The Two Sources of Your Rights – OPEIU Local 109 Training

So where does your power as a member come from? Two places.

Source 1 — Federal law. A federal law called the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) contains a section known as the “Bill of Rights of Members of Labor Organizations.” It guarantees every member of a private-sector union — including ours — a floor of basic rights: to vote, to speak up, to run for office, to have a say before dues go up, and to be treated fairly if the union ever brings internal charges against you. No union constitution or officer can take those rights below the floor the law sets. We walk through each of them in Lesson 2.

Source 2 — Our own governing documents. On top of that legal floor, we wrote rules for ourselves: the Local 109 Constitution and Bylaws and the OPEIU International Constitution. These spell out exactly how our union works — who can vote, how meetings run, how officers are elected, and what you’re entitled to as a member in good standing. Lesson 3 is built almost entirely from these two documents.

📜 From Our Governing Documents

Our Local’s Constitution opens by declaring, in its own words, why we exist:

“This Local Union declares for its objectives and aspirations the following: to organize all unorganized … pilots and other professional emergency medical personnel, technical, office and clerical employees; to secure terms and conditions of employment for its members consonant with ideals of fair wages and benefits …”
— Local 109 Constitution, Article I (Preamble)

💬 In plain terms: We set our own goals and we adopted this document to reach them. The union’s authority flows upward from its members — it doesn’t get handed down to us from someone else. That’s the root of every right described in this course.

💡 Think first: Where do your rights as a member actually come from? Name the sources in your head, then click to check.

Two sources: federal law (the LMRDA) and our own constitutions — the Local 109 Constitution and the OPEIU International Constitution.

Think of it as a floor and a house built on top. The LMRDA sets a legal floor of rights no officer or bylaw can drop below. Our constitutions build on that floor with the specific rules we wrote for ourselves. If you were thinking “my employer” or “my supervisor” — that’s the mix-up we clear up in the next topic, and it’s the single most common reason members think they have no rights.