United Office and Professional Workers of America

UNITED OFFICE AND PROFESSIONAL WORKERS OF AMERICA. Inspired by the industrial unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), dissident organizers from the American Federation of Labor’s Bookkeepers, Stenographers, and Accountants Union requested a charter in 1937 to form the United Office and Professional Workers of America (UOPWA); membership reached 43,000 workers by 1943. While some UOPWA organizers were members of the Communist Party, the union also attracted support from independent leftists, urban clerical workers, salaried employees, and white-collar professionals.

Along with the United Federal Workers and the State, County, and Municipal Workers of America, the UOPWA was given a mandate to organize what most leftists saw as a problematic segment of the labor force, the “white collars.” Never quite certain whether to view them as an inherently middle-class sector that would identify with management, or as exploited workers with legitimate grievances, many of them women, the CIO leadership found it problematic to make office-work organizing an ongoing effort. The UOPWA’s influence was narrowly circumscribed when the CIO ordered it to stay away from office workers under the jurisdiction of other industrial unions, most of which continued to ignore clerks or to bargain away their interests. The UOPWA was left with clerical workers in paperwork industries like insurance and banking that had virtually no history of union membership and were managed by corporate interests dead set against unionization. Nonetheless, the UOPWA organized direct-mail assembly-line workers, credit-house clearing workers, insurance agents, book editors, Arthur Murray dance instructors, and thousands of clericals, and by 1948 had 75,000 members in more than one hundred locals nationwide.

Organizing efforts of the UOPWA raised important conceptual problems, problems the “workerism” ideology of the Left, traditionally focused on male workers in heavy industry and manufacturing, found difficult to rethink. While the union repeatedly challenged racial discrimination, its leaders were largely unable to confront divisions based on discrimination against women workers and widespread professional elitism, which often operated in tandem to privilege men’s concerns. Women clerical workers were often dismissed as incapable of being dedicated unionists and given almost no professional organizing training. Nonetheless, women rose to positions of leadership in some locals, particularly in Boston, Chicago and New York’s Local 16. Important victories after World War II showed that wide-ranging office-worker unionism was a real possibility.

After thirteen years of increasing success in organizing white-collar workers, the UOPWA was expelled from the CIO in the 1950 purge of union members who refused to sign “loyalty oaths” mandated by the Taft Hartley Act of 1947. It would not be until the 1970s that an industrial unionist approach to white-collar organizing would again appear in the labor movement, inspired by the Feminist movement and “Boston 9 to 5” in 1973, expanded in the National Association of Working Women, and a partnership with the SEIU (Service Employees International Union.).

McColloch, Mark. White Collar Workers in Transition: The Boom Years, 1940–1970. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Social Network Cooperative.“United Office and Professional Workers of America.”

Strom, Sharon Hartman. “‘We’re No Kitty Foyles’: Organizing Office Workers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1937–1950.” In Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, edited by Ruth Milkman. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Political Woman: Florence Luscomb and the Legacy of Radical Reform. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2001.

Sturmthal, A. F., ed. White Collar Trade Unions: Contemporary Developments in Industrialized Societies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966.