Why this exists
Walk onto a job site in 2026 and ask the foreman to verify a union member. He'll squint at a laminated card, photograph it with his phone, text the local, wait. Sometimes the card is a year out of date. Sometimes the local doesn't text back. Sometimes the worker doesn't have the card on them at all.
Every minute that delay continues, somebody is losing a shift, a contractor is choosing the path of least resistance, and a member is being asked to prove something that should already be obvious. The information exists. It's just not anywhere useful.
The Union Hub is the smallest possible thing that fixes this. A URL per member. A status that updates in real time. A verifier that any third party can hit without an app, a password, or a phone call to head office.
The point isn't dashboards. The point isn't an app. The point is a single, authoritative answer to a single question: is this person a member, right now?
Who's behind it
The Union Hub is a project of Abnormal Press, a small hybrid marketing and product studio in Toronto. The operator is Jit Singh — founder of Abnormal Press, sole proprietor on the books, designer-at-the-keyboard for everything you see on this site.
That's not a stealth-mode tagline. It's the truth, and it's load-bearing for how we do business: there is one person who will know your account end to end, who will pick up the phone, and whose name is on every legal page on this site. When the operator transitions to an incorporated entity (planned, not done), the legal pages will be updated and you'll get notice.
Backing the work is the practice the studio has been building for years — opinionated brand strategy, design systems, and product thinking, applied to organizations that actually do something for a living.
What we believe
1. The verifier is the product.
Most "membership platforms" are admin dashboards with a member-facing afterthought. We start at the other end. The most important user of this system is the third party who needs an answer in three seconds. Everything else serves that.
2. Boring software is good software.
No app to install. No password to forget. No SDK to integrate. A URL that opens in any browser, on any device, and renders the same answer. We will resist every product instinct that wants to add a layer.
3. The audit log is non-negotiable.
If we can't tell a member who looked at their record, when, and what they saw, we don't deserve to hold the record. The audit log isn't a compliance feature. It's a member-trust feature. Read how it works.
4. Members aren't the customer.
The union is the customer. The member is the person whose information we hold. Those are different relationships with different rights. Our job is to serve the union without ever forgetting that the members didn't sign the contract — and to give them the tools to find out what we hold and ask us to change it.
5. We don't do extractive software.
We don't sell data. We don't run ads. We don't train models on your roster. We don't hold a member's status hostage to upsell a feature. The price you pay is the price; the data is yours; if you leave, we give it back.
How we work
Everything that ships goes through a small loop: a written change description, an implementation, a brief review, and an entry in the audit log. There is no separate marketing site that lies about how the product works because the same person writes both.
We pilot with one local at a time. We onboard the local in a single working session. We give every union admin the operator's direct line. We take feature requests in writing and either build them, decline them with a reason, or queue them with a date.
If you're a union or a federation thinking about a pilot, the path is short: a thirty-minute conversation, a one-page agreement, a working roster in your hand within two weeks.
What's next
The near-term roadmap is on the Security page and the Audit log page; the short version is application-layer encryption for sensitive fields, a Canadian-only Supabase region for unions that require it, and a clean export path that produces a file an arbitrator could read without our help.
If you have an idea about what the Service should be — or what it should never become — write to hello@theunionhub.com. The operator reads every email.