sorry im late just discovering this website exists. There is a lot of good organizing advice in this thread already, so I will stick to the contract. I’ll try and keep this as general as possible since it will obviously vary state to state/country to country because of employment law.

If you are in a large union there are staffers who should be assigned to help you, you will need advice from a professional negotiator. If you are a small union, reach out to a big one and ask for assistance. Having a professional negotiator at the table is powerful as the negotiator can challenge your employer in ways that the bargaining unit may feel intimidated to since the power relationship is unbalanced.

Ask your union if they can train people in contract interpretation. Additionally ask about how to go about getting union stewards; union stewards are your coworkers who can act as a representative of the union. It is extremely important you start training those people up now; the employer will be resistant to change their practices to align with a unionized environment and you will need to enforce on the floor. Even before you get your contract I believe employment standards will protect the right to representation in some capacity; anything you start enforcing before you get the contract will show the employer you mean business. Stewards should be someone who is not afraid to stand up to management, someone your coworkers respect, and someone who is good at their job. They should be fair and objective, and not afraid to have difficult conversations. Usually things like this that are dictated internally by the union should be covered in your constitution if you have one.

I think someone else mentioned this, yes monetary gains are really important and most people will care about those the most, however there are other areas members will not even consider that are equally if not more important. 3 of those areas are mgmt rights, the grievance procedure, and discipline/dismissal.

Management rights is an article that will be in every collective agreement that basically states anything not covered in the CA falls within management’s operational rights; i.e. if it’s not in the CA, the employer can do what it wants. If you are a social worker and your employer demands you clean toilets all day instead of doing social work, so long as they pay you the agreed to wage in the CA, that’s within their rights unless you have certain classifications/duties covered in the CA. This is important because the scope is very expansive and the employer likes to use this language as an excuse anytime they may break the contract. You will never get this out of the contract, but it’s important to understand how it works and why it’s there.

The grievance procedure is a procedure to get redress from the employer in case the employer breaks the contract. Outside of organizing this is one of the only avenues that rank and file members can seek redress from the employer. It’s sort of like fake court; you explain why the employer broke the contract, the employer explains why they didn’t, and the appointed hearing officer will decide who is right. The grievance procedure usually involves several steps, each step escalating in the authority of the hearing officer to grant the redress. Sometimes the last step will be binding arbitration.

Discipline/dismissal will dictate how the employer goes about that. It can have timelines on how long an event occurred that an employer can go back and discipline you for, how long the employer needs to give you notice before investigating you, if they need to provide you with allegations about the incident, etc. This is where people live and die in the bargaining unit - anything the employer can use to reduce the bargaining unit needs to be heavily scrutinized.

You should coach your bargaining committee to be completely non-reactive at the table - no one has any reaction good or bad to any proposal from the employer in front of the employer. You do not want to reveal any tactics or any indication on how the bargaining unit thinks.

I think that’s a good start, dm me if you have questions. People negotiate as professionals so this process is understandably intimidating, but your employer probably knows less than you about unionized environments based on my experience lol so don’t let them push you around. No I will not be taking any questions from anarchists at this time.