Teamsters Local 667
Memphis Strong — carrying the legacy of 1968
Powering · Labor Education
3 Referendums.
Plain English.
Three City of Memphis charter amendments are on the back of your ballot this November, and they are written in language nobody talks in. Two of them help working people. One of them asks you to sign a blank check. Here is every one of them in plain words, what a yes does, what a no does, and where your Labor Council stands.
The flyer carries all three ordinances, the vote on each one, the early voting window, the Labor Council seal and a QR code back to this page — in English or Spanish, dark for posting online or white to run off on a copier. Hand it to a member who has fifteen seconds, and send them here when they have five minutes.
Shall the Charter be amended to revise the list of City positions exempt from civil service, removing “employees” of the Memphis and Shelby County Public Library from that list?
Right now the City Charter, Article 34, Section 250(i), writes “all officers and employees of the Memphis and Shelby County Public Library” out of civil service. This takes the word “employees” out of that exemption, so library workers get the same civil service status other City employees have.
Library employees gain civil service status — the procedural protections that come with it, including a real process before they can be disciplined or fired.
Library employees stay carved out, with no civil service protection.
There is no good reason a librarian or a branch clerk should have fewer job protections than the rest of the City workforce. This is a straight gain for working people and it costs the taxpayer nothing.
Shall the Charter be amended to require the City Council to create a lobbyist registration and disclosure process?
Tennessee already makes people who lobby state officials register and file disclosures. So does Shelby County, where anyone paid to influence County officials has to register. The City of Memphis does not. This would require the Council to build that process.
The Council must create a registration and disclosure system, so the public can see who is pushing City policy and how much they are spending to push it.
Memphis keeps operating with no lobbyist disclosure at City Hall.
Disclosure is a floodlight. When corporate money shows up to shape City policy, we should be able to name it in public and run a campaign around it, instead of guessing who wrote the ordinance.
One condition: the CLC needs a seat at the table while the Council writes the rules. A registration process has to tell the difference between a paid, professional lobbyist and a member who takes off work to testify. If the rules end up costly or burdensome, they land on unions and neighborhood groups — not on the firms they were written for.
Shall the Charter be amended to authorize the City Council to establish uniform, comprehensive administrative procedures for appeals affecting the employment status of civil service employees?
This would hand the City Council broad authority to restructure the appeals process for City employees — civil service appeals, workplace-injury appeals, pension appeals and more — without telling voters what the new system would look like.
The Council gets authority to build a whole new appeals system, on terms it writes later.
The current appeals protections stay as they are, and the Council has to come back with an actual proposal if it wants to change them.
The line that should stop you…all laws…in conflict with (the ordinance) shall be immediately annulled, vacated, and repealed…
It never says what the new procedures would be, or how they would interact with the disciplinary and grievance procedures in our union MOUs. It does not void those procedures — but it does not preserve them either. And it goes well past housekeeping: it says every law “in conflict” with it “shall be immediately annulled, vacated, and repealed,” without naming a single one of them. That blind spot is where our members' rights live. At a bare minimum an ordinance like this should guarantee in writing that due process and the right to representation survive. This one asks for a yes without saying what we are agreeing to.
Your first and last name, your date of birth and your county for the name search — or your full street address with the city for the county map. Both tools are free and run by the government, not by us.
- Shelby County Election Commission: (901) 222-1200 · voteinfo@shelbycountytn.gov
- 157 Poplar Avenue, Suite 137, Memphis, TN 38103 · Monday–Friday, 8:00 am – 4:30 pm
- TN Division of Elections: 1-877-850-4959
- Bring a valid photo ID to vote in person.
Where this comes from. The analysis on this page follows a legal memorandum on Referendum Ordinances No. 5966, No. 5977 and No. 5978 prepared by Cole Weintraub, Legal Counsel, for Kevin Bradshaw, President of the Memphis & West Tennessee Central Labor Council, dated October 10, 2026. Ballot questions are summarized from the ordinances as certified for the November 3, 2026 ballot; for the official wording and your sample ballot, see the Shelby County Election Commission. Support and oppose positions are the Labor Council's own.
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