Friday morning I will pick up Steve and we will head down to the Winter Advocacy Conference sponsored by the IEA in Springfield. Steve is on our Negotiating Team and we will meet other members of our team when we get down there.

Springfield is a three hour drive and a million miles away from the Northwest suburbs of Chicago. The IEA is a 128 thousand member union, but most of the members are south of I-80. Illinois, like most states, is rural. Most of our union locals are small, suburban or rural. Many of our members teach all day and work the farm when they get home.

Not me. I head home to the Northwest side of the city where the corn is in the frozen food section of Dominick’s and soy beans are called edamame and you get them warm and salty at Hachi’s sushi place around the corner.

The Conference is held every year at this time. It once was called a Bargaining Conference. Back then the focus was on bargaining training. That still happens, which is why we are going as a team. It has a broader focus now, including political action training.

Last year when we went, we got about ten miles past I-80 and a truck had jack-knifed on the icy road. I sat there for three hours, then called down to the Conference only to find out that the storm had knocked out power in all of Springfield and the Conference had been canceled. Our team all met up at a truck stop near the Aurora exit and had breakfast. Ah, team building over eggs, bacon, potatoes, toast and bad coffee with dairy creamer! I asked for milk for my coffee.

Our negotiating team is elected. This is rare for IEA locals where most teams are picked by the local president. I like our system better. It just seems to me that democracy works better. Got an issue? Run. Got a complaint about the way we negotiated? Run. Unhappy about what we did nor didn’t get? Run. It is ironic that most union staff people have told me that electing a negotiating team is a bad idea. I think it makes them nervous. Good.

Our Contract has a year and a half left. We start bargaining with our board a year from this Spring. We start visiting schools on our listening tour this coming Spring. Surveys go out in the Fall.

It’s a long process. But we want to represent our members well and that takes work. All the negotiators have unique issues that they are concerned with and that brought us to become negotiators. But all strive to act locally and think globally.

The Winter Conference this Friday starts the process.