United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
Encyclopedia
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), is an independent democratic rank-and-file labor union
representing workers in both the private and public sectors across the United States
.
UE was one of the first unions to be chartered by the Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) and grew to more than 750,000 members in the 1940s. UE was founded in March 1936 by several independent industrial unions which had been organized from the ground up in the early and mid-1930s by workers in major plants of the General Electric Company, Westinghouse Electric, RCA and other leading electrical equipment and radio manufacturers.
In 1937 a group of local unions in the machine shop industry, led by James J. Matles, left the International Association of Machinists (IAM), objecting to that union's policies of racial discrimination, and joined the young UE. UE withdrew from affiliation with CIO in 1949 over differences related to the developing Cold War
. It suffered significant losses of membership through the 1950s to raids by other unions, in particular the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) which was set up by the CIO in 1949 with the goal of replacing UE. The UE and IUE were fierce rivals for many years, but in the 1960s began to cooperate in bargaining with General Electric and other employers.
Now representing 35,000 workers in a variety of industries, UE continues actively organizing private and public sector workers, and its democratic structure and practices have attracted several small independent unions to affiliate. Over the past 15 years the union has built a strategic alliance with the Authentic Labor Front
, an independent Mexican
union, and UE is broadly active in international labor outreach and solidarity.
Today UE is highly regarded as one of the most democratic and politically progressive
national unions in the United States, and its philosophy and principle of democratic unionism is summed up in its longstanding slogan, "The members run this union."
Most UE locals hold monthly membership meetings. Field representatives from the national union assist local unions with bargaining and other activities, but UE’s constitution forbids the staff “to interfere with UE rank-and-file control, including election processes.” Trusteeship of local unions (takeover of a local by the national union) is not provided for in the UE constitution, and has therefore never occurred.
From its founding through 2005 UE had an intermediate structure of geographic districts. In 2005 the districts were replaced by three regions, Western, Eastern and Northeast. Each region holds meetings two or three times a year, composed of delegates from local unions. The regions elect their own officers and representatives to the General Executive Board (the national board of UE), including a full-time regional president. The regions coordinate work among the locals in their area, including solidarity, political action and union education. Several times a year the regions organize training workshops and other educational events through sub-regions – smaller geographic subdivisions.
Until 2003 UE held annual conventions, a frequency rare in organized labor; the union's conventions are now biannual. The five-day convention, consisting of elected delegates from UE locals across the country, is the highest decision-making body of the union. It discusses and approves policy resolutions submitted by locals and regions, on matters ranging from the union's bargaining and organizing strategies to domestic and foreign policy issues. Convention delegates participate in workshops and other educational and cultural events; elect the union’s three national officers as well as the national trustees; and debate and vote on all proposed amendments to the UE constitution.
The salaries of the national officers and staff are specified in the UE constitution, so giving raises to UE's paid officials requires amending the constitution at convention. All amendments to the constitution approved by the convention (including the proposed pay increases) are then sent to all UE locals, to be ratified or rejected by members voting at local union meetings in the weeks following the convention. Every member therefore has a direct vote on whether or not the pay of their national officers and staff will be increased.
Between conventions, decisions of the national union are made by the General Executive Board, consisting of the three national officers, the three regional presidents, and 12 additional rank-and-file representatives elected by the regions.
Since UE’s founding, its constitution has limited the pay of its officers to “a salary not to exceed the highest weekly wage paid in the industry.” Linked to the pay rates of production workers at GE, the annual salaries of UE’s three national officers are currently $51,984 – a fraction of what other unions pay their officers. The salaries of UE regional officers, staff, and those local officers who work for the union full-time, follow the same principle and are somewhat lower. As noted above, all increases in the pay of UE national officers and staff must be approved by delegates to the national convention, as amendments to the union constitution, and then ratified by membership vote at local union meetings.
UE’s policy on salaries is deeply rooted in UE’s philosophy of unionism. UE sees unionism as a movement and unions as independent organizations of workers. When union leaders live in the same income bracket as rank-and-file workers, it helps them to stay in touch with the outlook and needs of workers. In UE's view, salaries for union officers and staff that are comparable to those of corporate executives tend to undermine a union’s commitment to its fundamental purpose.
From the local to the national level, UE has a strong ethic of accountability and transparency in all its financial practices, and opposes any trace of what it calls “petty corruption” among union officials. UE leaders at all levels are taught that union funds belong to the members, and that members are entitled to detailed reports on union finances at all levels, and to democratically decide on major spending.
UE routinely rejects management pleas for bargaining "blackouts,” gag rules which prohibit open communication to rank-and-file union members during negotiations. The union frequently calls on its members to collectively demonstrate their support for the union’s bargaining goals during contract talks, by wearing T-shirts, buttons or stickers with union insignia and slogans; speaking up to management on key bargaining issues; and through rallies, informational picketing and other actions. Some UE locals even insist on the right of rank-and-file members to attend negotiating sessions as observers.
UE is very explicit in mandating that all union negotiations are a collective endeavor. The UE constitution states: "No representative of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) shall negotiate alone with the employer." UE feels that its open and participatory approach to bargaining results in better contracts than bargaining methods which restrict member involvement. Illustration of how UE negotiates with employers can be seen in the union’s detailed web reports on its 2007 national bargaining with GE.
Fighting for workers over day-to-day injustices on the job is, in UE's view, a central task of unions. The “first line of defense” in UE’s workplace organization consists of elected shop stewards within each department or workgroup. Among unions UE has one of the highest ratios of stewards to members, and aims for a steward-to-supervisor ratio of at least one to one. UE has a strong training program for its stewards, distributes a Steward Kit that includes the exemplary “UE Steward Handbook,” and publishes a monthly publication, the UE Steward, that provides tactical tips to stewards and local officers for dealing with workplace problems.
UE’s approach to grievances includes careful investigation of the issue by the steward, being well-prepared for meetings with the employer, and strategies for organizing and mobilizing members to pressure management to resolve the problem. UE warns its locals against excessive reliance on grievance arbitration, pointing out that the majority of arbitration decisions are in favor of management, and that an arbitrator’s unfavorable interpretation of a contract clause can harm the union for many years. UE avoids arbitrating grievances that it believes it is unlikely to win and trains its staff and local officers to carefully prepare for those cases they do take to arbitration. In most UE locals, the decision whether to arbitrate a grievance is made by membership vote.
In the UE national contract with GE, UE locals retain the right to strike over grievances. Such grievance strikes by UE-GE locals are infrequent and usually of short duration, but the existence of this option gives the union added clout and helps it to favorably resolve many grievances.
of the United Mine Workers
(UMW) and Sidney Hillman
, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
(ACWA). Over the next few years a dramatic wave of strikes and mass organizing by industrial workers rapidly built the membership of the CIO and of newly-formed industrial unions such as UE, the United Auto Workers
(UAW), United Rubber Workers, and United Steelworkers
(USW).
The UE expanded greatly over the next decade, organizing workers of the major corporations in the electrical equipment, radio and machine tool industries. The union won a contentious strike at RCA
and organized additional plants of GE, Westinghouse, GM's electrical division and smaller companies in its base industries. The union signed its first national contract with GE in 1938; Westinghouse, which more stubbornly resisted unionization of its plants, did not sign an agreement until 1941. By the end of World War II, UE was the third largest CIO union, with a membership of 500,000.
As in many of the new CIO unions organized in the 1930s, the membership and leaders of UE included a variety of radicals, including socialists and communists, as well as New Deal
liberals and Catholics. Among the organizers and leaders of UE Local 107 at the Westinghouse South Philadelphia works were several former members of the Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW). While foes of UE in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s charged the union with "communist domination," recent scholarly studies have demonstrated that UE was and remains one of the most democratic U.S. labor unions, and that its policies differed markedly from those of the US Communist Party on a number of major issues during those decades.
Following the outbreak of World War II
, UE joined with other unions in the CIO in urging a no-strike pledge and higher productivity for the duration of the war, which UE viewed as a struggle against world fascism
and therefore worthy of labor's support. The UE also supported expanded use of piecework systems in industry, which it defended as both necessary to boost production and a way to improve workers' earnings under the wartime wage control systems imposed by the War Labor Board. This appears, in fact, to be largely true: the incentive systems that management used were their loosest during World War II and represented an important, and generally popular, form of compensation for workers.
UE continued to bargain aggressively for its members during the war, winning numerous improvements in contract language and benefits. Despite the War Labor Board's policy of freezing wages for the duration of the war, UE leaders devised creative strategies to win WLB approval of pay increases for many of their members. And despite the union's support for the no-strike pledge, UE leaders supported militant actions by their members, such as a strike by UE members at a Babcock and Wilcox
plant in New Jersey
.
Soon after the war ended, beginning in late 1945, the three largest unions of the CIO engaged in a national strike to regain economic ground lost by workers during the war, when wages had been frozen but industrial profits had risen significantly. The United Auto Workers shut down the auto plants of General Motors; UE struck GE, Westinghouse, and the GM electrical division, and the United Steelworkers stopped work in the basic steel industry. The 1946 strikes were successful, but the outcome stiffened the resolve of industrialists to break the power of the CIO through a strategy of divide-and-conquer. The brewing Cold War
with the Soviet Union
would provide the opportunity, and in October 1946 GE's Charles Wilson summarized the political program of big business when he declared that the problems of the United States could be summed up as "Russia abroad, labor at home."
Republican victories in the elections of 1946 had brought a much more conservative Congress to Washington, with a determination to curb labor. The Taft-Hartley Act
, drafted in large part by lobbyists for the National Association of Manufacturers
, General Electric, Inland Steel and other industrialists, represented a major revision of the Wagner Act that significantly weakened labor's ability to organize and effectively negotiate.
Among its many anti-union provisions was a clause requiring officers of all unions to sign "non-communist affidavits," swearing that they were not members of the Communist Party. Leaders of virtually all CIO and AFL unions denounced this new law, and in particular called the non-communist affidavit clause an intolerable government interference in internal union matters and an encroachment on freedom of speech and association. Union leaders vowed to boycott the Taft-Hartley labor board and agreed in principle that all would refuse to sign the affidavits. But few lived up to that pledge.
Some union leaders, including Walter Reuther
of the UAW, signed the Taft-Hartley affidavits and then proceeded to raid (attempt to replace) locals of UE and the Farm Equipment Workers (FE), whose leaders were still holding out and refusing to sign. This meant that the raiding union, UAW, would appear on the NLRB ballot, but the incumbent union, UE or FE, could not.
The CIO, under President Philip Murray
, did nothing to discourage the United Auto Workers
from poaching on UE shops in the arms and typewriter industries in the Connecticut River Valley; other unions affiliated with the AFL, such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
, likewise displaced the UE in some plants.
Fissures within UE that appeared around the 1941 convention (when James Carey had been defeated as UE president by Albert J. Fitzgerald, a GE worker from Lynn, Massachusetts
) reopened in the late-40's national political environment of anti-communist hysteria. Up-and-coming Republican politicians, such as Congressman Richard Nixon
of California
and Senator Joseph McCarthy
of Wisconsin
, built their careers by conducting witch-hunts for imagined "Communist subversion" within the federal government, and by red-baiting their election opponents. The CIO itself was a prime target of the Republican red-baiters. CIO leaders such as Philip Murray of the Steelworkers and Walter Reuther
of the UAW responded to these attacks by purging their own unions of radicals, and by attacking those CIO unions, such as UE, that held out against the red-baiting tide. Investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee
and criticism from groups such as the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, which actively organized dissenters within UE into an opposition faction, put UE leaders on the defensive.
Anti-communist raids by other unions removed some conservative members and locals from UE, thereby weakening the right-wing internal opposition. Nonetheless oppositionists were confident that the national political atmosphere would enable them to seize power in UE at the union's 1949 convention. But the right-wing candidates were soundly defeated. UE's convention delegates instead backed their national officers' demands that the CIO stop the UAW and other CIO unions from raiding UE.
To defend the union from future raids, UE reversed its refusal to sign Taft-Hartley affidavits, enabling the union to again appear on the ballot in NLRB representation elections. When the CIO refused to take action to stop CIO-affiliated unions from raiding other CIO unions, UE boycotted the CIO's national convention in 1949 and withheld its per capita dues payments, effectively resigning its affiliation to the CIO. The CIO responded by announcing the expulsion of UE as well as that of the United Farm Equipment Workers (FE); the following year the CIO expelled nine other progressive unions.
Of the 11 "left" unions that were expelled or resigned from the CIO in 1949-50, only UE and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union
remain in existence today. All of the others were broken by the relentless attacks of employers, the government and other unions through the period of McCarthyism
.
In the case of UE, the CIO went a step further, chartering a rival union, the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IUE), that would attempt to destroy and replace UE. James Carey, the ex-president of UE, was appointed president of the IUE. The IUE wrested away many of the locals in the radio assembly and light manufacturing industries; the UE held on to much of its base in machine building. In the heavy electrical equipment plants, on the other hand, the two factions each had substantial strength. The resulting battles were fierce: in Local 601, which represented Westinghouse workers in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
and whose members had a tradition of radical politics dating back to Eugene V. Debs
' candidacy for President in 1912, the two factions were led by brothers Mike and Tom Fitzgerald, who attacked each other personally as vigorously as the factions did on political issues. The IUE won a close election, with the semi-skilled workers supporting the IUE while more skilled workers favored the UE.
Employers, the federal government, the news media and other establishment forces played major roles in the efforts to eliminate UE. UE was subjected to an endless barrage of inquisitions by Congressional committees, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC), Sen. Joseph McCarthy
's Subcommittee on Investigations, and a similar committee chaired by Sen. John Marshall Butler
. In several instances, these committees used subpoena power to set up UE members to be fired by their employers, unless the subpoenaed worker cooperated by "naming names," and thereby subjected other workers to the inquisition.
GE fired John Nelson, president of UE's large Local 506 in Erie, Pennsylvania
, on just such grounds. The stress resulting from his own firing and the unrelenting persecution of his union destroyed Nelson's health; he died in 1959 at the age of 42. McCarthy's "investigations" were sometimes carefully scheduled to help the IUE and the companies against UE. In 1953 he held a hearing in Lynn, Massachusetts
on the eve of an NLRB election between UE and IUE at the major GE plant there. His grilling of UE members, in the guise of investigating "Communist subversion," made for sensationalist news headlines and helped the IUE eke out a narrow win.
Several UE shop leaders, as well as UE Secretary-Treasurer Julius Emspak, were put on trial on contempt charges for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. The federal government tried unsuccessfully to take away James Matles's citizenship and deport him; the UE national organizing director had immigrated from Romania
as a youth. Other similar prosecutions, harassment by the FBI, vicious attacks in local newspapers, and denunciation by politicians, kept UE under siege for years.
The red-baiting attacks on UE during the McCarthy era did tremendous damage to the union, but were eventually shown, even in the prevailing atmosphere of anti-red hysteria, to have no legal merit. Most of the legal cases against UE leaders were eventually withdrawn or defeated in the courts, and in March 1959 the U.S. Justice Department was forced to drop its prosecution of UE on charges that the union was "Communist-dominated."
It seems a miracle that UE survived the 1950s at all, with attacks coming at it from all directions: the federal administration, Congress, Republicans and Democrats, news media, "mainstream" unions of both CIO and AFL, and even some members of the clergy. What helped UE to weather these storms was its own democratic structure and manner of operation, and its superior record of representing members (when contrasted with the IUE, for example) in collective bargaining and in fighting for shop grievances. Both of these attributes engendered fierce loyalty to UE among many of its members, even as the union was being slandered by powerful forces as some sort of national security threat.
UE loyalists counteracted the IUE by highlighting its relative weakness in standing up to management, and derisively characterized the acronym IUE as standing for "Imitation UE."
While the UE and the IUE won roughly equal number of elections through the first half of the 1950s, the IUE came away with larger numbers of members, particularly in the growing field of consumer electronics. Other unions, including the IBEW, the IAM, the UAW, the United Steel Workers of America, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Sheet Metal Workers International Association, also wedged in during these elections. The IUE, moreover, found itself divided, as the divergent groups that had allied to oppose the UE now found it hard to work with each other once in power.
James Carey's arrogance eventually caught up with him within the IUE as it had in UE. In 1965 he was defeated for the presidency of IUE by one of his own lieutenants, leaving him with the dubious distinction of being the only person in U.S. labor history to be elected, and subsequently thrown out, as national president of two different unions.
During World War II and continuing through the Cold War, UE took a more progressive position on women's rights than other unions, advocating "equal pay for equal work" during the war and, after the war, resisting employers' attempts to drive married women out of industry and to deny seniority and maternity leave to women workers. The 1946 strike at GE was prolonged by the company's insistence on giving a smaller wage increase to its women employees, whom GE president Charles E. Wilson contemptuously dismissed as "bobbysoxers." With all other strike issues resolved, UE held out on the picket lines until GE agreed that women would receive the same raises as men. In the early 1950s, while the union was under attack from all directions, UE organized a series of district and national conferences on the problems of women workers. Local union leaders who opposed UE's policies on gender equality often bolted to the IUE, and took members with them.
UE also stood out in that period for its advocacy of equality for African American workers. In July 1950 UE leaders appointed Ernest Thompson, a black international representative and former rank-and-file factory worker, as secretary of the UE Fair Practices Committee. In essence the union's affirmative action officer, Thompson met with the leadership of UE locals around the country to develop and implement action plans to force employers to hire more black workers, and to give African Americans opportunities to advance into skilled trades jobs. In the midst of the Cold War assaults on UE, the union's newspaper reported such success stories as the promotion of a black worker at Johnson Machine to lathe operator. The company had insisted that this worker was unqualified and refused to train him, so white union members had taught him the job during their lunch breaks.
UE spoke out frequently against the racist government policies of the time, drawing attention to the injustices of "Jim Crow
" racial segregation and denial of black voting rights. UE called for reinstating the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee, a wartime agency created by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt
to stop discrimination in industry, which was disbanded after the war by President Harry Truman. Here again, UE's progressive position was used against it by its foes; in several instances the IUE openly appealed for the votes of white workers on the basis of racial bigotry and by attacking UE's support for racial equality.
By 1954, UE officers reported that 87 percent of all UE contracts contained no-discrimination clauses, an achievement that placed UE far ahead of other unions.
A second wave of defections in the mid-1950s took several important UE locals, which had survived earlier raiding, into the IUE and other unions. The UE's membership dropped from 200,000 in 1953 to 58,000 in 1960. Some of the losses resulted from companies, including GE and Westinghouse, moving portions of their manufacturing from older plants in the Northeast to new plants in the South and West.
The split of 1955-56 largely involved tactical disagreements over how to move the UE's progressive program and brand of unionism forward in the face of the AFL-CIO merger. It proved a bitter disappointment to UE activists who had managed to bring the union successfully through the hardest years of the McCarthy period and the Cold War but who were now unable to keep the union together. Most locals in the UE's New York-north Jersey district (UE District 4) voted to go into the IUE reasoning that they had the strength and experience to influence the policies of the newer union. While this move was resented by UE activists elsewhere, especially in Pennsylvania and the midwest, the District 4 activists felt that the UE forces could soon have regained control of the re-united organization had the whole union followed their lead. By the mid 1960s, the former UE activists in IUE shops played a role in helping to bring about James Carey's ouster in a disputed election. Carey's departure eventually opened the way for the co-ordinated bargaining which partially healed the two dedade old division in the industry.
, the company’s vice president of labor and community relations, who devised the strategy in reaction to UE's success in the 1946 strike, and to capitalize on the bitter divisions, after 1949, in the ranks of GE union members. The 1970s brought UE renewed growth through successful organizing. UE lost many members in the 1980s and 1990s as the flight of many manufacturing plants abroad led to plant closings by both major employers in the electrical manufacturing industry, as well as by smaller UE employers.
Despite shrinkage of GE's U.S. manufacturing employment, UE remains a major force within General Electric today and plays a leading role in negotiating contracts that cover members of 13 unions in GE through the Coordinated Bargaining Committee. UE’s role in the union coalition resulted in union gains in 2007 national negotiations with GE.
The UE has broadened its scope in recent years, organizing public employees, service industry workers, school and college employees, and others. The UE has also replaced some other unions in workplaces where the existing unions has failed to adequately represent the membership.
The UE has entered into a Strategic Organizing Alliance with the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT), Mexico's Authentic Labor Front, in which the UE and FAT collaborate in organizing and educational projects. UE's organizing alliance with the FAT started in 1992 and grew from the two organizations' shared opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA). The UE has also formed alliances with non-labor groups, both in the U.S. and internationally, through the World Social Forum
, to fight the effects of corporate globalization
promoted by institutions of global capital such as the International Monetary Fund
and free trade agreements modeled on the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA).
Beginning in the mid-1990s, UE has been organizing state and municipal workers in North Carolina
, chartering their statewide organization as UE Local 150. A North Carolina state law dating to the Jim Crow
era of racial segregation, General Statute 95-98, prohibits public employees from bargaining labor contracts. UE is campaigning to repeal that act and replace it with legislation to facilitate public sector bargaining.
As part of that campaign, UE in December 2005 brought a complaint before the International Labor Organization, the UN’s labor agency, charging that the North Carolina bargaining ban violates international agreements on labor rights, which uphold the right of nearly all workers to form unions and bargain collectively. In March 2007 the ILO ruled in favor of UE, and called upon the United States and North Carolina to repeal GS 95-98 and begin discussions with unions to establish “a framework for collective bargaining.” UE’s Mexican ally the FAT, with the support of 52 other U.S., Mexican, Canadian and global labor organizations, filed a complaint in October 2006 with the Mexican National Administrative Office – a body established to address complaints of labor rights violations under NAFTA. The complaint charges that the North Carolina bargaining ban violates the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), the labor-rights side agreement to NAFTA. In November 2007 the Mexican NAO launched an investigation into those charges.
The plight of North Carolina public employees was dramatized in September 2006 when sanitation workers for the City of Raleigh conducted a two-day strike over unfair treatment and working conditions. Since the stoppage those workers, organized by UE Local 150, have won improvements and regular consultation of city officials with their elected union leaders. UE has expanded its public sector organizing to two other states in the Upper South that also lack public employee bargaining rights, establishing UE Local 160 in Virginia
and UE Local 170 in West Virginia
.
UE has also become known throughout the U.S. labor movement as the "National Home for Independent Unions", and works with many independent unions across the country. Over the past 20 years a number of existing independent unions have affiliated with UE, seeking the resources, support and solidarity of a national union and attracted by UE's democratic structure and practices.
One such victory came in July 2005 when the 2,500 member Connecticut Independent Labor and Police Unions (CILU/CIPU) voted by an overwhelming margin to become UE Local 222. Since joining UE, Local 222's work has focused on bringing democracy, justice and equality to the workplace, and on organizing and mobilizing its members and local communities in fights for gender pay equity, ending all forms of discrimination, and health care for all. The local has also added members by organizing additional groups of school and municipal workers in Connecticut.
in Chicago, when the plant closed with only three days notice to the employees, occupied the plant in protest of the closing and company's failure to pay employees their accrued vacation pay, and payments required under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act
. The WARN Act requires 60 days notice of a plant closing, or 60 days pay if timely notice is not given. The workers' action drew extensive media coverage and attracted wide support, including from U.S. President-elect Barack Obama
, and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich
banned state business with Bank of America
, because the bank's cancellation of the company's line of credit had prompted the shutdown. Protest demonstrations at Bank of America branches took place in dozens of U.S. cities during the sit-in. On December 10 the union members voted to end the occupation after Republic, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and the union negotiated a settlement that paid each worker eight weeks wages, plus all accumulated vacation pay, and health insurance for two months.
Two months later a California window manufacturer, Serious Materials, purchased the former Republic plant and reopened it, reinstating the union workers to their jobs in order of seniority and signing a labor contract with UE Local 1110 that was substantially the same as the union's former contract with Republic.
In April 2009 Vice President Joe Biden visited the plant and met with company officials and union leaders, praising the reopening of the plant as "a big deal."
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Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
representing workers in both the private and public sectors across the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
.
UE was one of the first unions to be chartered by the Congress of Industrial Organizations
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
(CIO) and grew to more than 750,000 members in the 1940s. UE was founded in March 1936 by several independent industrial unions which had been organized from the ground up in the early and mid-1930s by workers in major plants of the General Electric Company, Westinghouse Electric, RCA and other leading electrical equipment and radio manufacturers.
In 1937 a group of local unions in the machine shop industry, led by James J. Matles, left the International Association of Machinists (IAM), objecting to that union's policies of racial discrimination, and joined the young UE. UE withdrew from affiliation with CIO in 1949 over differences related to the developing Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
. It suffered significant losses of membership through the 1950s to raids by other unions, in particular the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) which was set up by the CIO in 1949 with the goal of replacing UE. The UE and IUE were fierce rivals for many years, but in the 1960s began to cooperate in bargaining with General Electric and other employers.
Now representing 35,000 workers in a variety of industries, UE continues actively organizing private and public sector workers, and its democratic structure and practices have attracted several small independent unions to affiliate. Over the past 15 years the union has built a strategic alliance with the Authentic Labor Front
Authentic Labor Front
The Authentic Labor Front is an independent confederation of labor unions in Mexico. It was formed as a progressive "Social Catholic" organization in 1960 in response to the nation's labor strife of 1958-1959. Following the strikes of these years, the Mexican government replaced the leaders of the...
, an independent Mexican
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
union, and UE is broadly active in international labor outreach and solidarity.
Today UE is highly regarded as one of the most democratic and politically progressive
Progressivism
Progressivism is an umbrella term for a political ideology advocating or favoring social, political, and economic reform or changes. Progressivism is often viewed by some conservatives, constitutionalists, and libertarians to be in opposition to conservative or reactionary ideologies.The...
national unions in the United States, and its philosophy and principle of democratic unionism is summed up in its longstanding slogan, "The members run this union."
Democratic structure
The fundamental unit of UE is the local union. Because UE was founded by existing independent local unions, UE locals enjoy a higher degree of autonomy than locals of other national unions. Local union members elect their local officers, negotiators, stewards, and delegates to the regional council and national convention; set policies for their local, including financial decisions; suggest bargaining demands and vote to approve the union’s full list of contract proposals; vote to ratify or reject contracts and supplemental agreements with the employer; and decide whether to strike, and when to end a strike, by majority vote.Most UE locals hold monthly membership meetings. Field representatives from the national union assist local unions with bargaining and other activities, but UE’s constitution forbids the staff “to interfere with UE rank-and-file control, including election processes.” Trusteeship of local unions (takeover of a local by the national union) is not provided for in the UE constitution, and has therefore never occurred.
From its founding through 2005 UE had an intermediate structure of geographic districts. In 2005 the districts were replaced by three regions, Western, Eastern and Northeast. Each region holds meetings two or three times a year, composed of delegates from local unions. The regions elect their own officers and representatives to the General Executive Board (the national board of UE), including a full-time regional president. The regions coordinate work among the locals in their area, including solidarity, political action and union education. Several times a year the regions organize training workshops and other educational events through sub-regions – smaller geographic subdivisions.
Until 2003 UE held annual conventions, a frequency rare in organized labor; the union's conventions are now biannual. The five-day convention, consisting of elected delegates from UE locals across the country, is the highest decision-making body of the union. It discusses and approves policy resolutions submitted by locals and regions, on matters ranging from the union's bargaining and organizing strategies to domestic and foreign policy issues. Convention delegates participate in workshops and other educational and cultural events; elect the union’s three national officers as well as the national trustees; and debate and vote on all proposed amendments to the UE constitution.
The salaries of the national officers and staff are specified in the UE constitution, so giving raises to UE's paid officials requires amending the constitution at convention. All amendments to the constitution approved by the convention (including the proposed pay increases) are then sent to all UE locals, to be ratified or rejected by members voting at local union meetings in the weeks following the convention. Every member therefore has a direct vote on whether or not the pay of their national officers and staff will be increased.
Between conventions, decisions of the national union are made by the General Executive Board, consisting of the three national officers, the three regional presidents, and 12 additional rank-and-file representatives elected by the regions.
Financial practices
One feature that has distinguished UE from many other U.S. labor unions is its strong emphasis on frugality and financial responsibility.Since UE’s founding, its constitution has limited the pay of its officers to “a salary not to exceed the highest weekly wage paid in the industry.” Linked to the pay rates of production workers at GE, the annual salaries of UE’s three national officers are currently $51,984 – a fraction of what other unions pay their officers. The salaries of UE regional officers, staff, and those local officers who work for the union full-time, follow the same principle and are somewhat lower. As noted above, all increases in the pay of UE national officers and staff must be approved by delegates to the national convention, as amendments to the union constitution, and then ratified by membership vote at local union meetings.
UE’s policy on salaries is deeply rooted in UE’s philosophy of unionism. UE sees unionism as a movement and unions as independent organizations of workers. When union leaders live in the same income bracket as rank-and-file workers, it helps them to stay in touch with the outlook and needs of workers. In UE's view, salaries for union officers and staff that are comparable to those of corporate executives tend to undermine a union’s commitment to its fundamental purpose.
From the local to the national level, UE has a strong ethic of accountability and transparency in all its financial practices, and opposes any trace of what it calls “petty corruption” among union officials. UE leaders at all levels are taught that union funds belong to the members, and that members are entitled to detailed reports on union finances at all levels, and to democratically decide on major spending.
Bargaining and grievances
UE’s approach to collective bargaining places a premium on membership involvement. In preparation for contract bargaining, UE locals solicit ideas for contract changes from their members, and most locals then conduct a membership vote to approve the full slate of union proposals. UE bargaining committees regularly report back to members, both orally and through publications, during the course of bargaining.UE routinely rejects management pleas for bargaining "blackouts,” gag rules which prohibit open communication to rank-and-file union members during negotiations. The union frequently calls on its members to collectively demonstrate their support for the union’s bargaining goals during contract talks, by wearing T-shirts, buttons or stickers with union insignia and slogans; speaking up to management on key bargaining issues; and through rallies, informational picketing and other actions. Some UE locals even insist on the right of rank-and-file members to attend negotiating sessions as observers.
UE is very explicit in mandating that all union negotiations are a collective endeavor. The UE constitution states: "No representative of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) shall negotiate alone with the employer." UE feels that its open and participatory approach to bargaining results in better contracts than bargaining methods which restrict member involvement. Illustration of how UE negotiates with employers can be seen in the union’s detailed web reports on its 2007 national bargaining with GE.
Fighting for workers over day-to-day injustices on the job is, in UE's view, a central task of unions. The “first line of defense” in UE’s workplace organization consists of elected shop stewards within each department or workgroup. Among unions UE has one of the highest ratios of stewards to members, and aims for a steward-to-supervisor ratio of at least one to one. UE has a strong training program for its stewards, distributes a Steward Kit that includes the exemplary “UE Steward Handbook,” and publishes a monthly publication, the UE Steward, that provides tactical tips to stewards and local officers for dealing with workplace problems.
UE’s approach to grievances includes careful investigation of the issue by the steward, being well-prepared for meetings with the employer, and strategies for organizing and mobilizing members to pressure management to resolve the problem. UE warns its locals against excessive reliance on grievance arbitration, pointing out that the majority of arbitration decisions are in favor of management, and that an arbitrator’s unfavorable interpretation of a contract clause can harm the union for many years. UE avoids arbitrating grievances that it believes it is unlikely to win and trains its staff and local officers to carefully prepare for those cases they do take to arbitration. In most UE locals, the decision whether to arbitrate a grievance is made by membership vote.
In the UE national contract with GE, UE locals retain the right to strike over grievances. Such grievance strikes by UE-GE locals are infrequent and usually of short duration, but the existence of this option gives the union added clout and helps it to favorably resolve many grievances.
Early history: growth and schism
The CIO granted UE the first charter on November 16, 1938. UE was founded at a March 1936 meeting of existing local unions in plants of the electrical equipment and radio industries, a few months the founding of the CIO. In September 1936 the AFL suspended its member unions that had started the CIO – originally called the Committee on Industrial Organization and formed by existing industrial unions within the AFL as a caucus to promote organizing industrial unions in mass production industries. The AFL, dominated by craft unions, soon escalated the conflict by expelling the CIO unions, prominent among which were John L. LewisJohn L. Lewis
John Llewellyn Lewis was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America from 1920 to 1960...
of the United Mine Workers
United Mine Workers
The United Mine Workers of America is a North American labor union best known for representing coal miners and coal technicians. Today, the Union also represents health care workers, truck drivers, manufacturing workers and public employees in the United States and Canada...
(UMW) and Sidney Hillman
Sidney Hillman
Sidney Hillman was an American labor leader. Head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, he was a key figure in the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in marshaling labor's support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party.-Early years:Sidney Hillman was...
, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America
The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was a United States labor union known for its support for "social unionism" and progressive political causes. Led by Sidney Hillman for its first thirty years, it helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations...
(ACWA). Over the next few years a dramatic wave of strikes and mass organizing by industrial workers rapidly built the membership of the CIO and of newly-formed industrial unions such as UE, the United Auto Workers
United Auto Workers
The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, better known as the United Auto Workers , is a labor union which represents workers in the United States and Puerto Rico, and formerly in Canada. Founded as part of the Congress of Industrial...
(UAW), United Rubber Workers, and United Steelworkers
United Steelworkers
The United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union is the largest industrial labor union in North America, with 705,000 members. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, U.S., the United Steelworkers represents workers in the United...
(USW).
The UE expanded greatly over the next decade, organizing workers of the major corporations in the electrical equipment, radio and machine tool industries. The union won a contentious strike at RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
and organized additional plants of GE, Westinghouse, GM's electrical division and smaller companies in its base industries. The union signed its first national contract with GE in 1938; Westinghouse, which more stubbornly resisted unionization of its plants, did not sign an agreement until 1941. By the end of World War II, UE was the third largest CIO union, with a membership of 500,000.
As in many of the new CIO unions organized in the 1930s, the membership and leaders of UE included a variety of radicals, including socialists and communists, as well as New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
liberals and Catholics. Among the organizers and leaders of UE Local 107 at the Westinghouse South Philadelphia works were several former members of the Industrial Workers of the World
Industrial Workers of the World
The Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...
(IWW). While foes of UE in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s charged the union with "communist domination," recent scholarly studies have demonstrated that UE was and remains one of the most democratic U.S. labor unions, and that its policies differed markedly from those of the US Communist Party on a number of major issues during those decades.
Following the outbreak of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, UE joined with other unions in the CIO in urging a no-strike pledge and higher productivity for the duration of the war, which UE viewed as a struggle against world fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
and therefore worthy of labor's support. The UE also supported expanded use of piecework systems in industry, which it defended as both necessary to boost production and a way to improve workers' earnings under the wartime wage control systems imposed by the War Labor Board. This appears, in fact, to be largely true: the incentive systems that management used were their loosest during World War II and represented an important, and generally popular, form of compensation for workers.
UE continued to bargain aggressively for its members during the war, winning numerous improvements in contract language and benefits. Despite the War Labor Board's policy of freezing wages for the duration of the war, UE leaders devised creative strategies to win WLB approval of pay increases for many of their members. And despite the union's support for the no-strike pledge, UE leaders supported militant actions by their members, such as a strike by UE members at a Babcock and Wilcox
Babcock and Wilcox
The Babcock & Wilcox Company is a U.S.-based company that provides design, engineering, manufacturing, construction and facilities management services to nuclear, renewable, fossil power, industrial and government customers worldwide. B&W's boilers supply more than 300,000 megawatts of installed...
plant in New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
.
Soon after the war ended, beginning in late 1945, the three largest unions of the CIO engaged in a national strike to regain economic ground lost by workers during the war, when wages had been frozen but industrial profits had risen significantly. The United Auto Workers shut down the auto plants of General Motors; UE struck GE, Westinghouse, and the GM electrical division, and the United Steelworkers stopped work in the basic steel industry. The 1946 strikes were successful, but the outcome stiffened the resolve of industrialists to break the power of the CIO through a strategy of divide-and-conquer. The brewing Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
with the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
would provide the opportunity, and in October 1946 GE's Charles Wilson summarized the political program of big business when he declared that the problems of the United States could be summed up as "Russia abroad, labor at home."
Republican victories in the elections of 1946 had brought a much more conservative Congress to Washington, with a determination to curb labor. The Taft-Hartley Act
Taft-Hartley Act
The Labor–Management Relations Act is a United States federal law that monitors the activities and power of labor unions. The act, still effective, was sponsored by Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred A. Hartley, Jr. and became law by overriding U.S. President Harry S...
, drafted in large part by lobbyists for the National Association of Manufacturers
National Association of Manufacturers
The National Association of Manufacturers is an advocacy group headquartered in Washington, D.C. with 10 additional offices across the country...
, General Electric, Inland Steel and other industrialists, represented a major revision of the Wagner Act that significantly weakened labor's ability to organize and effectively negotiate.
Among its many anti-union provisions was a clause requiring officers of all unions to sign "non-communist affidavits," swearing that they were not members of the Communist Party. Leaders of virtually all CIO and AFL unions denounced this new law, and in particular called the non-communist affidavit clause an intolerable government interference in internal union matters and an encroachment on freedom of speech and association. Union leaders vowed to boycott the Taft-Hartley labor board and agreed in principle that all would refuse to sign the affidavits. But few lived up to that pledge.
Some union leaders, including Walter Reuther
Walter Reuther
Walter Philip Reuther was an American labor union leader, who made the United Automobile Workers a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century...
of the UAW, signed the Taft-Hartley affidavits and then proceeded to raid (attempt to replace) locals of UE and the Farm Equipment Workers (FE), whose leaders were still holding out and refusing to sign. This meant that the raiding union, UAW, would appear on the NLRB ballot, but the incumbent union, UE or FE, could not.
The CIO, under President Philip Murray
Philip Murray
Philip Murray was a Scottish born steelworker and an American labor leader. He was the first president of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee , the first president of the United Steelworkers of America , and the longest-serving president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations .-Early...
, did nothing to discourage the United Auto Workers
United Auto Workers
The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, better known as the United Auto Workers , is a labor union which represents workers in the United States and Puerto Rico, and formerly in Canada. Founded as part of the Congress of Industrial...
from poaching on UE shops in the arms and typewriter industries in the Connecticut River Valley; other unions affiliated with the AFL, such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is a labor union which represents workers in the electrical industry in the United States, Canada, Panama and several Caribbean island nations; particularly electricians, or Inside Wiremen, in the construction industry and linemen and other...
, likewise displaced the UE in some plants.
Fissures within UE that appeared around the 1941 convention (when James Carey had been defeated as UE president by Albert J. Fitzgerald, a GE worker from Lynn, Massachusetts
Lynn, Massachusetts
Lynn is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 89,050 at the 2000 census. An old industrial center, Lynn is home to Lynn Beach and Lynn Heritage State Park and is about north of downtown Boston.-17th century:...
) reopened in the late-40's national political environment of anti-communist hysteria. Up-and-coming Republican politicians, such as Congressman Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
of California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
and Senator Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
of Wisconsin
Wisconsin
Wisconsin is a U.S. state located in the north-central United States and is part of the Midwest. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michigan to the northeast, and Lake Superior to the north. Wisconsin's capital is...
, built their careers by conducting witch-hunts for imagined "Communist subversion" within the federal government, and by red-baiting their election opponents. The CIO itself was a prime target of the Republican red-baiters. CIO leaders such as Philip Murray of the Steelworkers and Walter Reuther
Walter Reuther
Walter Philip Reuther was an American labor union leader, who made the United Automobile Workers a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century...
of the UAW responded to these attacks by purging their own unions of radicals, and by attacking those CIO unions, such as UE, that held out against the red-baiting tide. Investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Committee on Un-American Activities or House Un-American Activities Committee was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security"...
and criticism from groups such as the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, which actively organized dissenters within UE into an opposition faction, put UE leaders on the defensive.
Anti-communist raids by other unions removed some conservative members and locals from UE, thereby weakening the right-wing internal opposition. Nonetheless oppositionists were confident that the national political atmosphere would enable them to seize power in UE at the union's 1949 convention. But the right-wing candidates were soundly defeated. UE's convention delegates instead backed their national officers' demands that the CIO stop the UAW and other CIO unions from raiding UE.
To defend the union from future raids, UE reversed its refusal to sign Taft-Hartley affidavits, enabling the union to again appear on the ballot in NLRB representation elections. When the CIO refused to take action to stop CIO-affiliated unions from raiding other CIO unions, UE boycotted the CIO's national convention in 1949 and withheld its per capita dues payments, effectively resigning its affiliation to the CIO. The CIO responded by announcing the expulsion of UE as well as that of the United Farm Equipment Workers (FE); the following year the CIO expelled nine other progressive unions.
Of the 11 "left" unions that were expelled or resigned from the CIO in 1949-50, only UE and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union
International Longshore and Warehouse Union
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union is a labor union which primarily represents dock workers on the West Coast of the United States, Hawaii and Alaska, and in British Columbia, Canada. It also represents hotel workers in Hawaii, cannery workers in Alaska, warehouse workers throughout...
remain in existence today. All of the others were broken by the relentless attacks of employers, the government and other unions through the period of McCarthyism
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
.
In the case of UE, the CIO went a step further, chartering a rival union, the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IUE), that would attempt to destroy and replace UE. James Carey, the ex-president of UE, was appointed president of the IUE. The IUE wrested away many of the locals in the radio assembly and light manufacturing industries; the UE held on to much of its base in machine building. In the heavy electrical equipment plants, on the other hand, the two factions each had substantial strength. The resulting battles were fierce: in Local 601, which represented Westinghouse workers in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
East Pittsburgh is a borough in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, about southeast of the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny rivers at Pittsburgh. The population in 1900 stood at 2,883, and in 1910, at 5,615. As of the 2010 census, the borough population was 1,822, having fallen from...
and whose members had a tradition of radical politics dating back to Eugene V. Debs
Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor Debs was an American union leader, one of the founding members of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World , and several times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States...
' candidacy for President in 1912, the two factions were led by brothers Mike and Tom Fitzgerald, who attacked each other personally as vigorously as the factions did on political issues. The IUE won a close election, with the semi-skilled workers supporting the IUE while more skilled workers favored the UE.
Employers, the federal government, the news media and other establishment forces played major roles in the efforts to eliminate UE. UE was subjected to an endless barrage of inquisitions by Congressional committees, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Committee on Un-American Activities or House Un-American Activities Committee was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security"...
(HUAC), Sen. Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
's Subcommittee on Investigations, and a similar committee chaired by Sen. John Marshall Butler
John Marshall Butler
John Marshall Butler was a Republican member of the United States Senate, representing the State of Maryland from 1951-1963.-Early life:Butler was born in Baltimore, Maryland and attended Baltimore public schools...
. In several instances, these committees used subpoena power to set up UE members to be fired by their employers, unless the subpoenaed worker cooperated by "naming names," and thereby subjected other workers to the inquisition.
GE fired John Nelson, president of UE's large Local 506 in Erie, Pennsylvania
Erie, Pennsylvania
Erie is a city located in northwestern Pennsylvania in the United States. Named for the lake and the Native American tribe that resided along its southern shore, Erie is the state's fourth-largest city , with a population of 102,000...
, on just such grounds. The stress resulting from his own firing and the unrelenting persecution of his union destroyed Nelson's health; he died in 1959 at the age of 42. McCarthy's "investigations" were sometimes carefully scheduled to help the IUE and the companies against UE. In 1953 he held a hearing in Lynn, Massachusetts
Lynn, Massachusetts
Lynn is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 89,050 at the 2000 census. An old industrial center, Lynn is home to Lynn Beach and Lynn Heritage State Park and is about north of downtown Boston.-17th century:...
on the eve of an NLRB election between UE and IUE at the major GE plant there. His grilling of UE members, in the guise of investigating "Communist subversion," made for sensationalist news headlines and helped the IUE eke out a narrow win.
Several UE shop leaders, as well as UE Secretary-Treasurer Julius Emspak, were put on trial on contempt charges for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. The federal government tried unsuccessfully to take away James Matles's citizenship and deport him; the UE national organizing director had immigrated from Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
as a youth. Other similar prosecutions, harassment by the FBI, vicious attacks in local newspapers, and denunciation by politicians, kept UE under siege for years.
The red-baiting attacks on UE during the McCarthy era did tremendous damage to the union, but were eventually shown, even in the prevailing atmosphere of anti-red hysteria, to have no legal merit. Most of the legal cases against UE leaders were eventually withdrawn or defeated in the courts, and in March 1959 the U.S. Justice Department was forced to drop its prosecution of UE on charges that the union was "Communist-dominated."
It seems a miracle that UE survived the 1950s at all, with attacks coming at it from all directions: the federal administration, Congress, Republicans and Democrats, news media, "mainstream" unions of both CIO and AFL, and even some members of the clergy. What helped UE to weather these storms was its own democratic structure and manner of operation, and its superior record of representing members (when contrasted with the IUE, for example) in collective bargaining and in fighting for shop grievances. Both of these attributes engendered fierce loyalty to UE among many of its members, even as the union was being slandered by powerful forces as some sort of national security threat.
UE loyalists counteracted the IUE by highlighting its relative weakness in standing up to management, and derisively characterized the acronym IUE as standing for "Imitation UE."
While the UE and the IUE won roughly equal number of elections through the first half of the 1950s, the IUE came away with larger numbers of members, particularly in the growing field of consumer electronics. Other unions, including the IBEW, the IAM, the UAW, the United Steel Workers of America, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Sheet Metal Workers International Association, also wedged in during these elections. The IUE, moreover, found itself divided, as the divergent groups that had allied to oppose the UE now found it hard to work with each other once in power.
James Carey's arrogance eventually caught up with him within the IUE as it had in UE. In 1965 he was defeated for the presidency of IUE by one of his own lieutenants, leaving him with the dubious distinction of being the only person in U.S. labor history to be elected, and subsequently thrown out, as national president of two different unions.
During World War II and continuing through the Cold War, UE took a more progressive position on women's rights than other unions, advocating "equal pay for equal work" during the war and, after the war, resisting employers' attempts to drive married women out of industry and to deny seniority and maternity leave to women workers. The 1946 strike at GE was prolonged by the company's insistence on giving a smaller wage increase to its women employees, whom GE president Charles E. Wilson contemptuously dismissed as "bobbysoxers." With all other strike issues resolved, UE held out on the picket lines until GE agreed that women would receive the same raises as men. In the early 1950s, while the union was under attack from all directions, UE organized a series of district and national conferences on the problems of women workers. Local union leaders who opposed UE's policies on gender equality often bolted to the IUE, and took members with them.
UE also stood out in that period for its advocacy of equality for African American workers. In July 1950 UE leaders appointed Ernest Thompson, a black international representative and former rank-and-file factory worker, as secretary of the UE Fair Practices Committee. In essence the union's affirmative action officer, Thompson met with the leadership of UE locals around the country to develop and implement action plans to force employers to hire more black workers, and to give African Americans opportunities to advance into skilled trades jobs. In the midst of the Cold War assaults on UE, the union's newspaper reported such success stories as the promotion of a black worker at Johnson Machine to lathe operator. The company had insisted that this worker was unqualified and refused to train him, so white union members had taught him the job during their lunch breaks.
UE spoke out frequently against the racist government policies of the time, drawing attention to the injustices of "Jim Crow
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
" racial segregation and denial of black voting rights. UE called for reinstating the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee, a wartime agency created by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
to stop discrimination in industry, which was disbanded after the war by President Harry Truman. Here again, UE's progressive position was used against it by its foes; in several instances the IUE openly appealed for the votes of white workers on the basis of racial bigotry and by attacking UE's support for racial equality.
By 1954, UE officers reported that 87 percent of all UE contracts contained no-discrimination clauses, an achievement that placed UE far ahead of other unions.
A second wave of defections in the mid-1950s took several important UE locals, which had survived earlier raiding, into the IUE and other unions. The UE's membership dropped from 200,000 in 1953 to 58,000 in 1960. Some of the losses resulted from companies, including GE and Westinghouse, moving portions of their manufacturing from older plants in the Northeast to new plants in the South and West.
The split of 1955-56 largely involved tactical disagreements over how to move the UE's progressive program and brand of unionism forward in the face of the AFL-CIO merger. It proved a bitter disappointment to UE activists who had managed to bring the union successfully through the hardest years of the McCarthy period and the Cold War but who were now unable to keep the union together. Most locals in the UE's New York-north Jersey district (UE District 4) voted to go into the IUE reasoning that they had the strength and experience to influence the policies of the newer union. While this move was resented by UE activists elsewhere, especially in Pennsylvania and the midwest, the District 4 activists felt that the UE forces could soon have regained control of the re-united organization had the whole union followed their lead. By the mid 1960s, the former UE activists in IUE shops played a role in helping to bring about James Carey's ouster in a disputed election. Carey's departure eventually opened the way for the co-ordinated bargaining which partially healed the two dedade old division in the industry.
UE reshapes itself
The UE and IUE began to cooperate in bargaining after the IUE's disastrous 1960 strike against GE. In the successful 103-day national strike in 1969-70, UE and IUE led an alliance of unions which broke the back of Boulwarism, GE’s aggressive 20-year-long policy of “take-it-or-leave-it” bargaining. Boulwarism was named for Lemuel BoulwareLemuel Boulware
Lemuel Ricketts Boulware was General Electric’s vice president of labor and community relations from 1956 until 1961...
, the company’s vice president of labor and community relations, who devised the strategy in reaction to UE's success in the 1946 strike, and to capitalize on the bitter divisions, after 1949, in the ranks of GE union members. The 1970s brought UE renewed growth through successful organizing. UE lost many members in the 1980s and 1990s as the flight of many manufacturing plants abroad led to plant closings by both major employers in the electrical manufacturing industry, as well as by smaller UE employers.
Despite shrinkage of GE's U.S. manufacturing employment, UE remains a major force within General Electric today and plays a leading role in negotiating contracts that cover members of 13 unions in GE through the Coordinated Bargaining Committee. UE’s role in the union coalition resulted in union gains in 2007 national negotiations with GE.
The UE has broadened its scope in recent years, organizing public employees, service industry workers, school and college employees, and others. The UE has also replaced some other unions in workplaces where the existing unions has failed to adequately represent the membership.
The UE has entered into a Strategic Organizing Alliance with the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT), Mexico's Authentic Labor Front, in which the UE and FAT collaborate in organizing and educational projects. UE's organizing alliance with the FAT started in 1992 and grew from the two organizations' shared opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement
North American Free Trade Agreement
The North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA is an agreement signed by the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, creating a trilateral trade bloc in North America. The agreement came into force on January 1, 1994. It superseded the Canada – United States Free Trade Agreement...
(NAFTA). The UE has also formed alliances with non-labor groups, both in the U.S. and internationally, through the World Social Forum
World Social Forum
The World Social Forum is an annual meeting of civil society organizations, first held in Brazil, which offers a self-conscious effort to develop an alternative future through the championing of counter-hegemonic globalization...
, to fight the effects of corporate globalization
Globalization
Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...
promoted by institutions of global capital such as the International Monetary Fund
International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...
and free trade agreements modeled on the North American Free Trade Agreement
North American Free Trade Agreement
The North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA is an agreement signed by the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, creating a trilateral trade bloc in North America. The agreement came into force on January 1, 1994. It superseded the Canada – United States Free Trade Agreement...
(NAFTA).
Beginning in the mid-1990s, UE has been organizing state and municipal workers in North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
, chartering their statewide organization as UE Local 150. A North Carolina state law dating to the Jim Crow
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
era of racial segregation, General Statute 95-98, prohibits public employees from bargaining labor contracts. UE is campaigning to repeal that act and replace it with legislation to facilitate public sector bargaining.
As part of that campaign, UE in December 2005 brought a complaint before the International Labor Organization, the UN’s labor agency, charging that the North Carolina bargaining ban violates international agreements on labor rights, which uphold the right of nearly all workers to form unions and bargain collectively. In March 2007 the ILO ruled in favor of UE, and called upon the United States and North Carolina to repeal GS 95-98 and begin discussions with unions to establish “a framework for collective bargaining.” UE’s Mexican ally the FAT, with the support of 52 other U.S., Mexican, Canadian and global labor organizations, filed a complaint in October 2006 with the Mexican National Administrative Office – a body established to address complaints of labor rights violations under NAFTA. The complaint charges that the North Carolina bargaining ban violates the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), the labor-rights side agreement to NAFTA. In November 2007 the Mexican NAO launched an investigation into those charges.
The plight of North Carolina public employees was dramatized in September 2006 when sanitation workers for the City of Raleigh conducted a two-day strike over unfair treatment and working conditions. Since the stoppage those workers, organized by UE Local 150, have won improvements and regular consultation of city officials with their elected union leaders. UE has expanded its public sector organizing to two other states in the Upper South that also lack public employee bargaining rights, establishing UE Local 160 in Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
and UE Local 170 in West Virginia
West Virginia
West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian and Southeastern regions of the United States, bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the northeast and Maryland to the east...
.
UE has also become known throughout the U.S. labor movement as the "National Home for Independent Unions", and works with many independent unions across the country. Over the past 20 years a number of existing independent unions have affiliated with UE, seeking the resources, support and solidarity of a national union and attracted by UE's democratic structure and practices.
One such victory came in July 2005 when the 2,500 member Connecticut Independent Labor and Police Unions (CILU/CIPU) voted by an overwhelming margin to become UE Local 222. Since joining UE, Local 222's work has focused on bringing democracy, justice and equality to the workplace, and on organizing and mobilizing its members and local communities in fights for gender pay equity, ending all forms of discrimination, and health care for all. The local has also added members by organizing additional groups of school and municipal workers in Connecticut.
The Republic Plant Occupation of 2008
On December 5, 2008, members of UE Local 1110 at Republic Windows and DoorsRepublic Windows and Doors
Republic Windows and Doors was a Chicago, Illinois-based producer of vinyl replacement windows. The company was founded in 1965 by William Spielman. The company was declared bankrupt on December 2, 2008...
in Chicago, when the plant closed with only three days notice to the employees, occupied the plant in protest of the closing and company's failure to pay employees their accrued vacation pay, and payments required under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act
Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 is a United States labor law which protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring most employers with 100 or more employees to provide sixty- calendar-day advance notification of plant closings and mass layoffs of...
. The WARN Act requires 60 days notice of a plant closing, or 60 days pay if timely notice is not given. The workers' action drew extensive media coverage and attracted wide support, including from U.S. President-elect Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
, and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich
Rod Blagojevich
Rod R. Blagojevich is an American politician who served as the 40th Governor of Illinois from 2003 to 2009. A Democrat, Blagojevich was a State Representative before being elected to the United States House of Representatives representing parts of Chicago...
banned state business with Bank of America
Bank of America
Bank of America Corporation, an American multinational banking and financial services corporation, is the second largest bank holding company in the United States by assets, and the fourth largest bank in the U.S. by market capitalization. The bank is headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina...
, because the bank's cancellation of the company's line of credit had prompted the shutdown. Protest demonstrations at Bank of America branches took place in dozens of U.S. cities during the sit-in. On December 10 the union members voted to end the occupation after Republic, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and the union negotiated a settlement that paid each worker eight weeks wages, plus all accumulated vacation pay, and health insurance for two months.
Two months later a California window manufacturer, Serious Materials, purchased the former Republic plant and reopened it, reinstating the union workers to their jobs in order of seniority and signing a labor contract with UE Local 1110 that was substantially the same as the union's former contract with Republic.
In April 2009 Vice President Joe Biden visited the plant and met with company officials and union leaders, praising the reopening of the plant as "a big deal."
See also
- Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1919-1937)Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1919-1937)The Communist Party and its allies played an important role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but never succeeded, with rare exceptions, either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda or in converting their influence in any particular union into...
- Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1937-1950)Communists in the U.S. Labor Movement (1937-1950)The Communist Party and its allies played an important role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but never succeeded, with rare exceptions, either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda or in converting their influence in any particular union into...
- Industrial Workers of the WorldIndustrial Workers of the WorldThe Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...
(Wobblies)
External sources
- UE's official website
- UE News Online headline updates from UE's newspaper
- UE's International Solidarity site
- UE local websites
- http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/documentinglabor/challengeGE.htmUE's struggles with the IUE in GE's Schenectady, New YorkSchenectady, New YorkSchenectady is a city in Schenectady County, New York, United States, of which it is the county seat. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 66,135...
plant] - UE Archives at the University of Pittsburgh
- Historic UE photo collection from the UE Archives at the University of Pittsburgh
- Drawing on the American Labor Movement Labor history cartoons by UE staff cartoonist Fred Wright
- Recollections of the late Nat Spero, former UE Research Director
- Radical Unionism in the Midwest On the history of UE District 8, based in St. Louis
Further reading
Books- Feurer, Rosemary, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950, University of Illinois Press, 2006, cloth, ISBN 0-252-03087-1; paper ISBN 0-252-07319-9
- Filippelli, Ronald L., and McColloch, Mark D., Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United Electrical Workers, State University of New York Press, 1995, hardcover, ISBN 0-7914-2181-3; paperback ISBN 0-7914-2182-1
- Matles, James J. and Higgins, James, Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank-and-File Union, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974, hardcover, ISBN 0-13-913079-9; paperback reprint ISBN 0-13-913053-5
- Rosswurm, Steve (ed.), The CIO's Left-Led Unions, Rutgers University Press, 1992, hardcover ISBN 0-8135-1769-9; paperback ISBN 0-8135-1770-2
- Schatz, Ronald W., The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923-60, University of Illinois Press, 1983, hardcover, ISBN 0-252-01031-0; paperback reprint ISBN 0-252-01438-3
- Sears, John Bennett, Generation of Resistance: The Electrical Unions and the Cold War, Infinity Publishing, 2008, paperback, ISBN 0-7414-4868-8
- Stepan-Norris, Judith, and Zeitlin, Maurice, Left Out: Reds and America's Industrial Unions, Cambridge University Press, 2003, hardcover ISBN 0-521-70212-6; paperback ISBN 0-521-79840-x
Articles
- Kannenberg, Lisa, "The Impact of the Cold War on Women's Trade Union Activism: The UE Experience," Labor History 34 (Spring-Summer 1993): 309-323
Union Publications
- Fitzgerald, Albert J., James J. Matles, Et Al. Organized Labor And The Black Worker. NY: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE), 1967. 29 pages. Stapled paperback. Photos.
- Tormey, Stephen, Seventy Years of Struggle: A Brief History of UE Bargaining with GE, Pittsburgh: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), 2007. 16 pages. Photos.
- United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), Building Activism and Involvement in UE Local Unions: How UE local officers can build stronger UE local unions, Pittsburgh: 1990. 13 pages. Illustrated.
- United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), Constitution and By-Laws, Pittsburgh: as amended 2007. 65 pages.
- United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), Solidarity and Democracy: A Leadership Guide to UE History, Pittsburgh: 1996. 92 pages. Photos, illustrated.
- United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), UE Aims and Structure: How Rank-and-File Unionism Works, Pittsburgh: Undated. 18 pages. Illustrated.
- United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), UE Independent Political Action: A UE Political Action Primer, Pittsburgh: Undated. 13 pages. Illustrated.
- United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), UE Steward Handbook: A Complete Reference Manual for Stewards, Pittsburgh: Undated. 98 pages. Illustrated.