The distance between her complaint and their answer
She calls her building rep, who calls the UniServ Director. They meet somewhere quiet. She tells it the way people tell things when they are still angry, out of order and with the worst part in the middle.
Now the real work starts, and none of it is filing.
- Is it grievable?
- A grievance or a gripe. Not every unfairness is a violation, and telling her no is part of the job too.
- Under what?
- A contract article, or a board policy applied unevenly. Two different paths with two different endings.
- Who answers?
- The principal. The superintendent. The board. Sometimes all three, in that order.
- What would make it right?
- The remedy. Written down at the start, because the whole thing gets measured against it later.
Then the clock starts, and it does not stop. Every one of these dates is counted by rules her particular contract wrote, and no two contracts wrote them the same way.
A contract grievance, start to finish
Event
14 days
Level 1
Supervisor
Supervisor
10 days
Level 2
Superintendent
Superintendent
10 days
Level 3
School Board
School Board
10 days
Arbitration
Miss one and it is over. Not lost on the merits. Just over.
She had a case. Her Director did the work. The contract closed the door on a date, and there is no appeal from a calendar.
Most associations are carrying that risk on a spreadsheet and somebody's memory. Not through carelessness. Through never having been handed anything better.
"Maintain an organized file for the grievance and note filing deadline dates on a calendar."
Michigan Education Association, Processing Gripes and Grievances, official steward training. A paper folder and a wall calendar. No system appears anywhere in the document.
What MemberCase holds
One record from the first phone call to the last signature, and four things nothing else in this category does.
It counts days the way her contract counts them
Calendar days. Teacher contract days. Business days minus holidays. Calendar days with winter, spring, and Thanksgiving break taken out and summer left in. Set the rule once per local and the arithmetic is right every time after that.
Every local keeps its own definitions
Portland counts a day one way. Douglas County counts teacher contract days. Two hundred and forty-eight locals can hold two hundred and forty-eight different rules and every deadline still lands where the contract says.
The clock runs on the district too
When the superintendent lets a response deadline pass, the grievance advances on its own, the way the contract says it should. Your Director hears about it that morning. Legal has seven days to reverse it if the posture calls for that.
Privileged work stays privileged
Once it becomes a legal matter, attorney work product sits apart from ordinary case notes. Outside counsel gets one case, for a set number of days, and every look at it is logged.
Your Executive Director opens one screen and sees every open grievance in the state, ordered by which ones are nearest a deadline. Which principal has four in six months. Which district settles and which one always goes to the board. That report used to take two days to assemble by hand and it was stale before it arrived.
Who we are
We build software for organizations whose actual job is looking after people. The Georgia Career Center, for people trying to find work. VoicePro. Prosper Accounting, for small businesses trying to keep their books straight.
MemberCase is the same shape of problem we keep coming back to. Somebody carries difficult work on behalf of other people, and the tools they were handed were built for something else.
Here is what we are not.
We are not a big company. MemberCase is new, and the first association to sign will be our first customer. The price reflects that, and so do the protections. Source code goes into third-party escrow before anybody signs. Your data exports every week to storage you control. If you leave, you take a complete copy with you at no charge.
You should not have to take a stranger's word for any of that, so it goes in the agreement with dates attached.
Your technology people will have questions
Good. Here is what to hand them.
Member and case data sits on infrastructure independently certified to SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001. Access rules are enforced inside the database rather than in the screen, so a fault in the interface cannot hand somebody a file they were never cleared to see.
An independent security scan of the application is available on request. MemberCase commits to its own SOC 2 Type 1 within twelve months of a signed agreement, written into the contract with a date attached rather than offered as a promise.
No artificial intelligence touches your members' information.
None today. Nothing ships later without your written approval first. That one is in the contract too.
What it costs
Priced by the size of your membership. Not by how many staff accounts you open, and never by how many grievances your people file.
Charging per grievance would hand an association a financial reason not to file one. That is a duty of fair representation problem, and no rate card of ours will ever contain it.
Unlimited staff accounts at every tier. No setup fee, no data migration fee. Ask and we'll send the rate card the same day.
Start with ninety days
Pick three field offices and fifteen or twenty locals. Run MemberCase beside whatever your Directors do now, so nothing depends on it while you are deciding. At the end of ninety days you will know whether it earned a place.
Cancel any time with thirty days notice. Your data comes with you either way.
marketing@membercase.com. A person answers these, usually the same day.