In 2015, we formed an advisory committee of members to make recommendations to our Executive Board about candidates for endorsement. Many Unions do not engage their membership on these decisions, but as a member-driven Union, we think this is incredibly important.

Here’s how our endorsement process works:

• Each May, our Political Advisory Committee updates our candidate questionnaire.
• Candidates return their questionnaire and we schedule them for a 30-minute interview.
• In these interviews, we ask candidates questions about their plan to support working-family issues.
• Our committee makes decisions about which candidates to recommend to our full Executive Board and whether to recommend a campaign contribution.* 
• Recommendations are sent to our Executive Board which ultimately makes the final decision.

*Contributions to candidates ONLY come from our Teamsters 117 Working Families PAC – as a policy, we do not use dues dollars to make contributions to candidates.

In politics, we only have permanent issues – we don’t have permanent friends. This means we continually need to hold politicians accountable for the votes they take and to make sure we hold them to what they say they are going to do.

The only way we do that is to have members involved.

Interested in Getting Involved?

If you are interested in participating on our Statewide Political Advisory Committee, please contact our Political Director Samantha Grad at 206-794-9663 or via email [email protected].