Audience: All Local 109 officers and officer candidates — required core course, alongside MEM100 and REP100.
Prerequisite: None required, though MEM100 (Know Your Rights) provides useful grounding in how member rights and union democracy work.
The moment you’re elected or appointed to office, something changes. You’re no longer only a member with rights — you’re someone the law calls a fiduciary: a person who holds the union’s money, property, and authority in trust for the membership.
This course is the foundation every Local 109 officer completes, regardless of position — President, Vice President, Secretary-Treasurer, Recording Secretary, Trustee, Division Representative, or Regional Chief Steward. It covers the legal duty that comes with holding office, how to recognize a conflict of interest before it becomes a problem, what you’re personally required to disclose and report, and what happens when this duty is breached.
This course does not replace the Secretary-Treasurer’s role-specific financial training (see ST100) — it’s the general layer underneath every officer role, including that one.
By the end of this course, you’ll be able to:
- Explain fiduciary duty in plain terms and identify where it applies to your own role
- Recognize a conflict of interest — actual, potential, or apparent — before it becomes a problem
- Know what to disclose, when, and to whom
- Identify your personal reporting obligations as an officer (Form LM-30)
- Describe what happens when this duty is breached — internally and externally
Format: Self-paced, 8 lessons. Estimated time: 1.5–2 hours.
Completion: A quiz is required to complete this course. Given the personal legal exposure officer duties carry, this course uses a higher standard than our introductory courses: an 80% overall score, with three critical items requiring a correct answer regardless of overall score.
