In the 1930s, as rank-and-file workers in the electrical manufacturing industry were establishing UE in workplaces like the giant General Electric plant in Erie, PA (Local 506) and Sargent Lock in New Haven, CT (Local 243), a union with a similar “Them and Us” philosophy of unionism was building militant, interracial unions in iron ore mines in an area known as “Red Mountain” near Birmingham, Alabama. Although those local unions fell victim to the same forces of red-baiting that attempted to destroy UE in the 1940s, for a decade they created a culture of aggressive struggle and unity among Black (and many white) miners, a culture whose legacy informed the civil rights movement decades later.

That union, the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers — commonly known as “Mine Mill” — already had a storied history before it arrived in Alabama. Founded in 1893 as the Western Federation of Miners, it had won the eight-hour day as early as 1894 for union miners in Cripple Creek, Colorado. It helped found the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, although later left and joined the American Federation of Labor.

Alabama iron miners had invited Mine Mill organizers to help them organize in 1918, but the organizers were violently driven out of town by company thugs before they were able to build stable organizations. Those company thugs, according to historian Brian Kelly, became “the basis of the Jefferson County Ku Klux Klan … the Klan has its origins, really, in the attempt by the employers to break up the union.”

In the 1930s, as workers in industries across the country were rising up and establishing the new industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Mine Mill — one of the CIO’s founding unions — returned to Alabama. Although strikes in 1934 and 1936 were unsuccessful, in 1938 the newly-established National Labor Relations Board ordered the company to rehire 160 Mine Mill members who were fired during the strikes and provide back pay. Shortly thereafter the union won recognition from the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCI), a subsidiary of the giant U.S. Steel corporation.

Mine Mill, like UE, practiced aggressive struggle and had a strong commitment to uniting all workers across racial barriers. Its locals in Alabama had a provision in their charters ensuring that the locals’ top offices would be evenly split between Black and white workers. Also like UE, it was accused of being “Communist-dominated” which, in the context of the South, carried connotations not only of foreign domination but of seeking to promote social equality between Black and white workers.

While Mine Mill received its most enthusiastic support from Black workers, significant numbers of white workers also supported the union. Historian Horace Huntley, whose father and grandfather were Mine Mill members, told an NPR interviewer in 2018 about a white Mine Mill activist named Phil Tindle:

He lived in the iron ore mining camp. He and other white miners … they were different kinds of people, you know. They didn’t hold one to a position based upon their color. And that was unusual for Alabamians in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s and, to some degree, even today.

Up against the Company, the CIO and the Klan

Mine Mill not only limited the companies’ ability to exploit their workers, its example of interracial unionism also threatened the social structure of the Jim Crow South, which kept power in the hands of a small number of wealthy white people and impoverished workers of all races. As happened in many UE workplaces after World War II, the companies, the local elite, and the CIO conspired to replace Mine Mill with a more compliant union — in this case, the Steelworkers.

The company explicitly used race as a tool in its attempts to destroy the union. Before Mine Mill was recognized, the workers at TCI were approximately 80 percent Black — TCI hired Black workers because they could pay them less. But once the union came in, TCI mostly hired white workers, assuming that they would be less likely to support Mine Mill. According to an oral history interview with Mine Mill member Elsie Culpepper, “It was so designed that there were never too many whites that worked in the mines. They hired all those white men, and they killed Mine Mill.”

Mine Mill, which was still at this point a member of the CIO, appealed to the labor federation to intervene to prevent the Steelworkers’ raid, but to no avail. (UE withdrew from the CIO in 1949 in part because of its failure to prevent other CIO unions from raiding UE shops.) In fact, CIO representative Van Jones met with white Mine Mill members and promised them that if they joined the Steelworkers they would have all-white locals.

An NLRB election to replace Mine Mill was scheduled on April 21, 1949, but Mine Mill wasn’t just facing off against the company and the Steelworkers — the Ku Klux Klan also joined the fray. Although firmly under the control of local elites, the Klan was successful in recruiting a significant number of white workers, who sadly chose to align with their bosses on the basis of shared racial identity instead of standing in solidarity with their Black co-workers. The night before the representation election, a hundred Klansmen in white robes and hoods rode by the Mine Mill office with burning torches. Mine Mill’s national Secretary-Treasurer Maurice Travis travelled to Alabama to speak in a radio debate with the Steelworkers, but after showing up at the radio station was beaten so severely by Steelworker supporters that it left him blind in one eye.

On the day of the vote, according to Mine Mill Education Director Graham Dolan:

Repeated reports of intimidation were phoned into our office during the day. Every automobile carrying white workers was stopped and its occupants told by roving gangs of Steel hoodlums that if they did not vote for Steel they would be killed or beaten up. The Steel hoodlums told the workers that they would know how they voted, that they had an arrangement with the Company for so knowing.

The race-baiting, red-baiting and violent intimidation proved too much, and Mine Mill lost the representation election at TCI to the Steelworkers.

“The Union meant a coming of freedom”

Huntley, the historian, conducted oral history interviews with many former Mine Mill members in the 1970s. He sums up what the union meant to Black workers:

To black workers, Mine Mill was much more than just another labor organization. Many miners related to this writer that prior to Mine Mill on Red Mountain, blacks lived in the “shadow of slavery.” For them the Union meant a coming of freedom, justice and equality. That labor organization became a way of life, and one that those workers cherished. With the loss of the election, that way of life was dealt a near fatal blow.

Nonetheless, Mine Mill’s legacy lived on in the Birmingham area, especially in the Bessemer Voters’ League (BVL), which historian Max Krochmal calls “the most durable institution” of the civil rights movement in Bessemer, the industrial suburb of Birmingham that encompassed much of the iron ore mining areas. Asbury Howard, Sr., a TCI miner who became a Mine Mill official, led both the BVL and the local NAACP until the latter was banned by the state in 1956. According to Krochmal, Howard “and untold others served as the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement.” Mine Mill veterans and other Black workers

led the battle for access to skilled jobs, joined the ACMHR [the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, an organization founded in 1956 after the NAACP was banned], formed the unit of “ushers” who protected the movement against violent attack, conducted direct action demonstrations in cafeterias and on buses, and registered voters.

Although it was defeated by the Steelworkers at TCI, Mine Mill survived into the 1960s as an independent union (in 1950 it was formally expelled from the CIO for “Communist domination”). A militant strike waged by mostly Chicano Mine Mill members in Grant County, New Mexico in 1951 was the subject of the legendary labor film Salt of the Earth. Most of Mine Mill merged into the Steelworkers in 1967, but its largest local — in Sudbury, Ontario — remained independent until 1993, when it became a local of the Canadian Autoworkers, who later helped found UE’s Canadian sister union Unifor.

The iron ore mines in Alabama all closed by the 1970s, but the city of Bessemer was thrust from obscurity into the national spotlight in early 2021 when workers at the giant Amazon warehouse there became the first workers at an Amazon facility in the U.S. to try to organize their shop through the NLRB process, an effort that some commentators connected to the history of Mine Mill in the area.

The history of Mine Mill in Alabama is a cautionary tale about how organizations like the Klan — and today’s so-called “alt-right” — can lure workers into choosing their racial identity over class solidarity, with disastrous consequences for militant unionism. But it also demonstrates that building militant unions that unite workers across racial lines is possible even under the most difficult circumstances.

The post “Them and Us” Unionism in the Deep South first appeared on Labor Today.

The strike came after failed strikes and labor organization failures, such as the Japanese Strikes in 1909 and 1920 and the failed labor struggles of the Filipino workers in 1920, 1924, and 1937. These failures shared a common denominator: they were all organized on ethnic lines.

For decades, Hawaiian plantation owners exploited ethnic differences between workers to prevent any efforts at successful organization. The bosses created a stratified wage system by race, segregated the worker housing, and most egregiously tried to divide the workers by ethnicity by hiring scab workers of other ethnicities that were not part of the strike.

Throughout the strike, the workers, regardless of race or nationality, maintained unity on democratic lines and everyone played a role in the mutual aid process to procure vital supplies for the duration of the strike. After 79 days of unified struggle, the workers, organized by ILWU, secured their demands of better housing, better pay, shorter work weeks, pensions, and more.

The 1946 Sugar Strike not only was a successful strike for the workers, but it also changed the Hawaiian islands forever, from a quasi-feudal society run by the “Big Five” monopolies to a democratic society. This strike showed that the primarily Asian workers are stronger when they put aside ethnic differences and unite for shared interests. This lesson should serve as an example to workers of all races, ethnicities, genders, religions, etc. that the only way to strike a blow at corporate oppression is through unity.

Originally Published by the American Asian Friendship Congress.

The post The 1946 Sugar Strike: A Lesson on the Strength in Unity of Asian Workers first appeared on Labor Today.

The Plumb Plan was quite simple, it proposed a tripartite working cooperation between the government, the operating officers, and the numerous trades (“classified employees” per the Plumb Plan) where a Board of Directors would be made up of 15 individuals with each sector being allowed five representatives. This would allow “true democracy since it gives the men engaged in the industry a voice in its management”.

“Under the Plumb plan, the railroads would be owned cooperatively, and the federal government would sell bonds, using them to purchase the railroads. All railroads would be merged into a public corporation.”

• Public Rail Now on the Plumb Plan

As for the surplus, once all expenses have been paid it would be distributed between the government and the workers (managerial and trades included in this distribution). This dividend system was devised as a way to prevent collusion between directors and gives an incentive for all those working the railroad. As for what the government does with its share of surplus, per the Plumb Plan, “It invests it in improvements and extensions, thus adding to the value of the railroads without adding to the fixed charges. It retires the outstanding bonds, thus reducing the fixed charges. Ultimately the public has its railroad service at cost.”

Fast forward to 2024 and the railroads are severely mismanaged with worker fatalities skyrocketing in recent years due to understaffing, unpredictable hours, and deplorable working conditions caused by so-called Precision Scheduled Railroading. With the work of Railroad Workers United and Public Rail Now, the discussion of nationalizing the railroad industry has entered public discourse once again.

The post The Plumb Plan: A Call for Democratically Run, Publicly Owned Railroads first appeared on Labor Today.

Seventy-five years ago, what was perhaps the most dramatic national convention in UE history opened in Cleveland.

In the months leading up to the convention, the corporate and government forces that sought to wipe out UE’s brand of militant, rank-and-file unionism were gathering steam. The UAW and the Steelworkers had been taking advantage of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, to raid UE shops. And within the union, a faction that wanted to abandon UE’s principles of aggressive struggle, rank-and-file control, political independence, international solidarity, and uniting all workers was preparing to try to gain control at the upcoming convention by accusing the union of being “communist-dominated.”

That faction was led by UE’s first president, James Carey, who had been defeated by Albert Fitzgerald at the 1941 convention. Carey had help from some powerful friends, most notably the Catholic priest Charles Owen Rice and the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of the U.S. Congress. Rice coached faction members on how to most effectively use red-baiting to win control of locals or get elected as delegates; meanwhile, HUAC summoned UE leaders to hearings to tar them as “reds” in the public eye. HUAC went so far as to summon leaders of Local 601 at the huge Westinghouse plant in East Pittsburgh — the largest UE shop in the country — to a hearing in D.C. just two days before the local’s election of delegates for the convention. U.S. immigration authorities also got in on the act, preventing virtually every delegate from UE District 5 in Canada from attending the convention — except those from the one Canadian local whose delegates supported the Carey faction.

The convention itself, as the UE NEWS reported, “was marked by more flagrant examples of outside interference, and by greater displays of disruption, filibustering and efforts to create disorderly situations … than any previous Convention of UE.” Father Rice himself attended, “sitting in the balcony with spy-glasses, dispatching messengers to his lieutenants on the floor,” and at one point encouraging a Carey delegate to engage in violent assault, calling out “punch him, punch him” from the balcony.

Father Rice also visited individual delegates in their hotel rooms, attempting to persuade them to vote against the union’s leadership. Delegate Jack Terry, of Local 332 in Fort Edward, New York, said, “Father Rice told me being a Catholic I should know it was my duty to vote for Kelley [the Carey-backed candidate running for president against Fitzgerald]. … That was an attempt to use the church to dictate how I should vote. I do not believe in the interference of the church in the union.”

Nonetheless, UE principles prevailed. Even a cursory reading of the convention proceedings make it clear that the Carey faction was given full liberty to speak on the convention floor and make their case — and were not met with the same kind of heckling and interruptions that they subjected their opponents to. Despite all of the outside interference, President Fitzgerald, Secretary-Treasurer Julius Emspak, and Director of Organization James Matles were all re-elected by roll-call votes of over 2,300 to around 1,500 for the Carey-backed candidates, and other resolutions and constitutional amendments opposed by the Carey faction passed by a similar margin.

In interviews with the UE NEWS, many first-time delegates were shocked at the behavior of the Carey faction. Samuel B. Meli, of Local 139 in Riverside, New Jersey, said, “Heretofore I was under the impression that the union in general fought for wages, hours and conditions. All these people seem to be doing is agitate about Communism.” Mary Helen Jones, from Local 1412 in Oakland, California, summed up her support for the UE leadership: “It’s not a question of left or right — it’s who wants to fight for my wages and rights.”

Even before the convention was over, the Carey faction issued a written statement to the press calling for the CIO to charter a rival union in the electrical industry, and appointed ten members to meet with the CIO to carry out this plan. In November, the CIO convention would do just that, chartering the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE), a union with no members and no contracts but an appointed president (Carey) and a large treasury donated by the CIO. The IUE, aided by the companies, the press, Father Rice, and the U.S. government, would go on to do its best to destroy UE.

On the concluding day of the convention, Friday September 23, Secretary-Treasurer Emspak delivered an address to the delegates denouncing the efforts of employers, the government and the press to “create a labor movement in this country controlled by the government and dominated by the companies.” He declared that, “if we are going to have a union, and we are, we are going to have a union that is going to be based on rank-and-file democratic principles. We are going to have a union that is not going to be dedicated to the services of a political machine in Washington, or anywhere else. We are going to have a union that is dedicated to the service of the interests of the membership and nobody else.” The UE NEWS, “at the express request of many delegates,” printed the speech in full in the October 3 issue covering the convention; similarly, we are reproducing it in full below.

While UE lost the majority of our membership during the “dirty decade” that followed to raids by IUE and other unions, UE continues to exist, and grow, seventy-five years later, with our principles intact. As Emspak foretold, we continue to have a union based on rank-and-file democratic principles, a union not dedicated to the services of a political machine but to the interests of the membership, a union that continues to uphold UE policies of aggressive struggle, rank-and-file control, political independence, international solidarity, and uniting all workers.

Remarks of UE General Secretary-Treasurer Julius Emspak to the 14^th UE Convention

SEPTEMBER 23, 1949—Many things have been said on this floor this afternoon but one thing that has been said is the real truth, whether it came from those who are supporting the statement of the executive board or those who are opposed, and that is: That the issues raised in this statement presented to the convention, the issues raised by the actions taken by this convention will be decided by the membership.

Those issues will be decided on the basis of whether this union is going to continue to make the great contributions that it has, not only to the workers in our electrical industry, but to the entire people of the United States.

the issues that are going to be decided are whether company union elements, aided by the employers, aided by reactionary elements in government, aided by the reactionary press are going to be able to create a labor movement in this country controlled by the government and dominated by the companies. That is the issue.

We say in that statement, very specifically, what our estimate is of the disrupters who mask themselves as rank and file committees and members for democratic action and all the cliches that any demagogue can find! We say in that statement, very clearly, what their objective is, and we stand on it. We’ll stand on it with the members. And do you know why we will be able to stand on it? Because the yardstick by which we measure the achievements of this union is not whether Charlie Wilson of General Electric likes us; it is not whether Thomas or Rankin or Wood (members of the House Un-American Activities Committee -Ed.) approve of us and call us “respectable.” No, our yardstick of whether this union is serving its members is whether the members are getting jobs, whether their wages are improving, whether their working conditions are improving, whether the basic conditions in this industry are being advanced; and they are.

It is very easy, the easiest thing in the world, to achieve the kind of respectability that this gang of disrupters is talking about. All you have to do is crawl on your belly to the boss. That is all.

All you have to do to achieve that respectability is to crawl on your belly to any lousy politician who offers you a trip to Washington.

All you have to do to achieve that respectability is to acquiesce to a legislative and economic program, that means the reincarnation in this country of the “yellow-dog” contract, government of labor relations by injunction. That is what you have to do to be respectable by the lights of those who are trying to impose their kind of policies upon the membership of this organization.

I don’t think that there is any doubt in the mind of any rank and file, honest rank and file, union member of this union or any other union of this country where this union stands. The record speaks for itself.

When I went to work for General Electric a little over 30 years ago and some of you have heard it, but it won’t hurt the rest of you to hear it, I went to work in that plant as a kid, 14 years old.

When I went in that plant it was right after the last major strike in General Electric until 1946. The company broke those unions, in Schenectady, in Erie, in Lynn, in Pittsfield and what there was in Fort Wayne. The company broke those unions. They broke them by using the kind of arguments they_are developing right now in our midst. They broke them by the red-baiting that was current then. They broke them by buying off the, leadership, just as they are trying to do now and are doing.

They drove those people back to work, and, yes, in some instances, imposed yellow-dog contracts on them, imposed the blacklist in the community to the extent that even today you will find people and they are old men now, who can’t get jobs, even today, because of that blacklist then. There are people in this hall who know that.

I tell you if we are going to have a union, and we are, we are going to have a union that is going to be based on rank and file democratic principles. We are going to have a union that is not going to be dedicated to the services of a. political machine in Washington, or anywhere else.

We are going to have a union that is dedicated to the service of the interests of the membership and nobody else.

We are going to have a union that is going to serve the economic and legislative interests of our members like no other union can, because we are going to fight for the right to maintain rank and file control, freedom from the companies and the company stooges in our midst.

And in doing this we will be serving the best interests of the people of our Union and of the United States.

The post “Uphold UE Policies; Fight Company Unionism”: The 1949 UE Convention first appeared on Labor Today.

August 27 marked the 75^th anniversary of the Peekskill Riots, two attacks by right wing mobs on concert-goers in Peekskill, in upstate New York. The audience was composed of union members, including UE members, and civil rights activists, and they had gathered to watch popular Black singer and actor Paul Robeson perform.

“We Shall Not Be Moved”: The First Riot

The concert was planned for the evening of August 27, 1949. Robeson was to follow the well-known folk singer Pete Seeger. A prominent American novelist, Howard Fast, was to serve as concert chairman. The concert was being held to raise money for the Civil Rights Congress, an organization that defended Black Americans sentenced to death.

When Fast and some attendees started arriving at the venue, a hostile crowd was already gathering outside. Right-wing groups, including the American Legion, attempted to have the concert canceled in the days leading up to it and showed up in an angry, violent mass.

Fast and a few dozen union members were attacked by hundreds of men. The union members were able to stand their ground thanks to some quick strategizing by Fast. The mob threw rocks and glass bottles at their heads and some hit their mark. Fast and about 30 union members were able to keep the mob from killing anyone but had to retreat to the top of the stage with the women and children. They stood with arms linked singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” as the mob screamed, “We’ll finish Hitler’s job” and threatened to lynch Robeson. The union members continued to sing and stand their ground, watching as the rioters burned chairs and pamphlets.

“As the mob descended on us, they hurled threats of: ‘Kill all the Jews and n—–s; Hitler was a good guy, we’re going to finish his job. Give us the women, we want the women,” Jack Czitron, a WWII veteran and member of UE Local 155 who was in attendance, told the UE NEWS. “We locked hands to defend ourselves. Timber torn from fences and rocks were thrown. Crosses were burned.”

Upon arriving by train, Robeson was picked up by Helen Rosen, a lifelong activist and close friend of Robeson, who knew of the riot and safely hid him in her car. Robeson saw a burning cross on a nearby hill and heard the noise from the riot and tried to help but was restrained by his friends. Police did not intervene and the riot only stopped after state troopers arrived later in the night.

“I Must Keep Fightin’ Until I’m Dyin’”: The Second Concert

Following the riot, Robeson met with union members and locals who had helped plan the initial concert. Together, they decided to have Robeson back to Peekskill to perform. Rank-and-file union members, including many from UE, agreed to protect concert goers and serve as a wall of defense around the venue.

Rather than the few hundred that were expected to attend the original concert, over 20,000 people attended the rescheduled event. Over a thousand union members protected concert-goers of all races alongside veterans and volunteers. The concert went on without issue and money was successfully raised for the Harlem chapter of the Civil Rights Congress. Robeson sang labor songs and staples to the enormous crowd like “Go Down Moses” and his radical version of “Ol’ Man River” where he replaced a racial epithet in the song with “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’”. Robeson also performed the Yiddish freedom anthem “Song of the Warsaw Ghetto” that night:

Never say that you have reached the very end,
When leaden skies a bitter future may portend,
For sure the hour for which we yearn will yet arrive,
​And our marching steps will thunder: we survive!

The concert was a hit but at the end of the event, a large mob of white men lined the roads outside of the venue waiting to ambush the multi-racial crowd of men, women, and children. Witnesses told the UE NEWS that mobsters began “hurling foul epithets” at Black and Jewish people in the crowd while swinging ropes in lynching threats. The right-wing mob chanted “We’re Hitler’s boys – Hitler’s boys” and could also be heard singing “Roll out the commies” to the tune of the popular drinking song “Roll Out the Barrel.”

Two hundred people were violently attacked and injured by the rioters while police stood by or, in some cases, beat Black concert-goers alongside the mob. Many cars were smashed, causing windows to shatter in peoples’ eyes, and rocks were launched through buses filled with men, women, and children.

Local 428 President Pat Barile told the UE NEWS, “I was one of the first few to leave the concert grounds and upon leaving we were greeted by a hail of rocks and stones that smashed our windows spraying us with glass splinters.

“This happened less than 150 feet from the exit in full view of dozens of troopers and policemen, who did nothing to stop the stone throwers but merely poked their clubs into the cars and ordered them to proceed knowing we would be stoned for the whole length of that road for about three or four miles. There was no need for this violence and it could have easily been avoided had the authorities so desired.”

“I’d Hammer Out Danger”: UE Officers Condemn Violence

“The cornerstone of American democracy is the right of men and women to free speech and assembly.” So said UE President Albert J. Fitzgerald, Secretary Treasurer Julius Emspak, and Director of Organization James J. Matles in a statement released following the riots. In the statement, the officers describe the riots as aimed at denying the right of free speech and assembly to the union members and Robeson supporters. They went on to explain that the violence directed at men, women, children, and even babies in arms is part of a pattern of increasing assaults by “forces of reaction through mobs as well as the police themselves.” 

The UE officers pointed out the lack of action by officials in the area. Explaining that police and troopers stood by and even participated in the violence, they questioned if law enforcement personnel were under instruction from a higher authority to do so. They pointed out that this was a pattern of violence being used more and more frequently on trade unionists, Black people, and any group which questioned the increasing corporate control of society.

The officers went on to point out the similarities between the violence of the rioters and lack of police intervention at Peekskill and the violence many union members face while on strike. “It is the logical extension of Taft-Harvey methods of police violence and mob hysteria deliberately provoked by newspapers and radio commentators and the powerful interests which control them. Union members — who have had to go on strike to protect their jobs — are familiar with such tactics.”

In the conclusion of their statement, UE officers said, “The interests of labor and the entire American people demand that the right of speech and assemblage be protected; and that those who instigated and participated in Peekskill violence be punished.” The officers then went on to demand the prosecution of the mob and the dismissal of local and state officials that permitted the rioting to occur.

The Peekskill riots marked a violent beginning to years of attacks against militant unions. UE faced many attacks as part of the Red Scare anti-communist hysteria. Many UE leaders were fired, blacklisted, and even arrested, and the federal government attempted to deport Matles. The union lost half its members to raids by other unions during the 1950s. But like the attendees of the benefit concert at Peekskill, union members fought back with perseverance and resistance. Steady organizing during the 1960s and 1970s and aggressive organizing from the 1990s through today have rebuilt some of what was lost during the anti-communist violence of the 1950s. As Seeger sang while opening for Robeson:

I’d hammer out danger
I’d hammer out warning
I’d hammer out love between all of my brothers
All over this land.

The post UE: The Peekskill Riots—Where Everyday Union Members Stood Up to Racism, Anti-Semitism, and Hate first appeared on Labor Today.

Fifty years ago [March 22, 1974], 3,200 women gathered in Chicago to found the Coalition of Labor Union Women to fight for equality in their unions and in society. The UE NEWS, which dedicated a full two pages to coverage of the event, reported:

In two days of meetings which were charged with excitement over the historic nature of the gathering, 3200 women trade unionists gave an amazing demonstration of the needs and hopes of the women of factory, office, store and school.

The massive turnout — organizers only expected 2,000 — reflected the dynamic energy of the women’s movement at the time. A “Women’s Labor Conference” held in St. Louis the previous November had attracted an overflow crowd; UE International Representative Florence Criley, one of two keynote speakers at that event, reported that “The Teamsters’ Plaza main room was jam packed and altogether [it was] a very satisfactory meeting.”

Criley, who was based in Chicago and played an important role in organizing the CLUW conference, was also in regular contact with other women’s organizations in the area. These served as a source of organizing leads and, in some cases, “salts” (activists who get a job in a workplace with the intention of organizing a union). As the UE NEWS reported, only a little over 4 million of the 34 million women then in the workforce were in unions and “a major goal of CLUW is to help bring the unorganized into the labor movement.” The UE delegation at the founding convention included not only over 50 representatives of UE locals, but also members of UE organizing committees at unorganized factories across the midwest.

For older UE delegates, the founding of CLUW was also reminiscent of an earlier wave of women’s activism. Gladys McCullough of Local 190 in Chicago told the UE NEWS that the conference “brings back memories of the UE women’s conferences.” As historian and former UE member Lisa Kannenberg described in a 2009 article for the UE NEWS, UE women had been gathering to discuss their specific issues as women as far back as 1941, when Local 601 at the giant Westinghouse plant in East Pittsburgh organized a “Conference on Women’s Wages” that “drew 72 delegates from nine of District 6’s eleven locals.”

As mobilization for World War II drew more women into the workforce, and into UE, other districts followed suit, and a similar round of district women’s conferences in the early 50s culminated in the first-ever “National Conference on the Problems of Working Women,” hosted by UE in May 1953. These conferences, along with a concentrated effort to educate the entire union membership about the importance of fighting for women’s issues, resulted in real materials gains for UE women, “ranging from success in narrowing wage differentials to new training classes to upgrade women into skilled jobs.”

“Women work for the same reasons as men”

UE participants at the CLUW conference were, as the UE NEWS reported, proud of the union’s record of winning “Equal pay for equal work, opening up jobs long limited to men, [and] wiping out rates for women which were below that of common labor for men.”

However, the gains made by UE women in the electrical industry were just a drop in the bucket compared to the vast disparities faced by both organized and unorganized women workers. The UE NEWS noted, “Women’s median earnings last year were only 58.5 percent of what men earned, a shocking indictment of unequal treatment which this new organization hopes to overcome.” Later in the year, the UE NEWS pointed out that the gender wage gap had actually been increasing over the previous two decades — in 1955, women were making 63.9 percent of men’s earnings. (Currently, women make 82 percent of men’s earnings — a gap that has been steady for the past two decades.)

In addition to addressing wage disparities, conference attendees vowed to fight for child-care legislation — a demand that UE had raised as early as the 1940s. “Whenever child care legislation is passed it is vetoed,” said Addie Wyatt, the director of women’s affaris of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union, who addressed the opening session. “Women work for the same reasons as men and if we have to work we have to have adequate day care for our children.”Back to top

“Opened up more opportunities for women to serve”

Although Wyatt cautioned delegates that “Our unions are not our enemies because we are ‘our union,’” CLUW also took aim at the lack of women leaders in the labor movement. According to conference organizers, although women made up approximately half of the membership of 26 international unions at the time, only 4.7 percent of those unions’ leadership positions were filled by women.

UE, despite its history of fighting for women workers, was not immune to this trend. District Ten President Trudi Southern, who attended the conference and was elected to the new organization’s national coordinating committee, was the only woman on the UE General Executive Board at the time. While UE had as many as 13 women on staff during World War II, that number had dwindled to a handful by the mid-70s.

One of those women, Amy Newell, recalled in 2017 that “It was really terrific to have an organization that was raising issues of women in their unions, as well as issues of women in the workplace.” Although Newell, who was hired in 1974, was not present at the founding convention, she represented UE on CLUW’s national board for several years in the early 1980s. In 1985, she was elected UE Secretary-Treasurer, becoming the first woman to hold a national office in a U.S. manufacturing union.

“I think it opened up more opportunities for women to serve in leadership in their unions at various levels,” said Newell. “There are [now] lots of unions headed by women, and that wasn’t true in the ’70s.”

At a caucus of the UE women in Chicago, Local 1012 President Mary McDaniel urged her fellow UE women to seek to become delegates to the UE convention. “There ought to be a way of getting more women elected,” she said. “We need this kind of representation at our conventions.”

Reflected at UE Convention

At the 39th UE convention, held later that year in New York City, McDaniel was pleased to see “more women at this convention than we have had in the past.” She was not alone. According to the UE NEWS, “Almost every delegate that spoke was able to report some progress in some aspect of the campaign for full equality [for women]; several noted the increase in the number of women delegates, and every woman who took the floor was either the president or held some other important office in the local or district she represented.”

Local 924 in Decatur, Indiana took up a special collection to send two women members to the convention after elections resulted in an all-male set of delegates. One of the women, Kate Fuhrman, held a job called “head man” on the motor assembly line. “They still call it ‘head man,’” Fuhrman explained to the UE NEWS, “because they are not used to having a woman do that job. I am the first one who has ever had it.” Fuhrman had worked at the plant for 19 years before she applied for the better-paying position. “I felt that I could do it as well as any man, so I applied for it.”

Reta Thornton, also from Local 924, told the UE NEWS that, “We have both learned at this convention that Kate’s story is typical. Because women are not encouraged to bid for the so-called ‘men’s jobs’, it takes a long time to do it even though they have the will to do it and know they can do the job well.”

Addie Wyatt of the Meat Cutters, who had been elected vice chair of the national CLUW at the Chicago conference, was a guest speaker at the convention. Wyatt, who had also been a founding member of the National Organization for Women and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, got her start in the United Packinghouse Workers of America. The UPWA was a militant CIO union that had fought aggressively against racial and gender discrimination before succumbing to red-baiting in the late 1940s and then merging into the AFL’s Amalgamated Meat Cutters in 1968. (In 1979, the Meat Cutters merged with the Retail Clerks International Association to form the United Food and Commercial Workers.)

Wyatt noted the crucial role of organized labor in creating “a climate in which programs designed to advance the status of women can thrive and be fruitful,” and called the founding of CLUW “one of the most significant developments in the women’s movement” in recent years. She denounced the fact that 37 percent of women-headed families had incomes below the poverty level, and that the federal minimum wage (then $2 per hour) was not quite enough to lift a family of four above the poverty level. She called for doubling the minimum wage. (In 2024, a single wage-earner supporting a family of four would need to make over $15 per hour — more than twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 — to lift their family above the federal poverty line.)

She pointed out that equal pay for equal work is not enough to address the wage gap between men and women, and called for requiring employers to provide training programs to give women access to better-paying jobs. Noting that the burden of unemployment falls more heavily on women, and especially on Black women, she called for a shorter work-week and a massive public works program. She also called for collective bargaining rights for hospital workers (who were not covered by the National Labor Relations Act until that year), domestic workers, and public-sector workers — all sectors of the economy that employed a large number of women.

“All working people must have the right to strike, to support their demands with the withdrawal of their labor,” Wyatt concluded. “Otherwise, they are simply slave laborers.”

“Independent of the AFL-CIO”

In her 2017 interview with the UE NEWS, retired UE Secretary-Treasurer Amy Newell pointed out that “It was very significant that it was independent of the AFL-CIO, so that it brought together women from many different kinds of unions, including the UE and others that weren’t in the AFL-CIO.” UE leaders such as Criley, Southern and Newell provided important leadership to the national organization, and the Bridgeport, Connecticut chapter was headed by UE Local 209 Vice President Rita Baynocky. UE’s national officers took a keen interest in the new organization, requesting regular reports from Criley and others.

CLUW chapters helped mobilize members of other unions to support UE struggles, as when the Chicago chapter brought members of the UAW, Teamsters, UFCW, AFSCME, AFT, the Newspaper Guild, and others to a 1982 picket of Litton Industries, part of Local 1180’s four-year struggle for a first contract at Litton’s South Dakota plant.

Independence from the AFL-CIO also allowed CLUW to formulate independent positions on issues like foreign policy, an area in which much of the American labor movement has traditionally taken direction from the federal government. The 1984 CLUW convention, in addition to passing resolutions demanding federally-funded child care, affirmative action and pay equity, also denounced the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe and U.S. military intervention in Central America. Currently, CLUW is part of the National Labor Network for Ceasefire, and CLUW leaders have spoken at press conferences and rallies alongside UE leaders demanding an immediate, permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

“Full equality in all areas of life”

But perhaps the most important legacy of CLUW is that it encouraged women not only to run for office in their unions, but also to fight for recognition that women’s issues are union issues. While UE conventions had adopted a resolution on women’s rights every year since 1939, those resolutions began to address broader issues in the 1970s, adopting the union’s first position in defense of abortion rights in 1976. Women’s historian Sharon Hartman Strom noted in her Reader’s Companion to US. Women’s History that the resolution adopted at the 1979 convention, “Support Full Equality for Women,” was widely influential among other women in the labor movement. That resolution stated:

The fight for women’s rights and the fight for stronger unions are related; the same forces which are promoting “Right to Work” laws, and making all-out efforts to defeat unions, are also attacking women’s rights to equal pay, to Affirmative Action programs, and to safe, legal abortions.

UE Resolution on Women’s Rights at 1979 Convention

Speaking on the resolution, Carole Delevigne of Local 262 said, “UE has traditionally supported the right of women to full equality in all areas of life. Well, if we want to ensure this equality we better back up our words with an active fight for women’s rights, and this includes the right of all women to a safe, legal, free abortion.” Dorothy Danahy, Local 332, spoke about her local’s successful efforts in winning pay upgrades for women workers, and Pat Jenkins, Local 623, praised the union for taking “the best possible stand” on women’s issues. Many men also spoke in favor of the resolution, including Local 618 President Ron Flowers, who described the successful walkouts conducted by women members of his local, and Alan Hart, Local 506, who challenged his union brothers to take sexual harassment in the workplace seriously, as “a real crisis … that was dividing our ranks.”

Although UE has played an important role in the fight for women’s equality since our early years, and in the formation of CLUW, we must not rest on our laurels. Recognizing that there is still work to be done, UE’s General Executive Board (which is currently about one-third women) has recently established a Women’s Leadership Program to promote women’s leadership in the union. In the words of that 1979 resolution, “By encouraging women to participate in and become leaders of the Union, we will strengthen the Union in its fight for the rights of all workers.”

The post UE: Fifty Years Ago, Union Women Founded New Organization to Fight for Equality first appeared on Labor Today.

Eight-five years ago today, the founding convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) opened in Pittsburgh. For years, new types of workers — workers in the mass-production industries long deemed “unorganizable” by many in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) — had been organizing new unions, often independently of the conservative craft unions that dominated the AFL. Like today, many of these struggles were led by young workers.

The CIO had initially been formed in 1935 as the “Committee for Industrial Organization” by labor leaders who understood that the labor movement had to organize these workers, and to do it on an industrial basis, uniting all workers in an industry rather than dividing them up by craft.

They had also learned the lesson that unions need to organize and unite all workers, not only across divisions of craft but also those of race, gender, ethnicity and belief. Employers’ ability to successfully pit white and Black workers against each other during the Great Steel Strike of 1919 was one of the major reasons that strike was lost. Many industries, especially the electrical manufacturing industry, employed a large number of women — it would be impossible to organize without including them as full members of unions. Most industries employed immigrants from a wide variety of countries — much early CIO organizing was conducted in many languages.

One of the new unions being formed at the time was UE — founded in 1936 by a group of independent unions in electrical and radio plants who declared in the preamble of their new constitution their intention to “form an organization which unites all workers on an industrial basis, and rank-and-file control, regardless of craft, age, sex, nationality, race, creed, or political beliefs, and pursue at all times a policy of aggressive struggle to improve our conditions.” At their founding convention, they elected young workers as their leaders: the 24-year-old James Carey as President and 30-year-old Julius Emspak as Secretary-Treasurer. In 1937 the 28-year-old James Matles would join them as the union’s first Director of Organization.

UE was the first union chartered by the CIO.

The refusal of the AFL to grant a charter to UE was one of the key issues that led CIO leaders to break from the AFL and found their own federation. Thirty-seven different AFL unions claimed jurisdiction over UE plants — and many of them had constitutions which limited membership on the basis of age, sex, race, religion, political belief, and even the state of a worker’s health.

As the UE NEWS noted in a recent feature, Pittsburgh was a fitting place for the CIO’s founding convention:

[T]he inability of the AFL’s craft unions to organize the industries of Pittsburgh — its steel mills but also its massive electrical plants — was invoked by Mineworkers’ President John L. Lewis at the founding convention … as Lewis pointed out in his address to the new federation’s founding convention, CIO unions like the Steelworkers and UE had succeeded in a few short years in turning Pittsburgh from a bastion of anti-unionism into one of the strongest union towns in the country.

Over the following decade, CIO unions would lead struggles that brought an unprecedented level of prosperity and security to large swaths of the U.S. working class, and the unionization rate in the U.S. to its highest point. Jack Metzgar, who grew up in a steelworker household in Western Pennsylvania, wrote in his memoir, “If what we lived through in the 1950s was not liberation, then liberation never happens in real human lives.”

The CIO would begin to abandon its founding principles in 1949 and 1950, when it expelled eleven unions including UE and the ILWU, and would merge with the AFL in 1955. However, the old principles of CIO unionism, kept alive by UE, ILWU, and countless rank-and-file activists throughout the labor movement, are on display in today’s labor movement more than ever in recent memory — especially in the recent successful “stand-up strike” led by the UAW, once the CIO’s largest union.

The post UE: Founding Congress of the C.I.O. Took Place 85 Years Ago Today, Brought “Liberation” to U.S. Workers first appeared on Labor Today.

Monday Agust 28, marked the 60th anniversary of the NLRB election that brought Local 123, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, into UE. UE Director of Organization Robert Kirkwood called it “one of [UE’s] most significant organizational victories since the Union was split in 1949.”

The 600 workers, who manufactured commercial air conditioning for Westinghouse in Staunton, VA, had been “represented” by an AFL-CIO union picked for them by the company when it opened the plant in the mid-50s, moving the work from plants in New Jersey and Massachusetts in hopes that southern workers would be more docile. Workers got in touch with UE after the company union “had made another of their sweetheart contract deals,” the UE NEWS reported. This resulted in a three-year campaign led by an organizing committee of 110 rank-and-file workers in the plant.

It was a hard-fought campaign. The company tried to buy off workers by raising wages for everyone in the plant, and intimidate them by having foreman take down the names of everyone wearing a UE button. The local Chamber of Commerce “tried to bar UE from use of any meeting halls” and “merchants were urged to threaten a cutoff of credit if people voted for UE,” the UE NEWS reported. “[T]he company started quoting from the UE Constitution’s preamble, hoping to play on prejudices against equal rights for all workers” and fired a key UE leader in the week before the election.

Nonetheless, the UE organizing committee held firm, visiting every one of their co-workers in their homes to talk to them about the union and answer company lies. On August 28, 1963, the workers voted 326-191 to join UE.

The victory was part of a string of organizing victories for UE in the 1960s, as workers in many plants who had left the union during the raids of the late 40s and early 50s came back to UE, having realized that the more conservative unions they had joined were unable (or unwilling) to engage in aggressive struggle to maintain the standards UE had won in the 1930s and 40s. In this period, UE also successfully organized many shops — like the Staunton Westinghouse plant — where workers had no previous experience with UE, but wanted a militant union that would fight for their interests.

Among the shops joining UE in this period were a General Electric plant in nearby Waynesboro, Virginia; Kennedy Valve in Elmira, New York, where UE Local 329 has represented workers since 1966; and UE’s first public-sector members in the city of Greenfield, MA, who joined Local 274.

The Staunton plant was sold when the Westinghouse Electric Company decided in the 1980s that it would be more profitable to get out of the manufacturing business. The plant is now located in nearby Verona, and is currently owned by Daikin Industries, a Japanese multinational conglomerate, but UE Local 123 continues to proudly represent workers there to this day.

The original UE NEWS coverage of the organizing campaign can be read on the University of Pittsburgh’s digital archives of the UE NEWS.

The post UE: Sixty Years Ago, Virginia Workers Defied Company Pressure to Form UE Local 123 first appeared on Labor Today.

The International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers faces complications when the bosses acquire a court injunction to break the strike or arrest the mine workers. Esperanza Quintero, wife of the lead striker Ramon Quintero, identifies the loophole that the injunction only applies to mine workers and pleads that the union allow women to join the picket. The men, who were worried for the safety of the women and the children refused, but the union allowed the wives to have vote. The union voted by majority to have women take up the position on the picket. After brutal crackdowns by police, arresting of most women strikers, and subsequently having solidarity strikers from other mines and other women to join, the men realized that they need their wives in order to succeed.

Due to the film being endorsed by the International Mine, Miller, and Smelter Workers—the writers, directors, and actors were later blacklisted as allegedly being subversives during the McCarthy period. Salt of the Earth is a must-see for anyone who seriously considers themselves a supporter of labor, racial, women’s, and civil rights.

The post REVIEW: Labor in Cinema—Salt of the Earth first appeared on Labor Today.

Alfred Renton Bryant Bridges (Harry Bridges) was born in Australia, in the Melbourne suburb of Kensington, on July 28, 1901. The son of a realtor, the young Bridges decided at age 15 that landlordery was no career for him. Instead, he pursued honest work and went to sea as a sailor for the merchant marine and adopted the name Harry, after his favorite uncle.

By 1920, Harry Bridges relocated to his permanent port of San Francisco, California. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1921 and participated in a seaman’s strike but left the organization shortly after, with doubts as to the IWW’s efficacy. He stopped going to sea and instead worked as a longshoreman, working as a rigger. The owners of the San Francisco shipyards set up a captured “company union” to which all workers were expected to belong, but Harry managed to dodge membership in it and work in an independent capacity until he could join the International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA). He participated in a May Day Parade in 1924, and in retaliation was blacklisted by the shipyard companies for several years. In order to earn a living, Harry was forced to join the company union in 1927.

Bridges’ organizing efforts did not end with that, however. He and several other like-minded longshoremen gathered into a formation calling themselves the Albion Hall Group. The group wrote and printed on mimeograph a leaflet called The Waterfront Worker, wherein Bridges and the others wrote about the daily struggles of their fellow workers. In 1933, the ILW opened a new local and Harry promptly joined. He and several other Albion Hall alumni were elected to executive positions. They campaigned for greater ILA rank-and-file participation, attempted to unite other longshoreman’s unions up and down the west coast, and in 1933 staged a successful strike.

In 1934 came the infamous and legendary West Coast Longshoreman’s strike. The demands, published in The Waterfront Worker, were: 1. More men for each work gang; 2. Lighter weight loads; and 3. An independent (not company) union. The Albion Hall Group tore up their company union cards and refused to pay dues, and encouraged others to do the same. They systematically began a work slowdown and began a campaign to demand union recognition, a closed shop, and nothing less than a single large west coast wide union.

On May 9, 1934, every longshoreman and every sailor in all the ports on the west coast walked off the job and began the strike in earnest. Shipping companies promptly hired scabs to replace them, and had the police escort them to and from the docks. In one incident, the strikers attacked a stockade in San Pedro that housed scabs with the intent of driving them off. The police intervened and killed two and injured scores others with gunfire. During this time, Harry Bridges, along with Sam Kagel, served as chairmen of the strike committee. They oversaw the conduct of the strike, as well as took the lead in reviewing any proposed contracts. Ports in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, among others, lay crippled due to the strike.

Things came to a head on July 5, in an event later known as “Bloody Thursday”. The bosses of the shipyards in San Francisco attempted to force open the port. Police fired tear gas at the picket lines and charged at them with mounted police. The strikers retaliated by throwing rocks and the police’s own tear gas canisters back at them. The onslaught pushed the strikers back to a defensive position, where both police and strikers held position. Then, maybe provoked or maybe not (eyewitness accounts differ) the police began firing handguns and shotguns at the strikers. Two men were killed and several were injured. That evening, the Governor of California called in the National Guard to patrol the waterfront. The strikers, outgunned, retreated from the area. Harry Bridges met with the San Francisco Labor Council to authorize a general strike.

The following Friday was the funeral for the murdered workers. So moving was the procession through the streets of San Francisco that public sympathy for the longshoreman grew exponentially. On the 14^th a general strike was declared and on the 16^th it began. 150,000 workers refused to report to work. Movie theaters closed, and many shops closed in solidarity. The police arrested 300 people and ran amok, smashing striker’s equipment. The general strike lasted four days.

It finally came to an end when the general strike committee, which had taken control over the strike, voted to end it. Bridges stridently argued against the end of the strike, but ultimately had no power to continue it. The general strike committee also voted to accept arbitration. Some small concessions to the longshoremen were made and the city of San Francisco returned to work.

By 1936, Harry Bridges was elected to be the president of the ILA Pacific coast district. Under his leadership, the ILA expanded eastward with the aim of unionizing inland warehouse workers as well. The next year, the ILA national leadership tried to reorganize the west coast district and cut the newly unionized warehouse workers loose. In response, Bridges formally had the west coast district formally secede from the ILA. His new union would be called the International Longshoreman’s and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU). The new union quickly affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and Bridges became the CIO’s west coast director. He would only serve a short time. Bridges adopted the Communist Party USA line at the time, opposing American intervention in World War 2. He specifically denounced President Roosevelt as a “warmonger”. In retaliation, the CIO leadership abolished his district position and therefore limited Bridges’ influence to California only.

Throughout his life, Harry Bridges would face numerous legal challenges and attempts to expel him from the United States. Due to his outspoken communist sympathies, he was taken to court and charged with lying about being a member of a communist party on his immigration papers. This case was thrown out, as he was not currently a member of any organization when he immigrated. A new law was written, the Smith act, in order to address this. Bridges was brought to trial again in 1945 for being “affiliated” with the communist party, though the prosecution was ultimately unable to prove said affiliation, and were unable to deport him.

At the end of the 40’s, the CIO had grown wary of Bridges’ power and influence. He was removed from his post as California director, and later the ILWU was expelled from the CIO for supposed “communist leadership”. The union continued on though, negotiating contracts and advocating on the worker’s behalf. Bridges himself carried on as the union’s president for many years until his retirement in 1977.

Harry Bridges died in 1990, aged 88. His legacy lives on in the ILWU, who’s headquarters is named for him. He lives on in numerous monuments in San Francisco and elsewhere, and in the Harry Bridges Institute in San Pedro, California. He lives on in the hearts of trade unionists everywhere, as a tireless defender of workers’ rights and an example for workers everywhere.

–”The most important word in the language of the working class is solidarity.”

The post Harry Bridges: Organizer, Leader, and Champion of Labor first appeared on Labor Today.