Region 2 Educationals

With an eye to building capacity and educating all members, Region 2 is once again presenting an informative weekend full of networking opportunities as well as interesting courses.
Held at the Hilton Mississauga/Meadowvale June 4th and 5th, this weekend is valued so much that your expenses are paid according to OPSEU policy.  In fact, if you live more than 60 kilometres away from the hotel, your Friday night room is covered too (allowing you to enjoy the Hospitality Suite).

For the upcoming weekend, the following courses are being offered:

• Basic Grievance Handling for Union Building: This course is designed to examine the grievance process from a workplace organizing perspective. Grievances are opportunities to build the union.  This hands-on course helps members analyze situations to decide whether a grievance is the best approach.  They will learn about different types of grievances and the remedies available through the grievance/arbitration process.  They will develop technical skills in writing, processing grievances and practice communication to assess whether a member’s rights have been violated. 
• Dealing with Workplace Conflict: Every day, in our lives, we have to deal with situations of conflict.  It may be with our family, our work colleagues, our friends, our peers or our supervisors.  In this 1 ½ day course we will define and analyze conflict and look at the range of processes aimed at alleviating or eliminating sources of conflict. There are many tools available to persons in conflict. How and when they are used depends on several factors that will be perused.  We will also look at mediation and its role in conflict resolution.
• Health & Safety-Level Two: This course is designed for Health and Safety committee members and union activists with a strong interest in Health and Safety. Participants learn how to be more effective members of their JHSC’s as they work in small groups learning how to better identify, categorize, and control hazards. Using case studies and examples from their own workplaces, participants learn how to improve workplace inspections, and how to begin accident and illness investigations. The course offers the opportunity to prioritize and strategize around health and safety problems and to address problems specific to participants’ own workplaces. The course builds on the material in OPSEU’s Level 1 course and assumes that participants have a basic knowledge of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
• Mental Health-Challenging the Stigma in the Workplace: This introductory course explores mental health, mental health concerns, and stigma in the workplace. Some of the topics covered in this course include: demystifying mental health; individual, union, and employer responsibilities; member-to-member issues; and some strategies to challenge stigma and build inclusion.
• Stewards 1-Making a Difference in the Workplace: This updated version (March 2015) of Stewards 1 includes a more detailed description and history of OPSEU's equity-seeking groups. The course continues to support stewards through a range of tools and practical activities. The key aims are to strengthen steward skills to orient a new employee to the union, have effective one-on-one conversations with a cross-section of members, develop a communications strategy to enlist diverse member involvement, and develop approaches to everyday workplace problems. Throughout the course, participants are supported as they develop a profile of their members, clarify the tasks of the steward, find the resources and information in OPSEU, and understand the grievance process and their role in it. Stewards 1 is a prerequisite to Stewards 2 and must be completed before taking Stewards 2.
• The OPSEU Story-Building Our Union Together: The history of OPSEU is rich and varied. Our union has evolved from a Civil Service Association to a powerful force in the labour movement. To understand how OPSEU works today, and will be a force in the future, we need to understand how we arrived where we are at now.
  This labour history course will examine how OPSEU began; how it evolved from a staff association to a full-fledged union; how social unionism and equity are a vital part of OPSEU; and how our past will help us to continue to make OPSEU a strong part of the labour movement in the future  

To check out more information about the weekend and get the registration package, click on the file below.

june_2016_region_2_educational_application_package.pdf
File Size:	250 kb
File Type:	pdf

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Be sure to let us know at info@opseulocal291.com when you register so we can connect you with someone else to go with - and pay nothing for your hotel stay!
Book your hotel room by May 13th and register for your courses by May 20th!