President's Perspective
Making Meetings More Meaningful...

(Dec. 18, 2009) You don’t have to be a general to attend the local’s General Membership meetings. You don’t even have to be a buck private. Your Guild membership gets you in.

We’re taking steps to make membership meetings more meaningful. We’re also taking advantage of the opportunities we have to enrich our members’ working lives.

To that end, we’ve invited WBNG member David Prosten to speak at our next membership meeting, Saturday, Jan. 9, at 10 a.m., at the local’s D.C. office, 1100 15th St. NW, Suite 350.

Prosten runs Union Communication Services, one of the largest publishers and marketers of union-related books that I know of. He’s a valuable resource for the entire labor movement, and the Guild’s got him! I expect David to bring some UCS catalogs and some samples of his wares. David displays his inventory at the CWA convention: If CWA is smart enough to have him show, then his own Guild local should have those smarts, too.

By inviting Prosten, we’re taking a step toward offering more relevant educational experiences for our members. We’ve stepped up our training efforts, but we can’t do it all by ourselves. And Prosten, as a wise winnower of all of the union-related publications, has done some of that work for us.

If you can’t make the meeting, check out “Labor’s Book Store” on the righthand column of the WBNG home page. Click through to “Bookstore” and you can order direct from UCS.

But that leads to larger questions: Are Saturdays at 10 a.m. a good time for membership meetings? If not, what days and times would you propose? E-mail me at mpattison@catholicnews.com with your ideas.

Also at the Jan. 9 meeting, we’ll nominate delegates and alternates to the Newspaper Guild’s sector conference in Washington on Saturday, July 25, and to the CWA convention, also in D.C., Monday and Tuesday, July 27-28.

I look forward to seeing you in January. Really.