Feliz año nuevo

We hope you all had a Happy & Safe Holiday Season with your family. With the New Year, come some new changes to dispatching for the Painters. As we have been talking about at meetings and sending text and email notices, in 2025 you cannot be dispatched if you do not have Current Fall Protection, Booms and Lifts, along with Harassment Prevention Training certificates. If you do not have your certs and are currently dispatched and working for a company, you will NOT be pulled from the job. However, if you leave the company for whatever reason and attempt to go to work somewhere else and do not have the certs, you cannot be dispatched. With the high volume of members looking to take the classes right now, spaces are filling up quickly. If you need a cert and cannot get scheduled for a class soon, contact the hall. We may be able to get you into a weekday class with the apprentices if possible.

You can find the January – June Class Schedule here: January-2025-June-2025-calendar.pdf

The Drywall Finishers Contract is up for renegotiation in 2026. We are already trying to get a feel for talking points and have been sending surveys out to Finishers. Keep an eye out in your texts and emails for a survey and please take the time to fill it out. 

There are rumors floating around that the carpenters are going to start doing Drywall Finishing. I would like to take a moment to talk about what that would look like if it happened. Having the separate trades unions keeps pay competitive, the last big raise we got was a result of that. A monopoly on the wall trades could slow pay increases. The Carpenters also put significantly less into their annuity fund, meaning less money when it’s time to retire. Our Tapers Pension is in a good place right now with big changes over the past few years that will directly impact your payout amount positively when it comes time to retire. As long as you are vested, your pension is safe if you leave this Union for any reason. However, if you left to go to another Union, you would start over with them and must go through their Vesting Period. You would not be contributing anymore to the Bay Area Tapers Pension, so that funds would sit stagnate, and you would not be included in any future changes on the fund. 

If a carpenter representative, or representative of any other Union attempt to talk to you on a job, please respectfully tell them to call your Representative.