The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) is a labor union representing workers in both the private and public sectors across the United States.
Several authors regard UE as one of the more democratic and politically progressive national unions in the United States.Yates, Michael, Why Unions Matter, Monthly Review Press, 2009, Nichols, John "Most Valuable Progressives of 2008", The Nation UE emphasizes its principles of democratic unionism with its longstanding slogan, "The members run this union."
As of 2019, UE membership was reported at 35,000. UE organizes private and public sector workers. Its practices attracted several small independent unions to affiliate. Since 1992, the union has built an alliance with the Authentic Labor Front, an independent Mexican union, and UE is active in international labor outreach.Hathaway, Dale, Allies Across the Border: Mexico's "Authentic Labor Front" and Global Solidarity, South End Press, 2000,
History Early history UE was one of the first unions to be chartered by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and grew to over 600,000 members in the 1940s. UE was founded in March 1936 by several independent industrial unions which had been organized in the earlier part of the 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, during the early stages of which a former official of the Polish Communist Party referred to the UE as one of the basic sources of anti-American propaganda for the Soviet bloc.Scope of Soviet Activity in the U.S., p. 1585. 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 rivals for many years, but in the 1960s began to cooperate in bargaining with General Electric and other employers.
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. Lewis of the United Mine Workers (UMW) and Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA). Over the next few years a 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 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 over 600,000.
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).Matles, James J. and Higgins, James, Them and Us: Struggles of a Rank-and-File Union, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974, hardcover, ; paperback reprint , chapter 12 Foes of UE in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s charged the union with "communist domination"; later studiesStepan-Norris, Judith, and Zeitlin, Maurice, Left Out: Reds and America's Industrial Unions, Cambridge University Press, 2003, hardcover ; paperback demonstrated that UE was one of the most democratic US labor unionsYates, pp. 77-81 and that its policies differed markedly from those of the US Communist Party on a number of major issues.
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.
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 strategies to win WLB approval of pay increases for many of their members. 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 & Wilcox plant in New Jersey, resulting in UE claiming over 200 locals at the peak of war production in 1944.
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 would provide the opportunity, and in October 1946 GE's Charles Wilson 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 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 followed through.
Some union leaders, including Walter Reuther of the UAW, signed the Taft-Hartley affidavits and then proceeded to raid locals of UE and the Farm Equipment Workers (FE), whose leaders were still holding out and refusing to sign. This meant that UAW would appear on the NLRB ballot, but the incumbent 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-1940s anti-communist political environment. Up-and-coming Republican politicians, such as Congressman Richard Nixon of California and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (who, according to Journalist Arnold Beichman, "was elected to his first term in the Senate with support from" UE, which preferred McCarthy to the anti-communist Robert M. La Follette), built their careers by targeting "Communist subversion" within the federal government and by red-baiting their election opponents such as the CIO. 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 communists and by attacking CIO unions such as UE that were viewed as communist dominated. 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 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 unions believed to be communist dominated.
Of the 11 "left wing" unions that were expelled or resigned from the CIO in 1949–50, only UE and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union remain in existence as of 2020. All of the others were broken by targeting from employers, the government and other unions through the period of McCarthyism.
The CIO chartered a rival union, the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IUE), that would attempt to destroy and replace UE. James Carey, the founding president of UE, was appointed president of the IUE. The IUE won 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, both had substantial strength. 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 Fitzpatrick, 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.