Fighting for what matters

As I write this, I and the rest of your International leadership are preparing for the 2025 SMART Leadership Conference. Each year, these confer­ences bring together local union officers from across North America and across our union, with both sheet metal and TD leaders gathering to do the hard work of strengthening SMART.

That is the most valuable part of these conferences: the fact that every single officer in our union — regardless of craft, trade, state, province or country — is in one place, doing the work that needs to be done for our common purpose.

That purpose? Fighting for SMART members.

That’s what we do in this union, whether on the jobsite, at the hall, on buses or trains, in government or beyond. It’s what ALL of us do: International officers, local union leaders, shop stewards and the hundreds of thousands of men and women who build and move our nation. And it’s what we’ve done throughout the history of our union, our movement and our two nations. The gains we’ve made — whether it’s pay, benefits, workplace safety, job-creating laws, you name it — we have made by fighting together for what matters.

SMART is YOU, the members — and I know all of us are dedicated to doing whatever we can to make sure the interests of you, the members, come first.

Across our union, we’ve won some huge victories recently. In Mobile, Alabama, members of SMART-TD Local 598 resisted the Alabama Port Authority’s attempts to divide members and secured an agreement that ensures major gains in wages, benefits and crew consist protections. In New Mexico and Connecticut, Local 49 and Local 38 won laws that expand prevailing wage to include custom offsite fabrication workers, creating jobs for SMART members and our neighbors. In Kansas, SMART-TD won state-level funding to expand passenger rail service. In Colorado, SMART Local 9 helped win the passage of the HVAC Improvements for Public Schools law, which will put our members to work statewide.

We’ve also been fighting for SMART members at the national level, in any arena that we can. One example: When the Department of Defense tried to end the use of project labor agreements (PLAs) on large-scale construc­tion projects, it was a direct threat to SMART members’ jobs. This wasn’t something Congress could fix, so North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU), which includes SMART and 13 other unions, took the fight to court. Together, we won a key victory: A federal judge ordered the Department of Defense to go back to using PLAs, putting union members and working Americans back on the job.

Another example, this one from Canada: The new prime minister announced a Federal Major Projects Office, designed to cut project approval times from five years to just two — a move that would create more jobs for skilled workers, including sheet metal workers and roofers.

From the local to the national, in the United States and Canada, that’s what our fight looks like. And it’s important to remember: SMART isn’t blue, SMART isn’t red. SMART is YOU, the members — and I know all of us are dedicated to doing whatever we can to make sure the interests of you, the members, come first. We will work with anyone, regardless of political party, and we will fight in Congress, in Parliament, in the courts, in local governments and at the bargaining table to protect members’ jobs, livelihoods and families. You have my word.

In solidarity,

SMART General President Michael Coleman