United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America

Based on Wikipedia: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America

The Union That Refused to Die

In 1953, Senator Joseph McCarthy scheduled a congressional hearing in Lynn, Massachusetts for the day before a crucial union election. The timing was no coincidence. McCarthy wanted to destroy the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America—known as UE—and he was willing to weaponize the full power of the federal government to do it.

The hearing made for sensationalist headlines. Workers were subpoenaed and forced to either "name names" of their colleagues or face firing. The rival union narrowly won the election.

But UE didn't disappear. Seventy years later, it's still here—one of only two unions from the eleven expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations during the Red Scare that survived into the twenty-first century. The other is the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Every other "left-wing" union that faced the combined assault of employers, government investigators, and rival unions was broken.

How did UE survive? And why did so many powerful forces want it dead in the first place?

Born in the Factory Floor Rebellions of the 1930s

To understand UE, you need to understand what American industry looked like in the early 1930s. The Great Depression had thrown millions out of work. Those who still had jobs often labored in dangerous conditions for poverty wages, with no legal right to organize.

In the electrical equipment and radio manufacturing plants—companies like General Electric, Westinghouse, and RCA—workers began organizing on their own. These weren't top-down campaigns directed by professional union staff. They were rebellions that bubbled up from the factory floor, led by workers who had nothing to lose.

In March 1936, representatives from these scattered local unions met and founded UE. It was a few months before the formal founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the CIO, which would become the great engine of industrial unionism in America.

The timing matters. The American Federation of Labor—the AFL—was dominated by craft unions. A craft union organizes workers by their specific trade: plumbers with plumbers, carpenters with carpenters. This worked fine for skilled tradespeople, but it was useless for the new mass-production industries. On an assembly line, you might have dozens of different job classifications working side by side. Craft unionism would divide them into competing factions. Industrial unionism would unite them all into one bargaining unit.

The AFL's leadership resisted industrial unionism. A group of existing industrial unions within the AFL—led by John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America—formed a caucus to push for change. They called it the Committee on Industrial Organization. The AFL suspended them in September 1936 and soon expelled them entirely. The committee became a rival federation: the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

UE received the CIO's first charter in November 1938. By then, a wave of strikes and mass organizing had swept through American industry. New industrial unions were forming rapidly: the United Auto Workers, the United Rubber Workers, the United Steelworkers. UE grew alongside them.

The Contentious Question of Who Runs a Union

UE's slogan was simple: "The members run this union."

This sounds like the kind of empty rhetoric every organization uses. But UE meant it in ways that set them apart from most American unions, then and now.

Later studies by labor historians found that UE was genuinely one of the most democratic unions in the country. Major decisions went to the membership. Local unions retained significant autonomy. Officers earned salaries tied to what the members themselves made in the factories—no getting rich off union dues.

This democratic structure attracted a diverse coalition. The membership and leadership included socialists, communists, New Deal liberals, and Catholics. Among the organizers of UE Local 107 at the Westinghouse plant in South Philadelphia were former members of the Industrial Workers of the World—the legendary "Wobblies" who had led some of the most dramatic labor battles of the early twentieth century.

In 1937, a group of local unions in the machine shop industry joined UE after leaving the International Association of Machinists. Their leader was James J. Matles, who had immigrated from Romania as a young man. The machinists left their old union over its policies of racial discrimination. UE welcomed them.

This commitment to racial equality was unusual for the time. Many AFL craft unions explicitly excluded Black workers. Even some CIO unions practiced discrimination in subtler ways. UE's willingness to organize all workers regardless of race both strengthened the union and made it more enemies.

Fighting for Equal Pay Before It Was Popular

UE also took positions on women's rights that were decades ahead of their time.

During World War II, with millions of men serving overseas, women flooded into factory jobs previously closed to them. The famous "Rosie the Riveter" image captured this moment. But employers often paid women less than men for identical work.

UE fought this. The union brought successful suits against General Electric and Westinghouse before the War Labor Board, demanding equal pay for equal work.

When the war ended, employers tried to push women out of industry entirely and deny them seniority rights and maternity leave. UE resisted.

The 1946 strike against General Electric illustrated the stakes. By then, most issues had been resolved, but GE insisted on giving women smaller wage increases than men. The company's president, Charles E. Wilson, dismissed the women workers contemptuously as "bobbysoxers"—a slang term for teenage girls obsessed with popular music.

UE held the line. The strike continued until GE agreed that women would receive the same raises as men.

The War and Its Aftermath

When the United States entered World War II after Pearl Harbor, UE joined other CIO unions in making a controversial decision: a no-strike pledge for the duration of the war. The union viewed the conflict as a struggle against world fascism that deserved labor's support.

UE even supported expanded use of piecework systems—paying workers by the number of units they produced rather than by the hour. This was normally something unions opposed, since it could be used to speed up work and squeeze more labor out of employees. But UE argued it was necessary to boost wartime production and, under the wage controls imposed by the War Labor Board, could actually help workers earn more.

Despite the no-strike pledge, UE continued bargaining aggressively. Union leaders found creative ways to win War Labor Board approval for pay increases. And when push came to shove, they still supported militant action—like the strike at a Babcock and Wilcox plant in New Jersey. By 1944, at the peak of war production, UE claimed over two hundred local unions and more than six hundred thousand members. It was the third largest CIO union.

Then the war ended, and everything changed.

In late 1945, the three largest CIO unions launched coordinated national strikes. The United Auto Workers shut down General Motors. The United Steelworkers stopped the basic steel industry. UE struck GE, Westinghouse, and GM's electrical division.

The workers had grievances. During the war, wages had been frozen while corporate profits soared. Now they wanted their share.

The 1946 strikes succeeded. But they also terrified American industrialists. GE's Charles Wilson—the same man who had dismissed women workers as bobbysoxers—declared that the problems of the United States could be summed up in two phrases: "Russia abroad, labor at home."

He was previewing the strategy that would nearly destroy the American labor movement.

The Cold War Comes to the Shop Floor

The Republican victories in the 1946 congressional elections brought a wave of conservatives to Washington determined to break labor's power. The result was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

Taft-Hartley was drafted largely by lobbyists for the National Association of Manufacturers, General Electric, Inland Steel, and other industrial giants. It significantly revised the Wagner Act—the 1935 law that had established workers' right to organize—in ways that weakened unions' ability to organize and bargain effectively.

Among its many provisions was a requirement that all union officers sign "non-communist affidavits," swearing they were not members of the Communist Party.

Labor leaders from across the spectrum denounced this as government interference in internal union affairs and an attack on freedom of speech and association. They vowed to boycott the new labor board and refuse to sign the affidavits.

Few followed through.

Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers signed the affidavits—and then proceeded to raid locals of unions whose leaders were still holding out. Here's how the system worked: if your union's officers hadn't signed the affidavits, your union couldn't appear on the ballot in National Labor Relations Board representation elections. But other unions that had signed could appear on that ballot. They could swoop in and try to take over your members.

UE's leaders refused to sign. The raids began.

Enemies Within and Without

UE had internal divisions too. At the 1941 convention, James Carey—one of UE's founders—had been defeated for the union presidency by Albert J. Fitzgerald, a GE worker from Lynn, Massachusetts. Carey never accepted this loss gracefully.

As the anti-communist political environment intensified in the late 1940s, these old wounds reopened. The House Un-American Activities Committee—known by its acronym HUAC—investigated UE. The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists organized dissenters within the union into an opposition faction.

Meanwhile, up-and-coming Republican politicians built their careers by targeting "communist subversion." Congressman Richard Nixon of California. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Here's an irony worth noting: according to journalist Arnold Beichman, McCarthy was elected to his first Senate term with support from UE, which preferred him to the anti-communist Robert M. La Follette. McCarthy would later become the union's most relentless persecutor.

CIO leaders responded to the Red Scare attacks by purging their own houses. Philip Murray of the Steelworkers and Walter Reuther of the UAW expelled communists from their unions and attacked CIO affiliates like UE that refused to follow suit.

At UE's 1949 convention, the right-wing opposition was confident they would finally seize control of the union. The national political atmosphere was on their side. Congressional investigators were breathing down UE's neck. Other unions were picking off its locals.

They lost anyway. UE's convention delegates backed their national officers and demanded that the CIO stop allowing its affiliated unions to raid each other.

The CIO refused. UE boycotted the CIO's national convention and withheld its dues payments, effectively resigning. The CIO responded by expelling UE and the United Farm Equipment Workers. The following year, the CIO expelled nine more unions deemed communist-dominated.

The IUE: Built to Destroy

The CIO chartered a new union specifically designed to replace UE. They called it the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers—the IUE. And they appointed James Carey, the man UE's members had rejected eight years earlier, as its president.

The IUE was, in essence, a company union backed by the labor establishment. Its purpose was not to organize unorganized workers but to take members away from UE.

UE loyalists had a nickname for their rival. They said IUE stood for "Imitation UE."

The competition was brutal. In the heavy electrical equipment plants, both unions had substantial strength, and elections were close. At Local 601, representing Westinghouse workers in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the two factions were led by brothers—Mike and Tom Fitzpatrick—who attacked each other as viciously as the factions did on political issues. That local had a tradition of radical politics dating back to Eugene V. Debs's presidential campaigns before World War I.

The IUE won that particular election. Semi-skilled workers tended to support the IUE; more skilled workers favored UE.

Through the first half of the 1950s, UE and IUE won roughly equal numbers of elections. But IUE came away with larger total membership, particularly in the growing consumer electronics field. Other unions also grabbed pieces of UE's former territory: the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the International Association of Machinists, the UAW, the Steelworkers, the Teamsters, the Sheet Metal Workers.

McCarthy's Hearings and the Human Cost

The assault on UE wasn't just about elections. The federal government, employers, and the news media joined forces to destroy the union entirely.

Congressional committees—HUAC, McCarthy's Subcommittee on Investigations, a similar committee chaired by Senator John Marshall Butler—subjected UE to relentless inquisitions. They used subpoena power as a weapon. A worker called to testify faced an impossible choice: "name names" of colleagues who might be communists or communist sympathizers, subjecting them to the same persecution, or refuse to cooperate and be fired.

John Nelson learned this firsthand. He was president of UE's large Local 506 in Erie, Pennsylvania. When he refused to cooperate with investigators, GE fired him. The stress of his firing and the unrelenting persecution of his union destroyed his health. He died in 1959 at age forty-two.

McCarthy's investigations were sometimes timed to maximize damage to UE in specific elections. The 1953 Lynn hearing, held the day before an NLRB vote, was the most blatant example. McCarthy hauled UE members before the committee under the guise of investigating "communist subversion," generating sensationalist headlines that helped IUE squeak out a victory.

The government also went after individual UE leaders. Several shop stewards and Julius Emspak, the union's secretary-treasurer, faced contempt charges for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. Federal prosecutors tried to strip James Matles of his citizenship and deport him to Romania. The FBI harassed union members. Local newspapers ran hit pieces. Politicians denounced UE from every platform they could find.

Vindication, Too Late

Here's the thing about the McCarthy era attacks on UE: they were eventually shown to be legally baseless.

Most of the cases against UE leaders were withdrawn or defeated in court. In March 1959, the United States Justice Department was forced to drop its prosecution of UE on charges that the union was "communist-dominated."

By then, the damage was done. UE had lost the majority of its membership. Many locals had defected to the IUE or other unions. Workers who had been fired, blacklisted, or driven from their careers never got those years back. John Nelson was dead.

But UE survived. That fact alone made it exceptional.

Strange Bedfellows

The IUE, the union created to destroy UE, had its own problems. The diverse factions that had allied against UE found it difficult to work together once they were in power. They had been united by a common enemy; remove that enemy, and the coalition fractured.

In 1965, James Carey—the man who had lost the UE presidency in 1941, been installed as IUE president by the CIO in 1949, and spent sixteen years trying to destroy his former union—was defeated for the IUE presidency by one of his own lieutenants.

By then, something remarkable had happened. UE and IUE, bitter rivals for nearly two decades, began cooperating in collective bargaining with General Electric and other employers. The two unions still competed for members, but they recognized that divided they were weaker at the negotiating table.

The logic of industrial unionism—the same logic that had driven the creation of the CIO in the 1930s—reasserted itself. Workers in the same industry, facing the same employers, benefit from solidarity even when they belong to different organizations.

What Survived

Today, UE represents about twenty-three thousand workers in both private and public sectors across the United States. That's a fraction of its peak membership of over six hundred thousand in the 1940s. But it's still here.

The union continues to organize new workplaces. Its democratic structure has attracted several small independent unions to affiliate. Over the past two decades, UE has built a strategic alliance with the Authentic Labor Front, an independent Mexican union, and remains active in international labor solidarity work.

Labor historians who study UE consistently note its unusually democratic character. Decisions flow up from the membership rather than down from headquarters. Local unions retain real autonomy. The slogan "The members run this union" isn't just marketing.

Several scholars have also noted that, despite the charges of "communist domination" that were used to justify the attacks on UE, the union's actual policies differed significantly from those of the Communist Party USA on many major issues. UE was a genuinely independent organization that made its own decisions based on its members' interests—which is precisely what made it threatening to those who wanted to control the American labor movement.

The Lesson of Survival

Why did UE survive when the other expelled unions were destroyed?

Part of the answer is probably structural. UE's democratic practices meant the union wasn't dependent on any single leader or small group of leaders who could be imprisoned, deported, or blacklisted into silence. When individual leaders were attacked, others stepped up. The membership remained committed.

Part of it may be the industries where UE was strongest. Heavy electrical equipment manufacturing and machine building required skilled workers who were harder to replace than assembly line workers in consumer electronics. That gave UE members more leverage even when their union was under siege.

And part of it was sheer stubbornness. UE members had built their union from nothing in the depths of the Great Depression. They had faced down corporate hostility before. They weren't going to surrender because some senator waved papers around and shouted about communists.

The story of UE is a reminder that American labor history is more complicated than the sanitized version often taught in schools. The labor movement wasn't built by respectable moderates who carefully stayed within bounds acceptable to employers and politicians. It was built by radicals, by people willing to take enormous personal risks, by workers who understood that their power came from solidarity and were unwilling to abandon that principle even when the full weight of the American establishment came down on them.

Some of those workers were communists. Some were socialists. Some were Catholics. Some were former Wobblies who remembered the free speech fights of the 1910s. What united them was a belief that working people deserved dignity and a fair share of the wealth they created—and that the only way to get it was to stick together.

UE is still sticking together. After nearly ninety years, the members still run this union.