United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America - UE Reshapes Itself

UE Reshapes Itself

The UE and IUE began to cooperate in bargaining after the IUE's disastrous 1960 strike against GE. In the successful 103-day national strike in 1969-70, UE and IUE led an alliance of unions which broke the back of Boulwarism, GE’s aggressive 20-year-long policy of “take-it-or-leave-it” bargaining. Boulwarism was named for Lemuel Boulware, the company’s vice president of labor and community relations, who devised the strategy in reaction to UE's success in the 1946 strike, and to capitalize on the bitter divisions, after 1949, in the ranks of GE union members. The 1970s brought UE renewed growth through successful organizing. UE lost many members in the 1980s and 1990s as the flight of many manufacturing plants abroad led to plant closings by both major employers in the electrical manufacturing industry, as well as by smaller UE employers.

Despite shrinkage of GE's U.S. manufacturing employment, UE remains a major force within General Electric today and plays a leading role in negotiating contracts that cover members of 13 unions in GE through the Coordinated Bargaining Committee. UE’s role in the union coalition resulted in union gains in 2007 national negotiations with GE.

The UE has broadened its scope in recent years, organizing public employees, service industry workers, school and college employees, and others. The UE has also replaced some other unions in workplaces where the existing unions has failed to adequately represent the membership.

The UE has entered into a Strategic Organizing Alliance with the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT), Mexico's Authentic Labor Front, in which the UE and FAT collaborate in organizing and educational projects. UE's organizing alliance with the FAT started in 1992 and grew from the two organizations' shared opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The UE has also formed alliances with non-labor groups, both in the U.S. and internationally, through the World Social Forum, to fight the effects of corporate globalization promoted by institutions of global capital such as the International Monetary Fund and free trade agreements modeled on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Beginning in the mid-1990s, UE has been organizing state and municipal workers in North Carolina, chartering their statewide organization as UE Local 150. A North Carolina state law dating to the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, General Statute 95-98, prohibits public employees from bargaining labor contracts. UE is campaigning to repeal that act and replace it with legislation to facilitate public sector bargaining.

As part of that campaign, UE in December 2005 brought a complaint before the International Labor Organization, the UN’s labor agency, charging that the North Carolina bargaining ban violates international agreements on labor rights, which uphold the right of nearly all workers to form unions and bargain collectively. In March 2007 the ILO ruled in favor of UE, and called upon the United States and North Carolina to repeal GS 95-98 and begin discussions with unions to establish “a framework for collective bargaining.” UE’s Mexican ally the FAT, with the support of 52 other U.S., Mexican, Canadian and global labor organizations, filed a complaint in October 2006 with the Mexican National Administrative Office – a body established to address complaints of labor rights violations under NAFTA. The complaint charges that the North Carolina bargaining ban violates the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), the labor-rights side agreement to NAFTA. In November 2007 the Mexican NAO launched an investigation into those charges.

The plight of North Carolina public employees was dramatized in September 2006 when sanitation workers for the City of Raleigh conducted a two-day strike over unfair treatment and working conditions. Since the stoppage those workers, organized by UE Local 150, have won improvements and regular consultation of city officials with their elected union leaders. UE has expanded its public sector organizing to two other states in the Upper South that also lack public employee bargaining rights, establishing UE Local 160 in Virginia and UE Local 170 in West Virginia.

UE has also become known throughout the U.S. labor movement as the "National Home for Independent Unions", and works with many independent unions across the country. Over the past 20 years a number of existing independent unions have affiliated with UE, seeking the resources, support and solidarity of a national union and attracted by UE's democratic structure and practices.

One such victory came in July 2005 when the 2,500 member Connecticut Independent Labor and Police Unions (CILU/CIPU) voted by an overwhelming margin to become UE Local 222. Since joining UE, Local 222's work has focused on bringing democracy, justice and equality to the workplace, and on organizing and mobilizing its members and local communities in fights for gender pay equity, ending all forms of discrimination, and health care for all. The local has also added members by organizing additional groups of school and municipal workers in Connecticut.