International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers
| Founded | 2011 |
|---|---|
| Members | 216,000 |
| Head union | Joseph Sellers, Jr. (General President) |
| Affiliation | AFL-CIO, CLC, NAMTU |
| Office location | Washington, D.C. |
| Country | United States; Canada |
| Website | smart-union.org |
The International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART) is a trade union of skilled metal workers who perform architectural sheet metal work and who work in the airline, bus, mass transit, and railroad industries. The merger of the United Transportation Union (UTU) and the Sheet Metal Workers' International Association (SMWIA) was finalized on August 11, 2014.
In 2005, the AFL-CIO adopted a policy encouraging mergers among its members, particularly by smaller unions into larger ones or smaller ones into amalgamations of larger organizations. The SMWIA (which was based in Washington, D.C.) represented workers who fabricated and installed heating and air conditioning work, shipbuilding, appliance construction, heater and boiler construction, precision and specialty parts manufacture, and a variety of other jobs involving sheet metal. These included some metal workers in the railroad industry. UTU (which was based in Cleveland, Ohio) represented primarily bus, mass transit, and railroad workers. In 2006, SWMIA joined a coalition of labor unions (the Rail Labor Bargaining Coalition) seeking to jointly negotiate new contracts with the nation's freight railways and Amtrak.
The experience of working together was a positive one, and merger talks between the two unions began. These talks yielded a merger agreement in which SMWIA and UTU would, effective January 1, 2008, merge into a new union, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (to be known by the acronym SMART). The SWMIA executive council approved the merger on June 13, 2007. Because the SMWIA constitution provided for merger by action of the executive council alone, no SMWIA membership ratification vote was held. The board of directors of the UTU approved the merger on June 11, 2007. The UTU constitution required action by the membership, however. In the weeks before the UTU convention of August 2007, 71 percent of the members voted to approve the merger.
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