United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers Union

UNITED FARM EQUIPMENT AND METAL WORKERS UNION. One of the original industrial unions that arose during the Great Depression, the United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers Union (FE) received its charter from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1938. The FE organized workers at agricultural implement manufacturers and in 1941 brought the industry’s behemoth, the historically anti-union International Harvester corporation, under contract. From the start, the FE’s top leaders were associated with the Communist Party, a relationship that shaped the union’s militant character. “The philosophy of our union,” one FE official said, “was that management had no right to exist.” The FE was also distinguished by its measurable commitment to interracial solidarity, especially noteworthy in a union whose membership was about 80 percent white. By 1946, the FE had two African Americans on its eleven member executive board, at a time when few unions had any Black representation in national leadership. The FE local at International Harvester’s plant in Louisville, Kentucky, demonstrated an unusual degree of racial unity and became a force in early desegregation efforts in that city.

The FE, never an especially big union, reached its height in the 1940s at about 100,000 members, preponderantly from International Harvester plants throughout the Midwest and in Louisville. The relationship between the FE and International Harvester remained openly combative, as the union fought to maintain a large and aggressive steward body, and “wildcat” strike rates at FE plants remained extraordinarily high. From 1946 through 1954, FE members engaged in more than one thousand walkouts at International Harvester plants, actions that were either openly or tacitly supported by top officials of the FE. International Harvester management declared that the FE was run by “irresponsible radicals.”

Increasingly, in the years after World War II, the FE’s unabashed radicalism also brought it into conflict with the CIO hierarchy, especially the staunchly anti-communist president of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Walter Reuther. Reuther’s faith that labor-management cooperation could provide mutually beneficial economic growth met its most vociferous challenge from the stubbornly class-conscious FE leadership. The FE thus condemned collective bargaining concepts designed to augment corporate profitability and ensure industrial “peace,” such as the long contracts and pay increases tied to productivity that Reuther championed. FE leaders also resisted signing the non-communist affidavits mandated by the Taft-Hartley Act and heavily involved themselves with Henry Wallace’s 1948 third-party Presidential bid. In 1949, the FE entered into an autonomous affiliation with the larger, and also left-wing, United Electrical Workers (UE). Shortly thereafter, both the FE and the UE, along with eight other unions, were charged with “Communist domination” and expelled from the CIO.

Denouncing the “reds” in the FE leadership, Reuter asserted UAW jurisdiction over the farm equipment industry and launched a series of raids intended to usurp representation at plants already organized by the FE. Workers at International Harvester, however, remained doggedly loyal to the FE, voting time and again to reject the advances of the far bigger and better funded UAW. But the hostile Cold War climate proved draining for the FE, as it came under an intensifying red-baiting barrage from business forces, the labor establishment, the mainstream press, and the federal government. In 1952, International Harvester, intent on breaking the FE, insisted on a wholesale revision of its contract. Following a bitter three-month strike, marked by considerable picket line violence, the company emerged victorious. The FE lost the contract provisions that had bolstered its militancy and distinguished it from the UAW, and some of the union’s most committed local leaders were permanently discharged. Three years later, as negotiations with International Harvester approached, FE leaders feared that the company would endeavor to destroy the union altogether. Severing ties with the UE, FE officials negotiated a merger with the United Auto Workers. In May 1955 workers at International Harvester voted to become UAW members, and the FE passed out of existence.

Gilpin, Toni. The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020.