For the people who run the table

Cities and towns, school districts, public universities, hospital systems and transit authorities. Several unions, several contracts, bargaining parameters set by somebody else, and a labor relations staff smaller than anyone outside it assumes.

The record is held in Canada · Your documents stay in your own systems

The advantage to you

The round stops living in inboxes, so the next one does not start by reconstructing the last one.

Your documents stay in your own systems, under your own retention schedule, which keeps records management and public records requests where they already are rather than creating a second copy somewhere you have to account for.

What was presented, who received it, what was tentatively agreed and what is still open becomes a record you can produce, rather than a reconstruction assembled from four people’s inboxes eighteen months later.

What is hard about this today

Not because anyone is doing it badly. Because the tools were not built for a negotiation with two sides who cannot share a workspace.

Two sets of files: Your preparation cannot go anywhere the union might reach, so it lives in a private folder, a spreadsheet and a text thread. Nobody can see the whole position at once, including you.
The first hour: Every session opens with working out what changed since the last one, because proposals arrived as attachments and somebody is working from a superseded copy.
Information requests: The union asks for data, the request sits in an email, and nobody can say later exactly when it arrived, when it was answered, or whether it was answered at all. That is the question a charge of bargaining in bad faith turns on.
Afterwards: A grievance, an arbitration, an unfair practice charge or a public records request arrives, and answering it means reading inboxes rather than running a query.

What changes

A sealed caucus: Your bargaining team, your counsel and your finance people work in a room the union cannot see and cannot know the contents of. Neither can we. Your preparation is preparation again rather than something to be careful about.
One table: Proposals and counterproposals are presented at the table, dated and attributed, against an agenda both sides adopted. Settled articles stop being reopened because both sides are looking at the same status.
Tentative agreements, signed off: An article becomes a tentative agreement only when each side has signed it off. The sign-off page lists every TA with the name and time on each side, and prints on its own.
Information requests with a clock: A request is a tracked item with a due date, answered or declined with a reason, and flagged to both sides when it is overdue. The log is the evidence either way.
Costing in US payroll terms: An offer costed against your actual roster, with Social Security stopping at the wage base for each person rather than averaged across payroll. Federal rates are in, with New York and Massachusetts unemployment rates; the screen says plainly what is not included.

The parts your counsel will ask about

Records and retention: Because documents remain in your own systems, your retention schedule continues to apply to them without anything being copied into a vendor’s platform to be governed separately.
Public records requests: What is held, and by whom, is stated rather than described in general terms. If a request lands, you are answering from your own systems and a record you can export, not from ours.
The record itself: Your organization can export its own record and check that nothing in it has been altered, using a verifier that never contacts us. That check runs on your own machine and does not depend on our cooperation or our continued existence.
Where the record is held: The record is held in Canada today. A US region is planned, not built; if your procurement requires US hosting, ask us before you evaluate rather than after. Documents are wherever your own systems are.
Accessibility: An interim accessibility statement against WCAG 2.1 Level AA is published. We do not have a VPAT yet, and will not describe the statement as one.
Certification: We do not hold a SOC 2 report yet. The dates we are working to are published and treated as commitments, on the assumption that your reviewer will write them down.

When it goes to a board or an arbitrator

Already in shape: What was exchanged, when, by whom, and what each side said about it is dated and attributed as it happens rather than assembled afterwards under time pressure.
A mediator at the table: A mediator can be given a seat at the shared table that lets them read what was exchanged and nothing from either caucus. Who admitted them is part of the record.
Nothing to take on faith: The other side can check the record independently, which means it is worth more to you than a record only you can vouch for.

What it does not do

Named here rather than found later. Anything missing from this list that matters to you is a question worth asking, and we will answer it the same way.

It does not bargain for you, recommend a position, or replace your counsel. It is a working surface and a record.
It does not tell you whether an agreement is valid, enforceable or properly ratified. That is your authority and your law, not our software.
It does not produce a filing for a labor board. The record is exportable and checkable, but assembling it into a charge or a response is your counsel’s work.
It does not connect to a signing service today, so the handoff to signature is a step you take yourself.
It does not have single sign-on today. That is four to six weeks of work once your identity people give us what we need, and we would rather say so than imply it exists.

Where to go next

The trust page · live checks, sub-processors, and what is not certified
Pricing · per negotiation, not per seat; the union joins free
Document integrity · what a fingerprint proves and what it does not

Both sides of a negotiation get the same product. If you want to know what the people across the table are being told, it is on the pages for public employers, state and city labor relations offices, and unions. We would rather you read all three.

A question? Talk to us.

Buying, a security review, a purchase order, or a question about your own situation: write to us and a person on the team will reply.

Contact ussales@termsroom.com