Still on the Frontlines

There’s a quiet assumption in this country that when your working years end, so does your voice. That the pension arrives, the tools go down, and the fight — whatever the fight was — passes to somebody else.

SOAR was built to prove that assumption wrong.

The OriginA Canadian idea, forty years strong

On May 23, 1985, USW International President Lynn Williams created SOAR — the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees — as an organization of USW retirees directly affiliated with the union itself.¹ Williams was a Canadian, and it shows in the organization’s DNA. Upon his own retirement, Williams went on to serve as SOAR’s International President from 1997 to 2007 — the first Canadian to hold each of those positions.²

The idea was simple and, at the time, radical: link the union’s active members with those in retirement so that both could work on common problems. Until SOAR came along, there was no strong advocate focused on the particular challenges facing USW pensioners and their spouses. SOAR made those problems visible — and helped shape union policy to deal with them.³

Four decades later, that partnership is written directly into the union’s constitution. Delegates to the USW’s 30th International Convention voted unanimously to recognize SOAR as an affiliate organization, encourage the formation of chapters, establish direct communication between local unions and chapters, and give SOAR leaders input into negotiations on retiree issues.³ Retirees don’t sit outside the room at the Steelworkers. They have a seat at the table.

The MissionWhat the work actually looks like

Ask a SOAR member what they do, and the answer rarely starts with the word “meeting.” SOAR exists to deal with the social, economic, educational, legislative and political concerns of its members and their spouses — fighting for the preservation of public pensions, for medicare, for better health care protection, and for laws that genuinely serve the elderly.⁴

That advocacy is matched by something just as important: connection. Chapter membership gives retirees and their spouses a vehicle for continued social interaction with friends and co-workers⁴ — the people they stood beside on the floor, at the gate, and at the bargaining table. In communities like Hamilton, Sault Ste. Marie and the Elk Valley, the SOAR chapter is where the workplace family stays a family.

When a local union pays to keep its retirees organized, that’s not charity. That’s an investment in institutional memory.

On the locals stepping up

And the locals are stepping up in kind. Local 7884 in Elk Valley, B.C., adopted a resolution to pay ten years of SOAR dues for every retiree and retiree spouse — a first in Canada — and challenged other locals to match it. In Hamilton, Locals 16506, 5328, 7135 and 1005 have all passed measures covering dues for their retirees, spouses and executives.⁵

Boots on the GroundGiving back, close to home

If advocacy is SOAR’s voice, charity is its hands. Nowhere is that more visible than Hamilton, where SOAR members have thrown their weight behind St. Matt’s — the community hub formerly known as St. Matthew’s House — supporting its work feeding families, fighting isolation among seniors, and keeping the city’s most vulnerable connected to help. This past June, that partnership took centre ice, with SOAR members among the crowd at the NHL Legends BBQ in Hamilton raising funds and awareness for St. Matt’s programs.

LeadershipThe woman at the helm in Canada

Nobody embodies that ethic more completely than Lena Sutton, SOAR’s Canadian National Co-ordinator. Sutton brings a résumé built entirely from the ground up.

Canadian National Co-ordinator, SOAR

Lena Sutton

She joined USW Local 7711 in 1974 and was elected President of SOAR Chapter 10 in Hamilton in 2006. Across more than four decades of activism she has served as recording secretary, shop steward, health and safety representative and a member of her local’s negotiating team, while remaining active with the Hamilton Area Women’s Committee and raising money for the United Way and local charities.⁶

The numbers behind her Jefferson Award recognition tell their own story:

Each year she also dedicates countless hours as a volunteer tax preparer for low-income families and retirees — often visiting people in their own homes to get the job done.⁶ That is the SOAR model in a single career: work hard, retire, and then somehow work harder.

The InvitationNot just for retirees

Here’s the part that surprises people: membership is open to anyone aged 45 and over who supports the organization’s guiding principles⁷ — you don’t have to be retired, and you don’t have to wait.

Twelve dollars a year for a seat in one of the most effective seniors’ advocacy networks in the country.⁸ SOAR is also looking forward, not just back. The organization is actively reaching out to the union’s NextGen members to close the gap between generations⁵ — because the retirees fighting to protect pensions today are defending the retirements of workers who haven’t taken them yet.

The StakesWhy it matters now

Every debate that touches Canadian seniors — pension security, health care capacity, the cost of staying in your own home — lands hardest on the generation that built this country’s industrial backbone. SOAR’s answer has been consistent for forty years: organize, show up, and speak.

Retirement, it turns out, isn’t the end of the story. For SOAR members, it’s the chapter where experience finally gets to lead.