On Friday, January 16, President Dan Clay, Secretary-Treasurer Jeff Anderson, Collective Bargaining Director Ken Spray, and UFCW Local 555 Union Representatives held 15 meetings to update members on the status of Portland Area Meat, CCK, and Grocery contract negotiations. President Dan Clay said "We need to find new ways to get the membership involved" and that is what we did, we took the information to the membership. In an effort to maximize exposure 5 locations were selected to make it easier for members to get to the meetings. Meetings were held in Hillsboro, SW Portland (TIgard), N Portland, SE Portland, and Gresham. Not only did we offer more meeting locations but we also offered more meeting times. Meetings were held at 9 AM, 2PM & 7PM in order to be available when the membership was available.
While we realize we will never be able to reach every single member, we believe that this approach was affective in getting the information out to a larger percentage of the membership. There is already great interest in these negotiations, and the membership wanted more. It showed in the turnout! We had hundreds of members calling, checking the website, and attending the meetings (some even attended more than one).
Preparations for the meeting started a couple of weeks before when Union Representatives started passing out meeting notification cards. We also posted information on Union Bulletin Boards and on our websites.
We want to thank everyone for taking the time to "Get ACTIVE - Get INFORMED" and we encourage everyone to take the message back to your work-site.
