At first glance, the mission of a labor union seems fairly straightforward: to represent the interests of its members. But when you look at the operational tasks that go into fulfilling that mission — from training, upskilling and job placement, to benefits administration, political organizing, retirement services and more — the magnitude of the mission becomes clear.
Further consider the complexities for an international union covering half a million construction workers and laborers who often deploy across more than 300 chapter jurisdictions to countless job sites. They do all this on tight timelines for crucial construction projects, many of which are funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
This is the daily reality for my organization, the Laborer’s International Union of North America (LiUNA). And here’s the story of how we evolved our technology and processes with AI, intelligent data and automation to meet unprecedented operational challenges to fulfill our important mission.
What Is LiUNA?
LiUNA, the Laborer’s International Union of North America, is one of the most diverse and fastest-growing unions in North America. It represents more than 500,000 construction workers, public employees and mail handlers. The union’s mission is to fight for better wages and benefits, safer job sites and increased opportunity for the men and women who do the hard and dangerous work of building the North American nations.
The Challenge of Running a Labor Union
LiUNA is one of the most diverse and fastest-growing unions in North America, representing more than 500,000 construction workers, public employees and mail handlers. We’re dedicated to fighting for better wages and benefits, safer job sites and increased opportunity for the men and women who do the hard and dangerous work of building the North American nations.
As CIO, my job is to ensure operational excellence for our members. That’s easier said than done when you consider our member lifecycle is one of the most complex of its kind. My team provides IT guidance and best practices that help our local unions support their members. We guide them from their first jobs through many years of active work and skills development all the way to the point of retirement and beyond.
Throughout this lifecycle, technologies and processes must manage operations and administer tons of services for members.This includes a massive job placement network, hundreds of benefit funds, hundreds of training programs and other resources that all must be coordinated across more than 300 local unions. A pipeline specialist based in Cleveland, for instance, may do training in Tennessee before heading off to a job site in Minneapolis.
A major hurdle complicating our ability to manage all this complexity was the fact that LiUNA’s legacy application environment was in need of an upgrade. Parts of our IT infrastructure were outdated: Processes weren’t aligned, system updates required excessive manual intervention, and a number of paper-based business processes needed to be digitized to streamline back office functions.
Likewise, the reporting capabilities of our existing tools made analyzing membership trends or quickly organizing targeted political and legislative action difficult. Furthermore, our mobile device tools had a limited set of capabilities that strained to accommodate a growing mobile workforce. All these factors created barriers to efficiently serving members, and we knew we could find a solution to revitalize our capabilities.
Solving Operational Challenges With AI
To solve these challenges, we set out to establish a modern business process management (BPM) solution as a way to improve services for the organization’s vast array of members. We prioritized identifying and deploying innovative solutions that maximize the use of our data to improve operational services without requiring special teams or skill sets to realize that value.
After thoroughly vetting the marketplace, we selected a cloud-based application platform from Appian to modernize and relaunch our membership management system, known as the LiUNA Officers Site. Through a combination of AI-driven process automation, deep data integration, native mobile application access and a new social collaboration interface, we were able to modernize business processes and increase efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery across the board.
The gains in efficiency were transformative, even for some of the most complex business processes. As just one example, we streamlined a benefit processing tool handling $350 million in membership benefit payments every year. Complexity had been a challenge amid hundreds of contractors paying a patchwork of benefit funds through multiple union chapters. Our platform streamlined paperwork for contractors and automated categorization and distribution of benefits, making it easier for contractors to hire our union members.
The entire modernization effort was supported by an underlying transformation at the data layer. This step focused both on a data fabric architecture for teams to get a unified view of data across the organization, together with low-code interfaces for easy collaboration and management of data by benefits personnel, finance managers and various other LiUNA business users. These capabilities serve to break down barriers of complexity and access, an essential requirement for a labor union that requires a wide range of stakeholders who are not necessarily technologists to collaborate to serve the members.
A Streamlined, Intelligent Union
As a result of our successful modernization effort, all stakeholders are connected through a unified process architecture and standardized workflows that deliver more speed, efficiency and service quality. We’re able to ingest and integrate massive amounts of data streaming in on a monthly basis from hundreds of local unions, quickly contextualizing it for audit, dues processing, member sentiment, compliance and other purposes.
A unified view of all data helps us understand patterns and align activities across the member lifecycle. For instance, when a member retires, a whole new array of services around pension, healthcare and other benefits kicks in. This is just one example of how intelligent data brings more efficiency and coordination across chapters, members, third-party service providers and others in the wide stakeholder network that serves our union members. In fact, we’ve come to view this BPM solution as far more than just a process improvement tool, but rather a complete data collection enhancement that we’re able to use throughout the entire organization.
The success of everything LiUNA does as an organization is dependent on the integrity of our membership data, and the speed at which we can organize and advocate for our members. Our entire modernization effort around data, AI and automation continues to pay dividends as the groundwork for ongoing efforts to further innovate and develop new services. The latest is a pilot project launched in Boston, now expanding regionally, for members to get work assignments in real-time on their phones. All these gains are fueling LiUNA’s mission success in giving members a collective voice for stronger bargaining rights, better pay and better benefits.
