For the people on the other side of that table

A president, a staff representative, a national representative. Fewer people than the employer has, a duty of fair representation, a membership to report to, and good reason to be wary of a system the employer picked.

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

The advantage to you

You get the same product they do, in your own storage, with your own costing and your own record. Not a guest seat in the employer’s system.

Your bargaining material stays in storage your local or your national owns. You are never asked to keep your preparation inside employer infrastructure, and there is no arrangement under which they could reach it.

You can cost their offer yourself, against the same published statutory rates they are using, so their number becomes something you can check rather than something you have to accept or reject on instinct.

The thing to be suspicious about, answered first

If the employer brought this to you, the reasonable first thought is that it is their system and you are being invited into it. Here is why that is not the arrangement.

Your room is yours: Your caucus is created when you join, owned by you from its first second. The employer cannot see it, cannot see who is in it, and cannot see that anything was said in it. Neither can we, and that is enforced beneath the interface rather than by a setting somebody could change.
Your storage is yours: You connect storage your organisation controls. If you do not have any, you can use storage of your own choosing rather than the employer’s, and nothing obliges you to put a document anywhere they can reach.
Your record is yours: You hold your own record of the negotiation, separate from theirs, and you can take a copy of it at any time and check it on your own laptop with a program that never contacts us. If the employer’s account of what was tabled and when ever differs from yours, you are not arguing from memory.
Neither of you administers the other: You manage your people. They manage theirs. Nobody grants or removes a seat on the other side.
What it costs you: Where the employer subscribes, the union joins that negotiation at no charge. You are not asked to fund the employer’s choice of tool in order to be at the table on equal terms.

What it changes for you

Their number, checkable: Employers usually have a costing model and unions usually do not, which makes a bargaining conversation about money an argument between a spreadsheet and a suspicion. The same costing tools are on your side of the table.
Where you actually differ: Two sides costing the same offer normally differ because they assumed different things, not because somebody did the arithmetic wrong. Assumptions can be put side by side, so the conversation moves from whose number is right to which assumption is right, which is a conversation you can win on the facts.
What was tabled, and when: Versions arrive dated and attributed, with what changed between them set out clause by clause. No more discovering at the table that you were reading last week’s draft.
Reporting to members: What was proposed, what was agreed, what was held over, and when each of those happened, in a form you can draw on for a bulletin or a ratification meeting without reconstructing it from notes.
Duty of fair representation: A dated, attributed record of what was exchanged and what the committee decided is the record that protects the committee if the decision is ever questioned.
Small teams: Most of what is above is administration you are already doing by hand, in evenings, between other work. It is the same work, kept in one place, and it survives the person who did it moving on.

What the employer can and cannot see

Worth being precise about, because this is what your committee will ask.

They can see: Your name and role at the shared table, what you tabled there, and what you said there. That is what the shared table is for.
They cannot see: Your caucus, its membership, its discussion, your risk register, your mandate, your costing, your assumptions, or anything you have not put on the table. Not by asking us, not by escalating, and not by paying us.
You decide when: A risk raised in your caucus stays sealed until your side chooses to raise it. An assumption stays private until you publish it. Nothing crosses because time passed or because a setting defaulted.
A copy you were given: Where they table a version, it can be written into your storage so you hold your own copy of exactly what you were given, checkable against theirs. That is a protection for you rather than a channel into your systems.

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, tell you what to accept, or replace your counsel or your national’s advice.
It does not tell you whether the employer’s figures are true. It lets you produce your own and shows where the two sets of assumptions differ.
It cannot trace a leaked page of a document back to who held it. Records we issue ourselves carry a per recipient code; documents in storage do not.
It does not run a ratification vote or a membership ballot.
We do not hold a SOC 2 report yet, and the dates we are working to are published rather than described vaguely.

Where to go next

The trust page · checked live, including what we have not certified
What the employer is told · the same product, from their side
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 public sector employers, government and mandate holders and unions. We would rather you read all three.