Labor and Working-Class History

Fifteen years ago, on September 17, 2011, approximately one thousand people gathered in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, launching the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Establishing a permanent encampment — a tactic that soon spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the country and the world — the movement brought attention to the skyrocketing inequality between the wealthiest one percent and the rest of us, “the 99 percent.”

On November 20, 1975, 730 workers at the General Electric turbine plant just outside Charleston, South Carolina voted to join UE, forming Local 1202. It was the second large electrical manufacturing plant in the South to organize with UE in the 1970s, following the Tampa Westinghouse plant, where workers formed UE Local 1201 in 1972.

In early April, UE Communications Director Jonathan Kissam presented remarks at a panel about the legacy of labor historian David Montgomery, who was a rank-and-file member of UE Local 475 before he became an historian. Kissam spoke about Montgomery’s life-long connection to the labor movement and popular struggles, and how that engagement provides a model for how intellectuals can make their work relevant to the public, and to workers in particular. The panel was part of the Organization of American Historians’ 2025 Conference on American History.

Last summer, the University of Illinois Press published A David Montgomery Reader: Essays on Capitalism and Worker Resistance, a collection of essays, some of them previously unpublished, by the late historian. Montgomery — a former UE member who addressed no less than four UE conventions — transformed the study of U.S. labor history in the 1960s and 70s. His work moved the focus of the discipline away from institutions and “great men” and to the way rank-and-file workers resisted dictatorial bosses and the insatiable demands of capital in their workplaces and communities.

Seventy-five years ago today, what was perhaps the most dramatic national convention in UE history opened in Cleveland.

In the months leading up to the convention, the corporate and government forces that sought to wipe out UE’s brand of militant, rank-and-file unionism were gathering steam. The UAW and the Steelworkers had been taking advantage of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, to raid UE shops. And within the union, a faction that wanted to abandon UE’s principles of aggressive struggle, rank-and-file control, political independence, international solidarity, and uniting all workers were preparing to try to wrest control of the union at the upcoming convention by accusing the union of being “communist-dominated.”

August 27 marks the 75th anniversary of the Peekskill Riots, two attacks by right wing mobs on concert-goers in Peekskill, in upstate New York. The audience was composed of union members, including UE members, and civil rights activists, and they had gathered to watch popular Black singer and actor Paul Robeson perform.

When you walked into UE Hall in Chicago you were greeted by an image of hands clasped together in solidarity with the UE logo in the background. Painted on the underside of the main staircase, the multi-racial hands reflect UE’s long history of uniting all workers regardless of race, nationality, or sex. The “Solidarity” mural that graced the walls of UE Hall on Ashland Avenue in Chicago was dedicated by its lead artists, John Pitman Weber and Jose Guerrero, “To the Builders of the Future, the Men and Women who Work in the Mines, Mills, and Factories.” Above this dedication were the 1857 words of Frederick Douglass reminding visitors that “If there is no struggle there is no progress.”

A new radio documentary produced by New England Public Media tells the story of how a UE local in a “deeply conservative rural county” in Massachusetts not only survived but grew during the red-baiting attacks on UE in the early 1950s. The 50-minute documentary “At Sword’s Point” first aired on May 4 and 5, but can be streamed from the NEPM website. Produced and narrated by public historian Tom Goldscheider, the documentary includes interviews with retired UE District Two President Judy Atkins and International Representative David Cohen.

The past two months have seen the release of two new limited-run podcasts about the history of the CIO, the federation of industrial unions that arose from and led the worker upsurge of the 1930s and 1940s. Organize the Unorganized tells the story of the CIO in a crisp, newsroom style, through the voices of prominent labor historians and of the participants themselves. Fragile Juggernaut, produced by a group of journalists, organizers and historians and sponsored by Haymarket Books, is taking a longer and deeper historical view.