BUILD. WIN. LEAD.

WHO WE ARE

  • VALENTINA LUKETA

    GENERAL PRESIDENT

  • KIM LAWSON

    DIRECTOR OF ORGANIZATION

  • andrew dinkelaker

    GENERAL SECRETARY-TREASURER

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Our Platform

    • Deepen the support the National Union provides to locals around administrative support, data support, membership services and other areas, with the goal of allowing local leaders to spend less time on administrative work and more time running their locals

      • Reinvigorate our education programs with intention to build new generation of leaders 

        • Ensure all of our locals have adequate core trainings in collective bargaining, mobilizing membership, building a contract campaign and leadership development

        • Focus on worker to worker exchanges

        • Offer more training, resources and support to locals on how we can build participation and move members into action

        • Develop more leaders so the work of running the union can be shared among more people

        • Offer more training opportunities for local officers, executive boards and stewards

        • Offer better training materials and more training opportunities so locals can learn from each others fights 

      • Build a more diverse pool of future leaders

        • Address barriers to leadership for women, people of color, younger members and others

      • Unite our union by integrating new members into UE while supporting existing locals

    • Support locals in waging more effective contract campaigns by providing strategic planning and support 

    • Help locals take action to defend our contracts and improve our conditions mid-contract by training staff on supporting locals with strategies and organizing skills 

    • Provide more focused support from the National Union in communications, legal support, strategic research, and global strategies

    • Build the UE Strike and Defense Fund so that our locals have increased power to wage strikes 

    • Use our increased resources to organize in our key industries across manufacturing, higher education, the public sector, the service sector and in the south.

    • More participation, dialogue and debate at all levels of our union

      • Bring more members into the discussion, so members may engage directly in making decisions to move our union forward

      • Enhance participation at the local, regional and national levels

    • Uphold the UE Constitution

      • Uphold - not eliminate - Article 25

      • Local Leadership Orientation on how to use the Constitution to fully exercise their democratic rights at all levels of the union 

    • Ensure that all voices are heard

      • Make special efforts to increase participation of women and people of color on the national level, including through support of the Women’s Caucus and the Black/African-American Caucus 

      • Build opportunities for the locals to engage with each other so we can all learn from each other

    • Wage the big bold fights that are needed in this period to scale up our power 

      • Fight to defend our union rights in higher education 

      • Fight to scale up our bargaining power in manufacturing and public sector 

    • Move forward on independent political action

      • Create more opportunities for members to directly challenge elected officials that serve corporate interests

      • Work with other unions and working-class organizations to build a Labor Party

    • Continue to lead on climate, international solidarity, peace, etc

      • Further expand our Green Locomotive project

      • Build the National Labor Network for Ceasefire to bring justice to Palestine and to break labor away from corporate-driven foreign policy

      • Focus additional attention on the fight to bring full collective bargaining rights to workers in the South

      • Support the building of international union networks for UE employers with overseas facilities

WHY WE MUST FIGHT

The working class is under attack like never before by oligarchs like Elon Musk and the Trump government that serves their interests. But as history has shown, when workers and our communities come together and organize, we can not only beat back the most severe attacks but change our world for the better. It’s going to take a fighting, member-run union like ours to lead in this moment - a union that knows which side it's on and that fights to unite all workers regardless of industry, race, gender, gender expression, nationality, immigration status or anything else. It’s going to take a union like ours to lead the fight to stand up to the oligarchs and their apologists in both parties, universities, the media and elsewhere.

GUIDED BY UE PRINCIPLES

Our union has made history over the past two years. We tripled our membership by organizing and winning first contracts covering tens of thousands of grad workers, took on and beat fortune 500 companies like Wabtec and Hitachi, and turned around million dollar deficits into instead running a surplus, paying down our debt, and putting real money into our Strike and Defense Fund. We revamped our staff structure to put the right people in charge of our union’s most important work, reorganized our National Office so we can better support our locals, and led the labor movement on key questions like building an independent working-class political voice, fighting for peace in Palestine, and taking on climate change. 

The path we took to get here was not an easy one, and not everyone agreed with the decisions we made. We got here by being bold and taking some risks, by trusting workers and by rooting every move we made in the principles that have animated our union since its founding in 1936. But this approach -  bold action to build our union, faith in the rank and file and an unshakable belief in our union’s principles - is what will guide our work over the next two years, should the membership elect us. 

If elected, we—Valentina Luketa, Kim Lawson, and Andrew Dinkelaker—will work to make best use of the resources that we now have in place thanks to our organizational growth.