Operating Engineer Stewards Hone Skills

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)

Seventy shop stewards attended the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 99’s training at the National Labor College last Thursday, spending the day honing their skills and learning new ways to guide their coworkers on the shop floor. “We’re like a family that’s eager to help each other,” said George Karellas (at right, blue shirt), who was originally from Greece and has been a “proud member” of Local 99 for forty years and a shop steward for almost ten years. “It’s great to be able to help young people coming into the profession and also give more experienced people advice and guidance.” Karellas told Union City that a good shop steward should be “very close to your coworkers; give them good advice, be transparent and be a mature person.” He added, “A good shop steward helps to remove confusion and misinformation in the workplace and helps to find common ground between workers and management. It’s so important for us to stick together, especially with such heavy pressure these days from politicians trying to bust unions and spread misinformation.” Local 99’s Business Manager Mike Murphy (center) told Union City that “a strong steward makes a strong local union,” adding that the aim of the training was to “make the stewards knowledgeable about the benefits and rights on the job that we’ve negotiated in their contracts, especially our health and welfare benefits and our pension fund benefits, and to make sure that they can directly transmit that knowledge to the members who are working on the sites.” Training topics also included identifying grievances, understanding Weingarten rights, organizational processes and how to file a grievance, labor laws, and an overview of management rights versus workers’ rights. Local 99 members operate and maintain automated or computerized control systems, stationary engines, and auxiliary equipment such as boilers, generators, pollution control devices, and other equipment which provides heat, ventilation, light, and power for buildings, industrial plants, and other work sites, as well as monitoring and inspecting plant equipment, alarms, meters, and other instruments to measure temperature, pressure and fuel flow, to detect leaks or other equipment malfunctions and to ensure plant equipment is operating at maximum efficiency. – report/photo by Adam Wright