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A FIGHTING UNION’S PATH TO RENEWAL: THE UE STORY  
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Chris Townsend
May 9, 2025
UE News
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_ The ongoing organizational renewal and substantial growth of UE is
one of the most remarkable stories in the U.S. labor movement in
decades. Of the 42 unions who comprised the founding roster of the CIO
in 1938 only eight survive intact today. _

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_The UE NEWS asked retired UE Political Action Director Chris Townsend
to write a summary of how UE’s membership base has changed over the
years. Brother Townsend joined the UE staff in the late 1980s, when
the membership was primarily (though not exclusively) manufacturing
workers, and retired in 2013, after the union’s membership had
expanded to include significant numbers of public-sector, higher
education, federal contract and rail crew workers, and supplemented
his own experience with detailed research from UE convention
proceedings and interviews with participants._

The ongoing organizational renewal and substantial growth of the
United Electrical Workers (UE) is one of the most distinctly
remarkable stories in the U.S. labor movement in decades. Few other
unions have suffered such losses from state repression, raiding
attacks by opportunist unions, and the catastrophic effects of
corporate job relocation — and survived. Of the original 42 unions
who comprised the founding roster of the Congress of Industrial Unions
(CIO) in 1938, a grand total of eight survive intact today. UE is one
of them. The remainder have passed out of existence, been destroyed by
repression and employer attacks, or been merged into larger unions and
lost forever.

Born in the electrical, radio, machine tool, and related manufacturing
industries, UE membership for the first four decades remained nearly
completely within those industries. The constant emphasis on the need
to organize the unorganized did lead to many thousands of
non-manufacturing members being brought into the union, but virtually
all were clerical or technical workers already working side by side
with UE’s members for the same employer. Occasional small groups of
non-manufacturing workers would find their way to UE and try to join.
They were dutifully encouraged to unionize but directed to another
union, whichever union that might already represent that sort of
worker elsewhere. Union “jurisdictions” were a serious business
then, with most unions dutifully staying in their own lane so far as
the types of workers they organized. With UE’s organizing base in
several specific manufacturing sectors, it was almost unimaginable
that unrelated types of workers would somehow make a home in a union
dominated totally by factory workers.

Along Comes Antioch College

Members of UE Local 767 protest the Vietnam War in 1971.

By the mid-1960’s, during the beginnings of the student organizing
upsurges across the country in support of the civil rights movement
and in opposition to the burgeoning Vietnam war, Antioch College
student LARRY RUBIN contacted UE asking the union to organize the
service and maintenance workers at the Yellow Springs, Ohio, campus.
Rubin and other students had already told the workers about UE’s
record at the bargaining table, its democratic processes, and its
rank-and-file character. The reflexive impulse of the union was to
refer them to another union, a union better suited for their type of
work. But Rubin, the students, and the workers involved all made the
case over and over that UE was the union they wanted to belong to.

UE organizer MEL WOMACK, one of the early African-American staff
members, finally went to bat for bringing the Antioch workers into UE,
taking Rubin’s plea all the way to the UE officers in New York City.
“I knew about UE from my family in Philadelphia, and this was the
right union for these workers. But we had to convince them that it
would be a good fit,” commented Rubin.

Making the decision a bit easier for the union was the fact that
virtually the entire union membership in Ohio had been destroyed or
lost during the preceding 15 years of raids and plant closings. As the
union organized new factories and reclaimed some lost shops in the
heavily industrialized state, the Antioch College workforce offered a
chance to rebuild a solid foundation for new manufacturing organizing.
A 1965 strike for union recognition was quickly won by the college
workers and students, and their official entry into UE allowed for the
reconstitution of UE District Seven shortly after.

For the past 60 years the Antioch members have played a consistent and
positive role in the life of the union that had nearly turned them
away. But the members of UE Local 767 today comprise just a handful
because of the closing of most Antioch operations in 2008 — a victim
of epic mismanagement. The Antioch College story transcends the entire
era from when UE began to seriously consider new non-manufacturing
workers for membership, and it also teaches the lesson that in an
economy driven completely by profits and “efficiency,” even a
workplace such as Antioch is not immune to layoffs or closing. 

Tough Decisions

By the 1970’s, UE began to experience wave after wave of layoffs and
plant closings as manufacturing bosses began their exodus from the
U.S. for low-wage zones across the globe. Retired UE Director of
Organization ED BRUNO commented that, “All through the 70’s and
into the 1980’s we suffered major losses as plants closed. Formerly
big plants were whittled down to just a few hundred members or even
less. It was hard to imagine. By the time Reagan was elected President
the floodgates opened. We had tried to organize runaway plants in the
South, with only limited success. And those plants were not immune to
closing either, as we discovered with the loss of the Tampa
Westinghouse and Charleston General Electric plants we had organized.
No plant was safe anymore.”

As the 1980’s ground on, the union experimented with a number of
strategies to organize again and regain lost membership. “By 1987
and ’88 we were forced to rethink our relationship as a union to the
manufacturing sector. We looked at trying to organize semiconductors,
medical equipment, service shops and other industries still largely
based here in the U.S. And we decided to take a look at the plastics
industry.” said Bruno. “We went all-in.”

The Plastics Organizing Effort

Plastics workers from across the country gather at the UE national
office in Pittsburgh, November 1989.

The plastics industry presented a formidable target for UE organizing.
It was decentralized and largely unorganized. Profits were high, and
wages were low. Early probing into the 600,000-worker sector yielded
above-average interest in unionizing by many workers, but employer
resistance was fierce. Sensing the need to move quickly under the
deteriorating conditions, UE devised the “Plastic Worker Organizing
Committee” (PWOC) plan of action, where several hundred plants would
be approached by the union simultaneously. All with the hope of
triggering a contagious wave of new organizing spirit among the
workers in the industry as was the model of legendary U.S. organizer
William Z. Foster in his approach to organizing meatpacking and steel
industries early in the 1900’s.

* _For more history on the PWOC efforts see __the thumbnail history
here_
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the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee. And for readers interested
in Foster’s legacy his collected works,_ AMERICAN TRADE UNIONISM_,
is __available_
[[link removed]]_ from
International Publishers._

Early PWOC results were encouraging, as large numbers of workers
responded to UE’s outreach and call for organization, better wages,
better benefits and working conditions. Plastic product and component
manufacturing plants were leafleted widely and workers were contacted
in several hundred plants. PWOC groups were started across a dozen
states and the union launched a full mobilization with hundreds of
union staff, local leaders, members, and UE supporters deployed. But
almost immediately employers responded to the organizing push with
fanatic and illegal repression.

Workers were fired, threatened, and terrorized from coast to coast.
Union-busting meetings were held in union targeted shops, and so
pathological was boss resistance that plastics employers not even
encountering UE yet forced their workers to attend anti-union
meetings. In UE’s historic base city of Erie, Pennsylvania, then and
now the home of many thousands of UE members and retirees from several
locals, the plastics employers held meetings to coordinate their plan
to repulse the organizing effort by all means legal and illegal.
Gigantic billboards were put up across the city decrying UE’s
organizing effort, all to induce fear and panic among the several
thousand workers in the Erie PWOC area.

Crushed

Only a handful of plastics shops were organized by the end of the
nearly two-year effort. One, Reid Valve in Leetsdale, Pennsylvania,
was organized only as a result of the massive lawbreaking by the
company during the organizing drive. Current UE International
Representative JOHN THOMPSON, then a shop leader, led the drive in
the plant where the employer engaged in illegal firings and conduct so
severe that the NLRB ordered recognition for the union without an
election as the remedy for the outrageous company lawbreaking. The
exceedingly rare “bargaining order” granted to UE by the labor
board for the Reid workers may well have been the only such order
granted that year to a labor union trying to organize.

Organizing progress across the entire union had nearly come to a halt
as the union-busting cloud descended on workplaces across all sectors.
Between the late 1980’s and 1992, the union was able to win
elections and organizing drives totaling barely several hundred
workers per year. This crisis was mirrored across the entire labor
movement, as mass layoffs, partial closings, and complete plant
shutdowns accelerated. The inability to crack into the plastics
industry in spite of the herculean effort by the entire union was
sobering. Was there a future for UE? Or any union? Was there a way
forward? Could the union even hang on, let alone revive?

New Course Needed

The question of widely diversifying the industrial sectors being
organized by UE remained a larger option, and by the early 1990’s a
small trickle of such shops had already been won. Experimentation with
organizing non-manufacturing workplaces and affiliating existing
independent unions took form, but were small in scale as most efforts
remained focused on factory organizing. Bus operators in Greenfield,
Massachusetts joined city and school district workers already part of
UE. Movie theatre and radio station staff had organized into UE in
Boston. Construction workers in Sacramento, California signed up. A
temporary employment agency was organized in Sioux Falls, South
Dakota. Radio station staff were won in Los Angeles, California. Bank
safe installers and alarm technicians were organized in Philadelphia.
A newspaper staff unit had been organized in Vermont. And there were
others, mostly small shops. Recruiting union members in
already-organized open shops also brought in some needed new blood as
the union implemented a renewed push in this regard as well.

Early Forward Momentum

With the election of BOB KINGSLEY as the new Director of
Organization in late 1992, it was apparent that UE was in immediate
need of expanded experimentation with the organization of new sectors.
“We didn’t want to give up on organizing manufacturing workers,
but we had to do something to bring in new members to offset the
losses,” said Kingsley. “Our factory members stepped-up and saw
the need too. Over and over and over again we relied on them to take
the UE message to workers far away from the factory floor.”
Magnifying the earlier work of Ed Bruno, Kingsley launched a major
outreach to independent unions across the country. Results were
significant, and in 1993 alone more new workers were organized either
by affiliation votes or NLRB elections than in the previous decade.
Public sector workers, truck drivers and mechanics, port workers,
warehouse workers, and food service workers joined, boosting the
numbers of non-manufacturing members in UE dramatically. Factory
workers continued to be organized as well, a welcomed uptick after
years of decline.

Iowa

The campaign to win the affiliation of the large Iowa United
Professionals (IUP) independent union was key to opening the door to
additional units not traditional for the union. This large statewide
unit of state professional workers had voted in a leadership vote to
join UE in 1989, only to be counseled to return home and develop
actual rank-and-file support for the move. By the spring of 1993, both
IUP and UE were ready, and the overwhelming vote to join UE by the
membership was another shot in the arm for UE’s rebuilding efforts.
Kingsley recalls, “We won the Iowa affiliation vote in the middle of
their epic spring flood, where half the state was under water. We had
UE factory members from all across the country crisscrossing the
state, extolling the UE’s merits from the shop floor perspective, in
the midst of this calamity. We got votes for determination alone and
won overwhelmingly.”

The big Iowa win allowed UE to launch additional organizing campaigns
for unorganized public-sector workers at school districts and county
workplaces, with new successes. By 1995, graduate teaching and
research assistants at the University of Iowa contacted UE, and
veteran organizer CAROL LAMBIASE was tasked with determining if a
campaign was feasible for the 2,600 workers.

After an enormous and sustained campaign, the University of Iowa
workers voted overwhelmingly to join UE in April of 1996. This marked
the largest organizing win in several decades for UE and gave the
union new energy to expand organizing even further. Everyone in UE was
celebrating the big Iowa win, but a common question was, “Tell me
again what kind of work they do?”

UE NEWS coverage of the election win at the University of Iowa.

New Directions

The organizing success in Iowa, including UE’s very first graduate
worker unit, all set the stage for continued UE growth in the public
sector as well as other new sectors. Through the 1990’s and beyond,
UE set down additional membership roots in the health care sector, at
food coops, among rail crew van drivers, and among federal contract
workers, all while maintaining a realistic focus on new organizing in
the original manufacturing sector. GENE ELK and MARK
MEINSTER followed Kingsley as directors of organization in the last
decade, and each led membership and staff in the direction of further
growth in a diversity of sectors. Both helped set the stage for the
explosive growth of the last three years, enabling the union to emerge
from the pandemic period strengthened with more than 35,000 new
members joining from higher education ranks alone
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A Remarkable Renewal

The role played by UE Local 896, the Campaign to Organize Graduate
Students (COGS) — the University of Iowa graduate teaching and
research assistants and first UE win in that sector — was
trailblazing. Local 896 has compiled a solid record of rank-and-file
and democratic local functioning, aggressive struggle on behalf of the
members’ interests, and in opposition to the blizzard of political
attacks waged against public employees in Iowa for almost 30 years.
This outstanding record is all the more remarkable given that owing to
the nature of their profession, workers do not remain for lifetime
careers. Each successive generation must relearn the union history and
from the point they are hired must join the front ranks of the local.

It would have been inconceivable for any of us who spent time in UE
— in my case a 25-year career — to have imagined that Local 896
would have helped to rekindle UE to such an awesome extent. But why
not? When those of us who were grappling with the difficult and at
times unsolvable puzzle of just how we were going to reverse UE’s
decline, and build new membership again, we always believed that there
existed a large section of workers who wanted real, aggressive,
militant, and member-run unionism. We learned that workers are shaped
somewhat by the work they perform for a boss someplace, but more than
that working people are shaped by a desire _not just for any
union,_ _but for a better kind of union._ UE’s assembly line
workers, machinists, toolmakers, and factory hands are now largely
replaced with higher education, public service, health care, rail,
retail, and technical workers. But rank-and-file unionism pushes on to
another generation, delivering real results and proving
that _member-run unionism works_.

A full stage during the Organizing Report at the 2023 UE Convention.

UE holds high that banner, and the response of workers like the
several tens of thousands who have poured in to the union’s ranks in
the past several years is proof of that. A special union salute is in
order to the UE founders, the old-timers who kept UE going in the most
trying of times, the current membership, officers, local activists,
and staff who kept rallying to UE’s banner, and now to the many new
faces arriving to replenish the ranks.

If UE did not exist it would have to be invented. On to the next stage
of growth, and wherever that takes us.

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