Union News - September 2021
With the pandemic and the introduction of working from home for a significant majority of our membership, keeping connected with our friends, family, coworkers, and the union has become a very challenging and daunting task.
No doubt many of you reading this article may have been hired after mid-to late March 2020. There is a good chance that you, unfortunately, have never been introduced to your local executives and stewards. Conversely it is equally difficult for locals and UTE to communicate both effectively and in a timely manner with our membership. While UTE has a Facebook page and sends out information via email to all of our members who have signed up for it, we know those methods still fail to reach a fairly significant segment of our membership.
This article will provide members information on how to find out who the members of the local executive and stewards are in your particular local as well as contact information should you need to get a hold of a union representative. The path is quite easy and will be spelt out below.
The UTE website is www.ute-sei.org, from there you can choose the English or French version of the website. On the home page you will see the following banner:
On this banner click on ABOUT UTE, this opens another page that on the left-hand side there is a list of seven options, the second last is titled “locals”.
Once you click on that it brings up a webpage that lists the ten geographic regions by which UTE is divided.
- Atlantic - this includes all locals located within the Atlantic provinces
- Greater Toronto Region - this includes the locals located within the Greater Toronto Region plus the local located in the city of Barrie.
- Montréal - this includes locals from the following locations; Laval, Montéregie South Shore, Montréal, Outaouais, Rouyn-Noranda and Sherbrooke.
- Northern/Eastern Ontario - this includes locals from the following locations: Belleville, Kingston, Peterborough, Sudbury and Thunder Bay.
- Pacific - this includes all locals located within the province of British Columbia
- Prairie - this includes the Winnipeg Tax Centre, Winnipeg TSO, Winnipeg CCSC site, and the Regina TSO.
- Québec - this includes locals from the following locations: Chicoutimi, Jonquière, Québec City, Shawinigan, and Trois Rivières.
- Rocky Mountains - this includes locals from the following locations: Edmonton, Lethbridge, Saskatoon, the Calgary TSO, and the Calgary Call Centre.
- South Western Ontario - this includes locals from the following locations: Hamilton, Kitchener, London, St. Catharines, and Windsor.
- National Capital Region - this includes all locals located in the National Capital Region.
Clicking on any local will provide a list of the members of the local executive and stewards, this also includes telephone numbers and, in some cases, a direct link to send an email to the local executive member. This email can be sent directly through the UTE webpage where the member needs to provide their name, phone number, email address (preferably a non-CRA email address), telephone number, and the preferred method of contact (via email or telephone). There is room for the member to provide information on the reason for the contact or the question being posed to the local executive.
In most cases finding your local is just a matter of finding your city within the region. In some cases, however, there can be many locals within a city. Each local’s page also brings up the physical address where members report to work, in order to provide members with more clarity on whether they are indeed contacting the correct local.
Hopefully, this information will provide the membership with clear directions on how to get a hold of a member of the local who represents them and their interests.
Gary Esslinger
Chair of the Communications Committee