AS I TOLD THE DELEGATES at the merger convention in January, old unionism governs by crisis and reaction and new unionism governs with vision and pro-action. In the six months since the merger, your officers have committed themselves to developing a vision to guide the work of PACE. Our centerspread this month highlights the Mission Statement for our new union: Organize... Engage... Educate... Build. Our Mission Statement was developed by the union's Futures Committee and approved by your Executive Board at last month's executive board meeting. The full Mission Statement and Goals appear in the centerspread.

Under our Mission Statement, our goals are to organize unrepresented workers and represented workers who are not members to build and mobilize our collective strength. We will also engage our members around improving our standards of living and honoring true family values through political and legislative action. We will also educate our members on the information and skills to act effectively at work, in our union and in our communities and on crucial issues facing working people. Where employers respect the independence and value of a strong union, we will also build partnerships.

Our Mission Statement and Goals will be posted at headquarters and regional offices. We will also send each local union a copy of the Mission Statement and Goals for publication and posting within your local union. Regional councils will also be asked to enlist their support for our Mission and Goals. The Mission' Statement and Goals will be a starting point for all planning nationally and regionally. Each PACE region and headquarters department will annually develop a plan for how it will work toward the four goals and submit annual written reports to the Executive Board.

Our Mission Statement was not created in a vacuum. For the first time in our collective history, we polled our membership to learn who you are, your values and your concerns. The fact that PACE undertook polling of members and local officers shows its dedication to a crucial principle: the members are the starting point for this union. This Union is For You.

Our centerspread also highlights key results of the poll, which we conducted of the UPIU membership last fall, and supplemented with a poll of the former OCAW members earlier this year. I personally have compared the polling results between the two former unions, and they are 99% identical, especially on priority issues.

The polling showed where PACE is focused and unified, it succeeds. It ties directly to our Mission Statement and Goals. It shows your priorities: a good retirement and pension, job security, workplace safety and health, and better contracts. To achieve those priorities requires organizing, engaging through political action, education and building partnerships. Your priorities are linked to the mission of the union. Only through dedication to our stated Mission and Goals can we bring about results on your priorities.

To be sure, our most important finding was that we must organize with a mission that is clearly communicated to bur members. We are not just organizing to survive or grow; we must organize so that we can better represent the membership that we all serve.

Everyone knows the benefits of being union. Union workers earn 34 percent more than nonunion workers and median weekly earnings for full-time wage and salary work were $640 in 1998, compared with $478 for their nonunion counterparts. That translates to over an $8,000 a year difference. Union workers typically have better and more benefits and safer workplaces. For many years, this union has bargained for that union difference.

Effective organizing, however, means better and more effective bargaining which means better contracts, better wages and better working conditions. Organizing is the cornerstone of our ability to more effectively represent our members and bargain for them. The history of collective bargaining shows that the higher percentage of a given industry or trade that is organized into one union, the more effective bargaining is and the better wages and working conditions are. Simply put: when we organize others we improve our own conditions. It will mean more money in your pocket if you organize the unorganized in your industry.

This finding is underscored by comparing the wages of workers in right-to-work for-less states to workers in free states. Right-to-work states have lower "union density" (the percentage of workers who belong to unions)--7.6 percent, compared with 16.8 percent in free states. This lack of union density lowers the average pay of those workers. In 1998, the annual average pay in free states was $29,100, compared with $24,600 in right-to-work states--an 18 percent difference.

Our mission to organize must become every individual member's mission. What can you do? Find organizing leads--talk to your friends, to your families about the union. Talk it up. Train your local brothers and sisters on organizing and set out to organize other shops into your local union. Set aside money from your local union treasury to organize. I can think of no better way to spend your local union members' hard earned money then to make their wages better through organizing.

We must stop dragging the deadweight of the unorganized behind us and organize. When we sit down to bargain we are hampered by every worker who is willing to work for $5, $6 or $7 dollars per hour with no benefits and in unsafe conditions. For years, by raising our standards we have slowly raised the standards of all workers. It is time we realize that only by helping the unorganized raise their standards through organizing, will we be able to permanently raise our own.