Consumer Affairs

The Consumer Affairs Committee monitors the social conscience and performance of companies in order to ensure members consume safe and honest products and services. This committee helps protect our union brothers and sisters by educating them on scams, unfair lending practices and other consumer pitfalls. Providing members with strong consumer education is the natural partner to effective collective bargaining. Improved wages are easily undone if members are subject to predatory lending or over extended credit. The Education Department created a workshop titled Money Matters that provides common sense budgeting tips, strategies on building an emergency fund and simple advice on how to avoid the pitfalls of endless debt. Your local union leadership can request a copy through your Servicing Rep. The committee’s area of focus includes, but is not limited to:

• truth in lending
• truth in packaging
• truth in advertising
• child labor
• utilities
• consumer fraud
• scams
• credit, and the like

The links below provide useful information for how to research companies, identify scams and much more.

Once the committee has identified significant information they should:

• Share information at membership meetings
• Provide information for the Local Union newsletter, website or social media
• Create flyers to be posted
• Have one-on-one conversations