Union Bargaining Preparation Checklist

Successful bargaining starts long before the first caucus. Gather your current CBA, side letters, past proposals, grievance trends, and employer financial or staffing data that members will expect you to reference.

Digitize your agreement so clauses are organized in one workspace. Union Boss extracts articles and sections from PDF or DOCX uploads so stewards can search language instead of flipping binders during prep meetings.

Identify your top priorities with the committee: wages, healthcare, staffing ratios, overtime, discipline procedures, and any local pain points from the last contract cycle. Rank them so proposal analysis knows what “high risk” means for your local — not only what looks legally sharp.

Build a proposal intake habit early. Decide who uploads management packages, who reviews AI risk flags, and who drafts counters. A shared dashboard keeps officers, stewards, and counsel aligned without emailing conflicting PDFs.

Train stewards on how to read management proposals quickly: what changed, which article it hits, and whether the change weakens notice, just cause, or economic terms. Run a dry-run analysis on a past proposal before the table opens so the team trusts the workflow under pressure.