Labor Unions Editing and Proofreading Services

Clause fourteen of the tentative agreement changed the shift pattern, and most members found it after they had voted. The summary they read led with a 4.2 percent raise and a signing bonus, both accurate, and it placed the shift change near the end under a neutral heading. Nobody lied. The bargaining committee had spent seven months on the settlement, believed it was the best available, and wrote a document meant to secure a yes. Employers count on a union overselling a settlement, because it makes the next round easier, and members who feel they were managed into a vote remember it for a decade.

Tentative agreement summaries and ratification material reach us more often than anything else a labor union produces. Bargaining updates and negotiation reports to members arrive alongside them, together with ballot and job action communications, workplace newsletters, and member handbooks and rights guides. We also work on grievance and disciplinary representation material, health and safety guidance for representatives, and organizing and recruitment material. Submissions to arbitration and to pay review panels, policy and campaign documents, member survey questions, constitutional amendments, and correspondence with employers and industry bodies come to us as well. Our editors write in the register your members expect rather than a corporate one.

The tentative agreement summary is the highest-stakes document a union produces, and the temptation in it is structural rather than dishonest. Negotiators who have carried a settlement for months lead with the gains, and clause 14 ends up past the point where reading stops. A summary that states the full package, with everything conceded given the same prominence as everything won, is harder to write and much harder to argue with afterward.

Money reads better as members will actually experience it. "A 4.2 percent general wage increase" tells a machine operator very little, while "about $118 more per month before deductions, at Grade 4 Step 2" can be checked against a paystub. Where a raise is staged, the schedule belongs in the same place as the headline figure, because 2 percent in January followed by 2.2 percent the January after is a different thing from 4.2 percent now.

The recommendation belongs apart from the description of the agreement, with the committee's reasoning set out and any dissent recorded. A committee that recommended acceptance by 6 votes to 5 can say so, and members can weigh that themselves. The alternative deserves the same care as the settlement, including what a strike would involve week by week and what the negotiators believe it would achieve. We do not assess any of that. The committee and the union's own legal and industrial relations advisors reach those judgments, and they arrive with the draft.

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including bargaining positions, member data, and material about individual cases. We are editors, not industrial relations or employment law advisors, and we offer no opinion on any agreement, dispute, ballot requirement, or legal question. What we can do is put the whole package in front of the member who has to vote on it.