2026 Conference for Bargaining & Organizing

Please join us at this year’s fall Conference for Bargaining & Organizing. The theme this year is Rooted in Solidarity: Growing POWER from the Ground Up.  Join us October 2, 3, and 4 to grow your organizing skills to build a strong union in your workplace and deliver key wins at the bargaining table.

This year we have added an additional day of programming allowing for members to choose three skill building courses to customize their experience. The conference will be two days long. We’ll explore what it means to use an organizing approach to empower our members and win for our students and communities. Whether you’re new to union activism or are an experienced union activist, there’s something here for you!

Agenda

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2026

3:30 – 5:30 pm: Networking & Top Golf
6 - 7 pm: Dinner & Welcome
7:30 pm: Keynote Speaker

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2026

8-9 am: Breakfast
9 – 10 am: Opening Panel
10:15 - 11:45 am: Skills Session #1
12 – 1 pm: Lunch
1:15 – 2:45 pm: Skills Session #2
3 – 4:30 pm: Skills Session #3
4:45 – 6 pm: Track #1
6:30 pm: Dinner

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2026

8 – 9 am: Breakfast
9:15 – 12:15 pm: Track #2

Track Descriptions

Members will continue with the same conference track through the duration of the event. Tracks begin on Saturday evening and continue through Sunday morning.

Coordinated Bargaining Track

This intensive training on coordinated bargaining is designed to unite education locals across Oregon, building the shared leverage necessary to pressure the state government for increased education funding. Throughout the session, participants will learn how to strategically align their goals, share critical information, and synchronize contract timelines to prevent the state or individual districts from pitting one local against another. We will cover the mechanics of establishing a joint council to set common minimum standards while ensuring that each local preserves its autonomy to negotiate and vote on its own distinct contract. Additionally, the training will address how to effectively counter management pushback and navigate crucial legal boundaries, ensuring that all joint tactics comply with labor laws and that each bargaining unit maintains its required legal independence. Ultimately, this training will equip local leaders with the tools to transform isolated negotiations into a powerful, unified statewide strategy.

Democratized Bargaining Track

OEA locals across the state are undergoing major transformations to build power and demand more for educators, students, and our communities. Local unions are engaging in democratic strategies to build power in negotiations, including inviting more members into the process through open bargaining with larger teams, running escalating contract campaigns, and moving beyond “bread and butter” issues to fight for the common good. In this track, participants will spend the day exploring why and how they could start to employ some of these strategies to democratize their negotiations and win big for their members and community. This track will place emphasis on why getting strike ready is essential. 

Organizing for Power Track                                                                                               

Maybe your situation feels impossible—with all the obstacles in your particular workplace, there’s no way to bring people together, no demand that can be won. But that’s not true. There’s always something you can do, even if it means starting with something very small. This workshop will help you figure out what. Against what seems like overwhelming power and resources from the other side, what do we have? We have the ability to form relationships with each other; to respect each other, which the boss doesn’t, to look around and think for ourselves. There is only one guarantee: if you build relationships with your co-workers on the basis of respect and shared values, you will be better able to shift power away from the boss. 

This is a highly participatory workshop track designed to inspire bottom-up activism that helps members solve workplace problems through active engagement and collective action. 

Striking to Win Track

A strike, which is our most powerful tool, should not come as a surprise after a failed attempt at settlement; it should be a plan workers have built up for months, if not years.

By the time you reach this stage in a contract fight, tensions may be high and so may be anticipation from your co-workers about how a strike will affect winning a strong contract. The goal of this track is to help prepare for and inoculate around some of the strategic challenges in bargaining so we can sustain the fight through to victory. If we can prepare for some of the biggest challenges in advance, we can focus on keeping up the energy and maintaining some fun despite the intensity.  But a strike that isn’t organized democratically could just be another form of “taking orders,” this time from your union rather than your boss. We’ll explore every step of the strike—contract campaign, strike prep, going out, supporting each other through it, and ratifying and returning to work—under the microscope of democratic practice. This is a hands-on, heads-engaged daylong workshop.

Beyond getting strike-ready and understanding what it takes to win at the bargaining table once your local is out on strike, this track will explore what it takes to maintain a strong field campaign for the duration of the strike. Lastly, this track will also help you understand fundamentals of a strong communication system and aggressive narrative strategy linked to the bargaining table and field campaign is essential to winning a strike. 

Building Rep Track

Building Reps are the backbone of our union, defending their coworkers when they are needed most. This track will focus on how building or association reps can build and maintain effective union structures to assess power, build unity, and leverage their collective power to win changes to improve their working conditions and student learning conditions. In this track we will review how Building Reps can use their special rights and protections to effectively advocate for their coworkers in investigatory interviews and learn practical organizing tools for engaging your co-workers, taking action, and getting results. We will also review how to move your co-workers to action through 1-on-1 organizing conversations.

Beyond the basics, this workshop will explore different tactics and strategies for resolving problems through collective action that build the union. Winning grievances, for example, isn’t only about how well you argue your case. It’s also about organizing members to build pressure on management so that we can win creatively without going to arbitration—or sometimes without even filing a grievance. Beyond the fundamental mechanics of filing grievances, participants will learn how to supercharge grievances to win for members and build power in your workplace. Other member leaders will share how they've used grievances to organize their coworkers, and learn from other rank and file leaders about how to handle sticky situations.