VUE is not just another piece of cool software, in it lies years of union experience and worker strife. It was developed with recognition of what unions need to compete and follow through on their extremely important mission, fighting for workers rights!

How does VUE do this? How could a piece of software be so important in the fight for workers? When you think about what it takes to manage the membership info day in and day out for a handful of people, and then multiply that by thousands you can see how the fight could be bogged down and distracted by the sheer amount of paperwork. That's where VUE comes in. After building your local union office's business rules and bargaining unit contract rules into the inner workings, the paperwork and managing your members then becomes a breeze, allowing you and your office to focus on what matters the absolute most, your members rights!!

What makes VUE so different and outstanding is that it is built from the ground up for unions, by unions, and it understands the union business. Going even further, it understands that each union does business differently and allows the flexibility for ever changing ways of doing business. In effect, VUE grows with your union. Add to that a team whose passion is for the fight, who understands technology and the need for the highest level of support and care, and you and your union have what it takes to compete, and thrive!

Through the Eyes of the Union ...

Joel ventured out into the world in an attempt to share our incredible union software, VUE, to some non-Los Angelinos. After many hours in the desert, Joel reached our target destination, a city that almost rivals Los Angeles on the craziness scale: Las Vegas.

He was there to meet with a couple of locals with whom I had made him appointments. After his meeting yesterday with the head of one of these locals, he called me, his voice unabashedly displaying his glee and ever-enduring optimism. Evidently, after giving this local a very well-recieved free demo of our software, the head of local exclaimed, "Do you know how rare it is for me to have a smile on my face after a presentation like this? When Olivia called me, I just assumed that this was another usual software sale; I didn't expect something so innovative!"
After Joel relayed this little story to me over the phone, something clicked in my mind.

Here at Velarium, we know that we have an incredible product. We work with it every day, in one way or another. We know how many years of experimentation and fine-tuning it took to produce VUE, and we know firsthand how much our VUE clients love us and what we've done for them. But, it's a different story when you see it through the eyes of the union.
We saw the excitement emanating from this man, whose enthusiasm reminded me of a very important human truth: very fews things in life feel better than the feeling of relief. Relief from pain, relief from hunger, relief from sadness, relief from loneliness, relief from anything negative. This isn't just another piece of cool software to him; it's an office lifesaver. When you're drowning in a sea of unorganized paperwork, kicking yourself for misplacing a document somewhere in your computer, spending hours upon hours hunting and pecking just to get member Joe Shmoe's new address and phone number into the computer, and then something like VUE comes along, it's a pretty huge relief!

All of a sudden, everything you have on every member is in one clean, organized, secure place. Every little bit of updated member info is loaded onto your computers automatically. Every grievance is filed and securely saved, and even your attorney can attach or scan any legal document. If that pesky Joe Shmoe isn't paying his dues, he won't ever fall through the cracks again. The computer won't let him. Not even once.

The people who work in the offices of union locals are there for a reason, and it is not to absent-mindedly organize and type meaningless information all day. They are there because they believe in what unions do and could do. They have passion, they have ideas, but they don't have the time to cultivate those ideas that could be moving the union forward. They are too busy trying to problem-solve when their computers could do in it 1/100 the time, and better. They are too busy feeling exhausted from the mundane work that they've done, too busy popping aspirin to kill the headaches from not understanding how their union lost so much money in unpaid dues.

We know how cool grievance managment, dues reconciliation, and automatic member updates are, but when you see it through the eyes of the person whose life is just made so much easier, you really get it. You see the load taken off of people's shoulders, and you see their minds and hands freed up to pursue what they're really there for: to grow and to inspire. It stops being about software, and starts being about the people: the happier people who make for a happier union.

This is why we're here and why we do what we do, and we are so lucky to have people to remind us that we're so much more than an IT company ...