Open Books, Tight Fists

The last decade has been among the most difficult periods in UE history, as a combination of plant closings, layoffs and union busting significantly depleted our membership, and thereby the resources available to the union at all levels. With severely limited resources, we were forced to make many difficult decisions, including reducing our administrative staff to the bare minimum. This presented a variety of challenges to the national union, to the regions, and to locals.

Now that a remarkable wave of new organizing has brought our membership back to a sustainable level, and provided the union with more resources, it is an appropriate time to reaffirm our commitment to financial transparency (“open books”) and prudent spending (“tight fists”), and to ensure that the union at all levels is able to maintain these practices.

UE’s commitment to “open books” has been critical in getting us through this recent period. The difficult decisions that were frequently needed were made through a democratic process by elected rank-and-file members fully informed of the union’s financial situation. In order for members to make informed decisions, it is critical that the union at all levels provide regular financial reports to the membership. And in order to ensure that officers are accountable, the books must be regularly audited by trustees at the national, regional, and local levels.

Our commitment to “tight fists” has been equally important. We have gotten through this period by being very wise about how we have used our limited resources. Indeed, our frugality allowed us to still spend significant resources on organizing the unorganized—without which we would not have experienced the membership growth that has brought us back to financial stability.

Although we now have more resources, we should not abandon the principle of “tight fists,” but rather work to ensure that our resources continue to be used wisely at all levels of the union. We must rebuild our strike fund so that our members have full confidence in taking on the boss, continue to improve and modernize our administrative and accounting systems so we can provide support to locals, and maintain our commitment to new organizing to strengthen our union and the working class as a whole.

Recommitting to the principle of “open books, tight fists” is particularly important as we return full financial autonomy to the UE regions. Regional officers, executive board members, trustees and regional council delegates will now have full responsibility for ensuring both financial transparency and wise spending of their resources.

As we grow our finances, we recognize that the global working class faces existential crises of labor exploitation, imperialist war, racialized and gendered violence, and tightening repression on labor organizing. We must invest our financial resources in ways that ensure that they are used as a tool to build our collective strength, not as an aid to the rapacious profit of corporations.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79th UE CONVENTION:

  1. Commits the national union to:
    1. Updating our materials on handling finances;
    2. Creating modular trainings for local financial officers;
    3. Creating digital tools for financial reporting and online payment of per capita payments;
    4. Assisting locals in making use of these resources;
    5. Continuing to upgrade our accounting systems to build capacity for reporting;
    6. Supporting locals in their enforcement of union security clauses;
    7. Modeling best practices in providing regular financial reports;
  2. Calls on locals and regions to:
    1. Consider developing best practices regarding finances if they do not already have them;
    2. Provide financial reports at each meeting of the body;
    3. Have regular trustee audits and submit the audit reports to the national office;
    4. Ensure that their financial books are made available in a complete and timely manner for their annual outside audits and preparation of government filings;
    5. Engage their members in decision-making about how dues money is spent to carry out the goals of the union in the most effective manner;
  3. Instructs the Secretary-Treasurer to invest and expend UE’s financial resources in a manner that:
    1. Respects the values established in the union constitution or enumerated through previous national convention resolutions, such as UE’s endorsement of Boycott, Divest, Sanction;
    2. Does not benefit employers where workers are striking, undermine union power, or enable the weakening of labor organizing;
    3. Does not fund the war industry, violate international human rights norms, support prisons and police domestically or internationally, or in any way abet the perpetuation of genocide;
    4. Does not expand the scale of the climate crisis or deepen the environmental harms faced by the working class;
  4. Commits the national union to developing resources to assist the financial officers and treasurers of UE locals and regions in enacting policies similar to those described in point 3 above at the local and regional level.