United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America

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UE
Image:UE logo.png
United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America
Founded 1936
Members 35,000
Country United States
Affiliation Independent, ICEM
Office location Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Website www.ranknfile-ue.org

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) is a United States labor union which was one of the first unions to affiliate with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1936 and grew to more than 400,000 members in the 1940s. Expelled from the CIO in 1950, it was nearly destroyed by raids from the International Union of Electrical Workers, which the CIO sponsored as a rival under the leadership of James Carey, a former president of the UE, and from unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. Now representing only 35,000 workers in a variety of industries, it continues actively organizing and has formed a strategic alliance with the Authentic Labor Front, an independent Mexican union. Today UE is regarded as one of the most democratic and politically progressive national unions in the United States. Their slogan is "The Members Run This Union!"

Contents

[edit] Origins of the union

The UE was formed in 1936 by the merger of a number of autonomous local unions and shop caucuses that had sprung up in the electrical manufacturing and radio assembly industry. Among them they represented approximately 15,000 workers out of 300,000 in the industry as a whole.

These disparate unions came out of different settings. The radio workers, led by the first President of the UE, James Carey, were employees of a young industry, with young leaders, who had won union recognition at employers such as Philco in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and King-Colonial in Buffalo, New York through dramatic strikes. The membership of the radio and other light manufacturing locals was also younger, more heavily female and subject to more turnover than the locals that represented employees of heavy manufacturing plants. Many of these radio workers locals had been given federal union charters by the AFL, which allowed them to affiliate directly with the AFL, but gave them no assurance that they would be able to preserve their autonomy.

The heavy electrical manufacturing locals came out of General Electric Co. and Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and carried more baggage with them. Westinghouse had defeated an organizing campaign in 1916, while GE had, after defeating a strike in 1918, instituted a complex set of social welfare measures designed to win workers'loyalty, while preventing them from seeking higher wages through union representation. Both GE and Westinghouse established company unions or representation plans at most of their plants to monitor and contain employees' demands.

The Great Depression made these social welfare systems unworkable, as plummeting demand for electrical products led the companies to reduce many employees to working only a few days or less a week. The company unions, on the other hand, remained an effective way to avoid unionization, since the company could win over workers by delivering wage raises through the company union, while ignoring the independent unions. After battling the company unions unsuccessfully at many plants UE decided instead to try to win elections to office within the company unions in order to swing them to the UE.

There was another current that played a significant role in the formation of the UE: left wing activists, drawn from the Communist Party in some factories, the Socialist Party elsewhere, and the Industrial Workers of the World in others. Many of these activists were skilled employees who had lost their relatively privileged positions, either as a result of layoffs or by being transferred to unskilled work.

The UE's first secretary-treasurer, Julius Emspak, was a skilled tool and die maker who grew up in a family of GE employees with strong Socialist convictions and who later became closely tied to the Communist Party, he dropped out of school to go to work for GE, then left work to go to school on a GE scholarship to study law, then philosophy. When he returned to the plant, he became leader of the fledgling local there. James Matles, the UE's first director of organization, followed a different path: after seeking to organize a separate union of machine workers, the Metal Workers Industrial Union, as part of the Trade Union Unity League during the Communist Party's Third Period, he took his members into the International Association of Machinists in 1935, then pulled them out to join the UE in 1937.

[edit] Growth and schism

The CIO granted the UE a charter shortly after its formation. The UE expanded greatly in the next decade, winning a contentious strike at RCA Corporation and expanding throughout Westinghouse and GM. By the end of World War II, UE was the third largest CIO union, with a membership of 500,000.

While the union was growing, international politics became significant for the union's internal politics. During the Popular Front era of the last half of the 1930s, Socialists and Communists in the UE's leadership put aside many of their differences to work on the common goal of organizing, winning union recognition and negotiating collective bargaining agreements. That unity began to fray later in the decade, particularly at the level of national leadership. The Communist Party's change in position after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when it began to attack Roosevelt, isolated it within the CIO and caused Carey, who had worked closely with Communist UE officials in the past, to distance himself from them over their opposition to a third term for Roosevelt.

Those differences were papered over, but not resolved, when the Soviet Union joined the war against Nazi Germany.The CP-affiliated leadership of the UE joined with other unions in the CIO in urging a no-strike pledge and higher productivity for the duration of the war. The UE also pushed for expanded use of piecework systems in the electrical 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.

In other ways, however, the UE and other CP-led unions within the CIO went much further than other unions in subordinating their members' short-term interests to the need for defense production. The UE, along with Harry Bridges of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union even supported a proposal by Roosevelt in 1944 to militarize some civilian workplaces, but retreated when the rest of the CIO executive board reacted furiously against it. On the other hand, UE took a more progressive position on women's rights than many other unions with large numbers of women in its membership, advocating "equal pay for equal work," and, after the war, resisting employers' attempts to drive married women out of the industry and to deny seniority and maternity leave to women workers.

Those fissures within the UE reopened after the end of World War II and in the first few months of the Cold war, when the political climate for labor also became chilly. Republican victories in the elections of 1946 had brought a much more conservative Congress to Washington, with the determination to curb labor. The employers with whom the UE dealt, who had been relatively liberal in the past, now saw the UE as a force to be reckoned with; the union's success in shutting down all of GE's and Westinghouse's plants in 1946 and workers' success in turning incentive pay programs to their own advantage by manipulating production convinced management that it needed to take a tougher line with the union.

At the same time, the issue of Communist influence in the labor movement became even more salient, with the UE being one of the unions most frequently attacked for being Communist-led. Investigations by the House Unamerican Activities Committee and criticism from groups such as the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists put leftist leaders on the defensive, while encouraging internal opposition to the leadership.

The left leadership continued securely in power, winning reelection over the right wing candidates put forward at its 1946 convention, but found itself increasingly estranged from the leadership of the CIO, which had passed funds to right-wing opposition forces within the union through Father Charles Owen Rice, the head of the ACTU. After passage of the Taft Hartley Act in 1947, the CIO did nothing to discourage the United Auto Workers from raiding UE shops in the arms and typewriter industries in the Connecticut River valley; other unions outside the CIO, such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, likewise displaced the UE in some plants, aided by the fact that the union could not appear on the ballot in any election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board since it had refused to sign the non-communist affidavits required by the Taft-Hartley Act.

While those raids generally weakened the right opposition's base of support within the UE, the opposition appeared to be gaining strength by the union's 1949 convention. The UE leadership therefore demanded that the CIO take action to stop the UAW and other CIO unions from raiding it, then reversed its position on signing non-communist affidavits to permit the UE to fight NLRB decertification elections. When the CIO failed to give it those assurances, the UE boycotted the CIO's national convention in 1949; the CIO responded the following year by ejecting the UE and nine other unions.

The CIO went one step farther in the case of the UE, chartering a rival union, the International Union of Electrical Workers. The IUE wrested away many of the locals in the radio assembly and light manufacturing industry; the UE held on to much of its base in machine-building. In the heavy manufacturing 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.

While the UE and the IUE won roughly equal number of elections in this period, the IUE came away with larger numbers of members, particularly in the growing field of consumer electronics. Other unions, including the IBEW, the IAW, 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, which continued until 1954. 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.

The UE, however, was even more fractured. While the need to repel assaults from all quarters led to a sort of grim solidarity in the early 1950s, later in the decade important locals that had remained within the UE defected to the IUE. The UE's membership dropped from 200,000 in 1953 to 58,000 in 1960. The UE's weakened state made it difficult to resist GE's and Westinghouse's demands, particularly as older plants in the Northeast closed, replaced by new plants in the South and West.

[edit] Reshaping itself

The UE and IUE learned to cooperate in bargaining after the IUE's disastrous 1960 strike against GE. The UE lost many of its members in the industry, however, 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, reducing the UE to its historic base in the machine-building industry.

The UE has since broadened its scope, organizing service industry workers, school and college employees, and others. The UE has also replaced AFL-CIO unions in workplaces where the existing union has failed to satisfy the membership.

The UE has also 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. The UE has also attempted to form strong alliances with non-labor groups, both at home and internationally through the World Social Forum, to fight the effects of globalization represented by organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement.

UE is becoming even better known as the "National Home for Independent Unions", and works closely with independent union across the country. The most recent victory for UE came on July 20th, 2005 when the 2300 member Connecticut Independent Labor and Police Unions (CILU/CIPU) voted by an overwhelming 936 to 121 margin to become UE Local 222. [1]

[edit] And see

[edit] External sources

[edit] Further reading

Books

  • 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
  • Schatz, Ronald W. , 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

Union Publications

  • Fitzgerald, Albert J., James J. Matles, Et Al. Organized Labor And The Black Worker. NY: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (1967). 29 pages. Stapled paperback. Photos.
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