United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America

UNITED ELECTRICAL, RADIO AND MACHINE WORKERS OF AMERICA. Chartered by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935–1936, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) formed as a merger of three distinct union organizations, bringing together workers concentrated in General Electric (GE), Westinghouse, Radio Corporation of America, Philco, and Delco manufacturing plants. GE workers in particular had a rich history of union organization and contact with the Left. In Schenectady, where thousands worked, machinists had led GE workers in the 1918–1919 strikes and supported the municipal socialist government. There and elsewhere, industrial union ideas survived conservative times chiefly through members of radical, often foreign-language Left groups. By the mid-1930s, Al Coultard, a veteran socialist and skilled worker, headed the union in Lynn, Massachusetts. Julius Emspak, a toolmaker and college graduate, became the key strategist. Progressives and Communists cooperated widely in organizing drives on GE and Westinghouse. A second branch of the UE, machinist locals formerly in the Metalworkers Industrial Union (affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League) and later in the machinists union, was led into the UE by radical James Matles. The third branch, a largely young, female work force at radio and home-appliance shops, had little experience in unionism or radicalism. Temporarily an American Federation of Labor “federal labor union,” the radio workers later abandoned an inequitable arrangement within the largely male, craft-oriented International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and joined pragmatically with the emerging UE. James Carey, their leader, was a Catholic anticommunist. To assure unity, the merger made Carey president of the new union, Emspak the secretary-treasurer, and Matles the director of organization.

From the beginning, Left individuals and ethnic groups played a major role in the UE, quickly one of the “big three” CIO unions. Italians and especially Hungarian workers lent their support to progressive leaders. Aggressive efforts to organize women, who made up a large portion of the electrical union, brought successful militant unionism and an egalitarian approach toward more equalized wage structures (between men and women, but also between employed and unemployed union members), ideas hitherto unknown in mainstream American unionism.

Already by 1940, factional unrest stirred the union. Avowed anticommunists, led by charismatic Father Owen Rice, launched a public attack on the leadership of a Pittsburgh Westinghouse local. At the national level, union leadership was also contested. A. J. Fitzgerald, the young, newly elected president of Lynn GE Local 201, defeated James Carey for the presidency of the UE. Carey, who went on to become secretary-treasurer of the CIO, used his new position in assaulting alleged Communist domination. This dispute, and the formation of hostile “rank and file” and “progressive” caucuses in the same Pittsburgh plant, foreshadowed the eventual split in the union.

The end of the war brought the first national strike against GE and Westinghouse in 1946. The union reached a peak membership of approximately 650,000. Successful in its industrial struggle, the UE evoked a new strategy from GE in particular, the call for separation of union membership from its leaders. Throughout the late 1940s, major US publications such as the Saturday Evening Post, American Mercury, and Look “exposed” the dangers of “red” leadership in East Pittsburgh, and the House Un-American Activities Committee held hearings on supposed Communist infiltration just as union elections approached. Federal Bureau of Investigation informants “surfaced” to add more scandal.

The announced 1949 expulsion of the UE from the CIO, and the formation of a competing International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IUE) under James Carey, partly accomplished the companies’ goal. The UE had flatly refused to comply with the Taft-Hartley Act, until forced by law to do so, further refused to fire staff and officers due to political beliefs, and attacked the Cold War by supporting Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party campaign. The IUE, with the support of public officials up to President Truman, appealed to nativism, religious fears, and defense-industry self-interest.

Withdrawing from the CIO before its expulsion, the UE gradually lost members until reaching a low of 100,000 in the mid-1960s, when raiding ceased, and then dropped to 80,000 after multiple plant shutdowns in the 1970s–1980s. Nevertheless, the UE remained a moral beacon of the union movement, its UE News (long featuring cartoonist Fred Wright, and in recent years Gary Huck) the most progressive major union newspaper. The UE assumed new significance during the 1960s, as one of the few unions to support the anti-war movement; it prepared the way for a number of unions to oppose US engagement in Central America in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the UE reached down to its roots and developed two innovative strategies. On the one hand, the UE aggressively pursued a community-based organizing strategy. In some respects this organizing approach extended the experiences of the original organizing drives of the CIO, which were often based on strong community support. The UE established strong links with community organizations, and working with them identified potential organizing targets and contacts.

The UE extended the strategy of building organizing drives with community support to include efforts to achieve recognition without recourse to the National Labor Relations Board. With the help of community organizations, churches, and respected neutrals, the union held representation elections and sought to encourage firms to recognize the union based on this show of support. Likewise, the strategy of community-based organization included successful campaigns to win first contracts. In all cases, the community was brought in as an early partner, not as an afterthought.

An outstanding example of this strategy was the fight to secure the continued operation of Republic Windows in Chicago. After a brief occupation of the plant triggered by the owners’ efforts to remove the production equipment, and refusal to pay workers accrued wages, the Union and community organized what became a four-year struggle that ultimately resulted in a worker-owned cooperative operating the facility.

The UE also became instrumental in new efforts to forge links with workers in Mexico. Working in cooperation with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and with the Frente Autentico Trabajo (FAT, Authentic Labor Front), the UE sought to organize runaway shops located along the United States-Mexico border. In its relations with FAT, the UE sought to build bridges between Mexican and US workers and offer direct material support to FAT organizing efforts. Through direct action, the UE demonstrated the possibilities for cross-border organizing and mutual cooperation.

The UE also began organizing in new venues such as colleges and co-ops. In 2019 workers at the Willy Street Co-op in Madison, Wisconsin, winning a unit of more than 300 workers. At the same time, the UE again reached down to its roots and published a new manual “Them and Us-Unionism” aimed at all those workers interested in building new rank and file driven organizations.

Emspak, Frank. “The Break-Up of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 1945–1950.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972.

Matles, James, and James Higgins. Them and Us: Struggle of a Rank-and-File Union. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Schatz, Ronald W. The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Young, James. Union Power: The United Electrical Workers in Erie Pennsylvania. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017.