Plain-language overview for stewards, branch officers, and union leadership. Draft — convention trust asset.

CREA is a research tool built for postal union representatives. It helps you find the relevant arbitration cases, contract articles, and handbook sections for a grievance in seconds — and it is built to be honest about what it knows. This page explains, in plain language, the safeguards that keep its answers grounded.

CREA is a research tool, not legal advice. It speeds up your research; it does not replace your national business agent, advocate, or your own judgment. Always verify a citation before you rely on it.

1. Every citation is checked against real documents

When CREA cites an arbitration award, a contract article, or a handbook section, that citation is verified against CREA's actual library of source documents before you ever see it. If a citation can't be matched to a real document in the corpus, it is detected and stripped before the answer is served rather than shown. CREA also corrects a citation's title when it doesn't match the real document, and when a case's outcome is unclear or the record conflicts, it suppresses the outcome claim rather than guess whether the case was won or lost. The goal is simple: if CREA shows you a case number or a section, it points to a real document — though you should still read it to confirm it fits your facts.

CREA's library spans thousands of arbitration cases, USPS manuals and handbooks (ELM, JCAM, the National Agreement, and more), and Step-4 settlements and memoranda.

2. Answers stay scoped to your union's contract

Your account is tied to your union (NALC, APWU, NPMHU, or NRLCA). CREA scopes every answer to your contract — it will not hand an NALC steward an APWU article, or quote another craft's arbitration awards at you. If your union isn't yet known, CREA stays deliberately conservative rather than guessing. This protects you from the single most dangerous kind of error: confidently citing the wrong union's rules.

3. A nightly quality audit checks a battery of representative questions

Every night, an automated audit re-checks a battery of representative questions against known-good answers ("gold standard"). If answer quality slips on any tracked question, the system flags it for review. This means quality is monitored continuously, not just at launch.

4. It won't invent a citation to fill a gap

When the source documents don't support a claim, CREA does not manufacture a case number, section, or quote to cover the gap. The unsupported citation is stripped and the gap is flagged for you (for example, a note that no supporting precedent was found in your union's corpus) — so you get a shorter, sourced answer instead of a confident invented one. A gap you can see beats a guess you can't.

5. You can see the sources

Answers come with their citations so you can go read the underlying case, article, or section yourself. CREA is a starting point for your research, with the receipts attached — not a black box.

What CREA does not do

• It does not give legal advice or form an attorney–client relationship.
• It does not replace your steward training, your NBA, or your advocate.
• It does not guarantee a grievance outcome — every case turns on its own facts and record.
• It does not speak for your national union.

In one sentence

CREA gets you to the right, real, union-correct sources faster, refuses to make things up, and is watched for quality every night — so you can spend your time building the case instead of hunting for the citation.

Read what stewards say about CREA →

Draft for review. Wording is intentionally non-technical and contains no proprietary implementation detail. Corpus figures follow CREA's standard "thousands of arbitration cases" phrasing (never a specific count). For the convention trust package, pair this with the integrity-evidence record once that is built.