few days or a few hours,” he says. “If we working people get together, we can have things the way they should be.”

 

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