Below is some guidance for meetings and elections.
If your local is unable to hold elections or meetings required in your local constitution and by-laws due to COVID-19 concerns, here is a guide that you may follow:
- Federal Law requires that the election of local union officers must occur at least every three years. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, however, the US Department of Labor has adopted a non-enforcement policy for reasonable election delays caused by the COVID-19 emergency.
- You still must be mindful, however, of election and meeting timing requirements provided in your local Constitution and By-Laws.
- While the decision on how to proceed is a matter of local autonomy, we consulted both Roberts’ Rules of Order and Atwood’s, and there is a proper way to delay such meetings or votes without running afoul of a local’s CBL. Here are the steps:
- One member the local (doesn’t have to be an officer) should show up at the meeting, at the given place and time required by the local’s CBL.
- That member calls the meeting to order, and then immediately adjourns the meeting to a future specified date due to lack of quorum.
- If that specified later date is not workable due to the COVID-19 emergency, the local would simply go through the same process again.
Please keep in mind that if your local is electing officers who are also delegates to the IAFF Convention, the LMRDA rules would also require that the local provide at least 15-days written notice by mail (not email) of the new date, time, and location of an election. Otherwise, your notice just has to be reasonable.
You may also wish to contact your local counsel to see whether any state laws would conflict with this, but in the states that we have checked, this approach would be allowable.