Former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who died on Tuesday, has been widely commemorated as one of the first openly gay members of Congress — and the first to come out voluntarily. Less known is the leading role he played in assisting UE locals fighting plant closings, from the early 1980s through 2010. Throughout his more than three decades in office, he was one of UE’s closest allies in Congress — and UE one of his staunchest defenders when he was attacked for his sexuality.

“He was always there,” said retired UE General President Peter Knowlton, who has lived since the late 1980s in the southeastern Massachusetts district that Frank represented for over 30 years. “He was somebody that we could count on to show up at a picket line, to show up at a rally to help us out.”

Frank was first elected to Congress in 1980. During his first term, in March 1982, he traveled to Racine, Wisconsin to participate in a Congressional hearing about plant closings [1], held by Wisconsin Representative Lee Aspin at the urging of UE. Twin Disc, a conglomerate based in Racine, had announced plans to close Paragon Gears in Taunton, Massachusetts, home of UE Local 228. Along with two other Democratic Members of Congress, Frank and Aspin heard testimony from Local 228, as well as from UE Local 1111 at Allen Bradley in Milwaukee and other Wisconsin unions.

In the mid-90s, Frank was the main Congressional supporter of UE Local 284’s efforts to save the J.C. Rhodes plant in New Bedford. Knowlton, who at the time was the UE field organizer assigned to Local 284, recalled that when the company announced their intention to close, “We right away reached out to Barney Frank, had a meeting with him. [Then-UE General President] John Hovis and I had a meeting with him, got his support and his involvement in the campaign, and our idea was to stop them from moving by any means necessary. And that ended up being a fairly significant attempt at an eminent domain campaign.”

“Eminent domain” refers to the legal right of local governments to force property owners to sell their property to the government when required by the public interest. While generally used to acquire properties for the purpose of building roads and other infrastructure improvements, UE was a pioneer in demanding that local governments use it to address the epidemic of plant shutdowns in the 1980s and 90s, especially when a company refuses to sell a factory to a potential buyer interested in keeping it open. In the case of J.C. Rhodes, UE sought to have the city council take possession of the factory through eminent domain and then sell it to a group of New Bedford businessmen who intended to keep it open.

As Frank wrote in the foreword to Refuse to Lose: Eminent Domain and the JC Rhodes Campaign, a booklet issued by UE about the campaign, “It is important to note that this plant was profitable. It closed not because the workers were inefficient, or because they could not make a product cheaply enough, or because there was competition that was undercutting them. It closed because the given set of financial and legal arrangements in the United States today made it profitable for Jerome Kohlberg [the leader of the group of wealthy investors that bought the plant] and his financial allies to buy it for the sole purpose of shutting it down. It was worth more to them dead than to the workers alive as we currently value things in our system.”

The UE campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, with the legislation to take the plant by eminent domain losing by one vote on the New Bedford city council. However, as Frank pointed out, “We lost, but in the process of losing, we demonstrated to the next Kohlberg wannabe that coming into our area to use various financial tools to take jobs away from working people will not be pleasant or easy.”

(In the 1996 elections, Frank’s Republican challenger Jonathan Raymond made his opposition to Frank’s support for Local 284’s efforts the central theme of his campaign. Raymond said, “I think we have to keep in mind that it’s profits that create jobs not jobs that create profits,” and, “Let’s not tell businesses how to run their business.” The voters did not agree: Frank defeated Raymond by a margin of 69 percent to 27 percent.)

Frank continued to be a solid UE ally until his retirement in 2012, supporting other UE locals in the area, including Local 204 during a tough contract fight at Haskon in Taunton in 2006, and then again when they fought to keep their plant open in 2010.

He frequently made the small list of Members of Congress who received 100% scores on the UE Congressional Scorecard, and was always happy to meet with rank-and-file UE members during the union’s political action conferences in Washington, DC. During his time in Congress, he was also a staunch supporter of a major UE political action priority [2]: universal, single-payer healthcare — or as it is more commonly referred to now, Medicare for All. When Local 204 was facing demands from Haskon for healthcare givebacks during their 2006 contract negotiations, Frank instead challenged the company to actually do something about the high cost of healthcare — join him and UE in pushing for universal care.

Frank came out as gay in 1987, the first Member of Congress to do so voluntarily. Asked whether Frank’s sexuality was ever an issue with UE members, Knowlton said, “People tried to make it an issue, but it wasn’t.” But as retired UE Political Action Director Chris Townsend said, “In that era, well up into the 90s, the gay question was still a firestorm.” Republicans sought to manufacture a “sex scandal” around Frank, as they had done with his fellow Massachusetts Congressman Gerry Studds, the first openly gay Member of Congress, who was outed earlier in the decade — and who was also a solid UE ally.

Townsend recalls, “District 2 President Rod Poineau literally saved Studds by inviting him to some UE member meetings. Frank likewise. The rest of labor thought they were lost causes. I recall Poineau telling me that he told Studds something along the lines of ‘Gerry, I don’t care about who you want to snuggle with. I care about working people. You do too. So let’s get back to work.’”

Knowlton noted that UE didn’t always agree with Frank, especially because he “was a strong adherent of the Democratic Party and was very uncritical of it,” while UE has already been a critic of the two-party system. “But when it came to his constituents and protecting their jobs and protecting their incomes and their families, he was actually quite excellent.

“We had our differences with him,” Knowlton concluded, “but on the nitty-gritty issues of the local stuff, he was always really good.”