On Friday, UE joined a rally at the Gary-Chicago International Airport, to protest the deportation of immigrants.
“An attack on immigrants is an attack on worker rights, and the working and living conditions of all U.S. workers,” said UE Local 1177 executive board member Shelly Burke, who represented UE on the speakers’ list. “We need a halt to deportation and all other harassment of immigrants.”
“UE has always supported a foreign policy based on labor solidarity and diplomacy,” said UE General President Peter Knowlton. “We especially welcome Senator Sanders’ insistence that our country must seek to build stronger relationships between people at the grassroots level, and his drawing attention to the fact that inequality, corruption and authoritarianism are part of a single system that oppresses and exploits workers across the globe.”
UE General President Peter Knowlton and Local 506 Executive Board Member at Large Matt McCracken spoke at a press conference this morning opposing the continued offshoring of jobs by General Electric and other companies.
"Sanders' Medicare for All bill is exactly what UE members have demanded for decades: a universal, single-payer healthcare system which guarantees coverage for all people," said UE Director of Organization Gene Elk. "We are ready to mobilize our members and communities to take on the health insurance industry, Wall Street, and the politicians who represent them, and to win healthcare as a right."
UE stands in full opposition to President Trump’s decision this week to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program, and in solidarity with those taking action to resist it.
White supremacists and neo-Nazi organizers emboldened by Trump’s presidency see the Trump era as their time and Trump has done absolutely nothing to discourage them. UE condemns the attack on Charlottesville VA and promises to continue organizing in our workplaces and communities to fight racism, fascism and bigotry.
At its quarterly meeting the UE General Executive Board adopted the following statement on the Trump administration's plans to renegotiate NAFTA.
RENEGOTIATION OF THE NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT (NAFTA)
United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE)
Donald Trump has made some horrible choices for his cabinet, such as, for Education Secretary, a billionaire who knows nothing about public education except that she wants to privatize it. His Treasury Secretary nominee is a former Goldman Sachs partner who foreclosed on 36,000 homeowners, in one case throwing a 90-year-old woman out of her house because she made a 27-cent error on a payment.
The election of Donald Trump, while very disturbing, should not come as a complete shock. For the past several decades the political establishment in both parties has advanced a set of policies known as neoliberalism that has made life harder for working people. Neoliberalism includes free trade, deregulation, privatization, and dismantling the social safety net, and it has been pursued aggressively by Republican administrations since Reagan, and Democratic administrations starting with Bill Clinton. This election year brought rebellion in both parties against what Bernie Sanders called “establishment politics and establishment economics.” That rebellion took the form, in the Democratic primaries, of the inclusive progressive populism of Sanders, and on the Republican side, the authoritarian, bigoted populism of Trump.