The technology of going paperless is identical in union and non-union plants. The rollout is not. In a union environment, a digitization project that smells like surveillance will meet organized resistance that no software feature can overcome, and it should, because the fear is usually justified by some plant somewhere that did exactly what the crew suspects.
Answer the data question before it's asked
Every operator wants to know one thing: is this about measuring the process or measuring me? Answer it in writing, early: capture exists to flag out-of-range conditions, build lot records, and kill re-keying. Operational screens show lines, machines, and patterns, not ranked individuals. Where individual data exists (sign-offs, training records), it feeds qualifications and compliance, not performance reviews. Put it in the rollout agreement if that is what trust takes.
Design with stewards, not at them
The practical move that changes everything: bring stewards and senior operators into form design. They know which checks are real and which are theater, where the clipboard lies, and what will actually be faster at the station. Their fingerprints on the forms convert the system from management's tool into the crew's tool. This is also simply better engineering, the floor knows the floor.
The pitch that lands
Skip the transformation language. The honest pitch: you stop writing the same number three times; the system catches the drift while the batch can still be saved instead of blaming whoever signed the sheet after it ships; and when something goes wrong, the record shows what the machine did, which protects the operator who ran it correctly. Blame-by-memory is the old system; the record is fairer than the argument.
Sequencing in a union environment
Same 90-day arc as anywhere (the plan is here), with two adjustments: run the paper-parallel period as long as the crew wants it, trust beats schedule, and publish the group-level dashboards to the floor first, before management sees them, so the crew meets its own data before being measured by it. Plants that do this find the floor asking to expand the system, which is the only sustainable version of paperless.