Aggressive struggle through concerted action is an essential feature of rank-and-file unionism. We do not see the union as an insurance agency to which members pay a fee in exchange for the services of high-paid business union staff who say they’ll “take care of it for you” through legalism, lobbying, and backroom deals. A union is a workers’ organization, built by members to improve their conditions through collective action.

In contract negotiations, this means involvement of the members in developing their demands. It also means using tactics in the workplace that show support for the bargaining committee and keep pressure on management. Too many union leaders believe the best way to negotiate a contract is to keep their members in the dark and keep them quiet. Our approach is to give the members as much information as possible to engage in action to support their proposals and to develop strategies and tactics to maximize membership participation.

The same is true in dealing with violations of workers’ rights that occur between contract negotiations. Stewards often find the chance of resolving a grievance is greater when members collectively express their discontent to management. Many locals have effectively used such tactics as mass grievances signed by every worker in the shop or department, or even delivered to the boss by a mass delegation. Locals find creative ways, while a grievance is going through the formal steps of the grievance procedure, to remind management of rank-and-file support for the union's position. Our reluctance to take our grievances to arbitration grows from our unwillingness to place our fate in the hands of a third party.

The UE approach to political action—collective action for political change, rather than attempting to buy influence with politicians through campaign contributions or via paid lobbyists—is closely related to our concept of workplace struggle. For our members in the public sector, political action and workplace struggle are frequently inseparable.

Aggressive struggle requires building solidarity beyond our ranks, with other unions and community organizations. UE left the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1949, when the CIO had lost its militant and progressive direction, but we have always found ways to interact with trade union and community allies who share our approach. Among those places are Jobs with Justice (JwJ) chapters, Labor Notes conferences, the Southern Workers’ Assembly, and local alliances in many communities. UE Local 150 participates in Workers’ Assemblies in Durham, Charlotte, Raleigh and Fayetteville, NC. These assemblies are groups of unions, activists, and community members organized around workers’ rights in the South, and are currently supporting UE organizing campaigns.

For the past 44 years, Labor Notes and its network of supporters have actively promoted this kind of cross-union rank-and-file solidarity. It has become an indispensable resource for trade unionists. UE leaders, rank-and-file members, and staff contribute regularly to Labor Notes, sharing our experiences and analyses with other trade unionists worldwide. Labor Notes conferences are now the largest gatherings of rank-and-file union members in the country. UE continues to provide some of the largest union delegations at national Labor Notes conferences and plays an important role in conducting workshops and plenary sessions.

The basis for UE’s participation in local, national and international coalitions, organizations and gatherings has always been a desire to build a more vigorous, responsive, and relevant working-class movement that can carry out aggressive struggle on all fronts to improve conditions for the whole working class.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Calls on the union at all levels to educate our members about the necessity, effectiveness, and most useful strategies of workplace struggle, including the purchase and use of books such as the Troublemaker’s Handbook, published by Labor Notes;
2. Calls on locals to ensure that proper democratic practices are in place to involve members in workplace struggle, including, when appropriate, stewards’ meetings and trainings;
3. Urges greater publicity for gains achieved by our members through workplace struggle in the UE Steward, UE NEWS, local union newsletters, and other union communications;
4. Commits to transparency in all forms of negotiations with the employer;
5. Calls on the union at all levels to:
   1. Participate in, support, and join Jobs with Justice, the Southern Workers’ Assembly, and other formations that bring together unions and community organizations;
   2. Participate in the next Labor Notes Conference in Chicago on June 12-14, 2026.
6. Encourages members and locals to participate in or assist the formation of Labor Notes Troublemaker schools, subscribe to Labor Notes, purchase bulk subscriptions and books, and submit articles for publication.

The last two years were full of uncertainty and more than a share of pain for the American working class. However, they were largely a good period for taking on the boss. Although businesses are not currently hiring as many people, few of them are laying workers off. This means employers have had to give additional ground on wages and working conditions. UE members have taken advantage of this to negotiate another historic round of contracts, a testament to what a rank-and-file union can accomplish.

Nowhere have the advances of the current period been stronger than in wages. Most agreements across the private sector achieved substantial increases, with dozens seeing the highest wage increases reported ever—increases which put real wage growth solidly ahead of inflation. Large increases were seen across many UE sectors, including manufacturing, higher education, food co-ops, and government contractors.

While not every UE shop saw historic wage increases, the tight labor market and rise in militancy reaped dividends everywhere. Many long-established UE locals were able to leverage the current conditions, in concert with aggressive shop-floor action, to fight off concessions to current health benefits, while improving paid leave, work rules and other contract language.

Unfortunately, numerous policy changes from the second Trump Administration suggest far more uncertainty over the coming period across essentially all UE sectors, all while dealing with the typical ratcheting down of labor rights under reactionary presidents. While the U.S. may yet avoid a recession, most of our shops will likely face more trying times when they next return to the table. Thankfully, UE is also at our strongest position in decades, and more able as a national union to punch back against this systematic war against the working class when it impacts us at the bargaining table.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79th UE CONVENTION:

1. Calls for education, engagement, and mobilization of members in preparation for the aggressive campaigns that are necessary for favorable contract settlements;
2. Calls for broadening contract struggles beyond the bargaining table by including strategic campaigns, shareholder actions, and labor-community alliances;
3. Calls for building solidarity with other unions (both domestic and international), especially those of the same employer;
4. Calls on locals to keep members informed, engaged, and mobilized at every stage of negotiations;
5. Directs the national union to continue providing:
   1. Research packets to UE workplaces entering contract negotiations, and to continue including in these materials the suggested bargaining goals list based upon best practices of UE locals developed through years of struggle;
   2. Trainings and workshops, as well as in-person support by regional or national officers as needed.

With the election of Donald Trump, the billionaires have taken firmer and more naked control of our government. Intent on further rebalancing power away from the working class, these oligarchs have set upon dismantling the few rights and protections workers have left, including cancelling union contracts for hundreds of thousands of union members in the federal sector, largely without any militant response from our nation’s main labor federation.

But putting the Democrats back into power will not save us. For decades, both parties have been complicit in dismantling the social safety net won by unions and their allies in the 1930s and 1960s. Neither party has made a meaningful effort to reform labor law or hold corporations and the rich accountable. Even under the Biden administration, union density continued to fall and workers like graduate fellows were excluded from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act.

Organizing the unorganized has been a bedrock UE principle since our founding. We understand that only through unity with other workers in our workplaces, industries and in society can we build the power needed to control the fruits of our labor and right the wrongs of our economic and social system. But more than ever, a growing, militant, class-oriented labor movement is necessary.

In societies facing increasing authoritarian control, workers’ collective power to disrupt the system is often the key factor in restoring democracy. It will be hard, but we can take inspiration from the struggles waged before us, including the general strike by Black workers in the South that broke the back of slavery, the great strikes at the end of the 19^th century, the upsurge of industrial workers in the 1930s and 1940s, the civil rights, women's and LGBTQ+ movements, and the great public-sector strikes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Across the world, the fights for union recognition and against authoritarian rule have often been intertwined. In Spain, South Africa, Brazil, South Korea, and elsewhere, union militants waged daring struggles that brought millions of workers into new unions and labor federations founded on the same principles that animate UE today.

UE’s growth over the past several years has bucked the trend among U.S. unions, proving that workers are hungry for a democratic, fighting union in this period. Building a union like ours is necessary not only to build our power, but as part of a larger strategy to beat back encroaching fascism and construct the world we want to see.

Since our last convention, UE has brought 25,000 new members under contract across eight universities. These efforts were led by hundreds of graduate workers who took the reins of the organizing process, doing the work of building the union in much the same way that UE’s founders did in the electrical, radio and machine plants of the 1930s. They maintained large contract action teams to keep members informed and engaged during bargaining. They held escalating actions, including pickets, rallies, press conferences and more. They built solid majorities of members in support of strikes. This made possible the historic first contracts that they won.

UE’s organizing in the higher education sector has spread beyond graduate workers: on August 25 and 26, 1,200 postdoctoral researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL will vote in an NLRB election.

But our goal is not only to build UE at the nation’s universities. Our hard-won financial stability allows us to target our core private-sector industries: manufacturing and logistics (especially rail manufacturing), government contractors, rail crew transportation, and retail grocery. Since the last UE convention, Hallcon drivers in 13 different units have joined UE through the card-check recognition process in our national master agreement with that company. This work was done by stewards, chief stewards, and other members of our Hallcon UE locals. In addition, Hallcon drivers have successfully fought to organize new transportation contractors that take over Hallcon’s work, such as PTI in Colorado and Southern California.

At the Kentucky Consular Center, UE Local 728 won card check recognition for the maintenance workers at the facility, who work for a different contractor called PacArctic. The local went further, successfully taking on the task of bargaining a first contract with that company.

Members of UE Local 1186 at Willy Street Co-op assisted on an affiliation involving 1,000 grocery store workers at 11 New Seasons grocery stores in Portland, OR. The workers, who formed the New Seasons Labor Union and won recognition on their own, and are bargaining a first contract, recently voted to affiliate with UE.

Local 506 at Wabtec has played a critical role in supporting the long-term organizing drive among 600 workers at Wabtec’s Fort Worth, TX facility, hosting the Texas workers at the UE Local 506 hall in Erie, PA for several days, and traveling to Fort Worth this summer to support the organizing there, in addition to holding regular Zoom calls with the organizing committee. UE spent the summer building contacts at several plants in the rail manufacturing sector across the country.

UE’s public sector organizing continues in Eastern Virginia, where efforts among municipal workers at Virginia Beach hit a setback in May 2024 when the city council voted down a collective bargaining ordinance. However, opportunities have arisen in other cities, including Newport News, Norfolk and Portsmouth. UE has put together a coalition of unions and community and faith leaders to support collective bargaining and push back against a concerted right-wing attack to deny these workers their human right to organize.

Our firm commitment to our principles—aggressive struggle, rank and file control, uniting all workers, political independence and international solidarity—has led to thousands of workers joining UE over the past two years. These principles set us apart, and give us the basis to not only build UE in the coming years, but to play a leading role in the fight for democracy, fairness and a just economy.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION ADOPTS THE FOLLOWING ORGANIZING PLAN TO BUILD OUR UNION:

1. UE will continue to serve as the “Union for Everyone” and will organize across the industrial, service and public sectors of our nation’s economy, serving as a beacon for workers seeking a fighting, member-run union and uniting workers from a wide range of occupations in the common pursuit of aggressive struggle to improve our conditions;
2. UE will place special emphasis on waging campaigns at sister shops and in industries where we have an existing presence, building our bargaining strength in order to defend past gains and improve our conditions. These sectors include rail manufacturing, higher education, government contractors, rail crew transportation and retail grocery.
3. UE recognizes right-to-work as a relic of Jim Crow laws and understands the racist origins of modern anti-union law. We further recognize the role that racism and white supremacy play in furthering corporate campaigns against labor rights and we therefore affirm efforts to organize predominantly Black public-sector workers in Virginia, which now has limited bargaining rights for municipal workers, and in North Carolina, where our members’ struggles for the past 25 years have served as a model for workers organizing throughout the South;
4. UE will continue its efforts to organize in higher education, especially historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), not only inviting graduate workers into UE but building campaigns among staff researchers, postdoctoral researchers, clerical staff and other areas of the industry;
5. UE will not shy away from taking on large private-sector corporations nor from launching organizing efforts in new sectors and parts of the country with lower union density such as the South. As resources allow, UE will test bold and innovative strategies to organize large private sector employers in industries such as engineering, technology, biosciences, e-commerce, manufacturing, and retail, and will encourage organization among workers who do not want the products they produce or the services they deliver used in ways that harm others;
6. UE will continue to build its ranks in its existing base areas, prioritizing areas with viable organizing targets, the active support of member volunteers and community allies, and other key strategic factors that enhance our prospects for success;
7. UE will look for opportunities for joint organizing work with allied organizations, such as Black Workers for Justice, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, the Southern Workers Assembly, Warehouse Workers for Justice, El Futuro es Nuestro and other unions, worker centers, including Black and Latinx worker organizations;
8. UE will continue building its worker-led organizing model, seeking to synthesize long-standing UE organizing approaches with our experience during the pandemic, learn from the recent influx of thousands of new members, and apply these lessons to the organizing campaigns ahead. We will continue to test new organizing strategies, such as building pre-majority unions where formal recognition cannot be achieved in the short term, waging recognition strikes, and employing other militant organizing tactics;
9. UE will encourage members in high turnover industries, after leaving their UE-represented workplace, to stay involved with the union and organize the non-union workplaces in their industry or sector;
10. UE will invite independent unions to join us as the national home of independent, member-run unionism, and we will offer refuge to workers in other unions who are seeking to escape corrupt, undemocratic conditions;
11. UE will build our ranks through internal organizing wherever open-shop conditions exist and will develop new plans and materials to assist locals in states that have adopted right-to-work-for-less laws or other measures to undermine union strength and security;
12. UE will involve our rank-and-file members in organizing whenever possible and will take the following steps to encourage more members to help organize the unorganized:
    1. We will provide training and support for members who wish to become involved in organizing and we will provide members with the tools for reaching out to nonunion workers in their communities and industries and engaging them in the organizing process;
    2. We will continue joint sponsorship with regions and locals of organizing trainings, blitzes and other special programs for which lost time and other costs are shared by the national and the region or local to make greater member participation possible;
    3. We will encourage locals to negotiate for better union leave provisions to enable more members to get time off the job to assist in building the union;
    4. We will respect cultural and language differences in our organizing work, and we will continue to reach into our ranks to find more volunteer organizers from diverse backgrounds.

Working people continue to face daily assault. The economic and political attacks and repression against working class and oppressed communities and organizations have intensified as Trump’s second term has more clearly exposed the corporate rule in this country. Organized labor—barely one-tenth of the workforce today—is one of the last defensive bastions of the working class. Corporate executives, Republican, and corporate Democrat leaders know that if they destroy the union movement, they eliminate the last substantial obstacle to their greedy agenda. Workers are responding with strikes, new political insurgencies, and many other forms of mass fightback.

Neither of the two largest and most dominant political parties in the U.S. today are representative of or willing to stand for working people in this country. Biden and Democrats in Congress ended pandemic aid, allowing increases to the child tax credit and Earned Income Tax Credit to expire, pushing additional millions back into poverty. Biden maintained cruel immigration policies, crushed a potential rail strike, and expanded fossil-fuel drilling, despite running on being one of the most “pro-labor” candidates in the field for both parties. Rather than deliver for working people, the Democratic establishment thought they could rely on voters’ rejection of Republican extremism, which proved to be politically fatal.

Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election not because most working people agree with his racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric, but because he spoke more effectively to the real issues faced by working people today. Basic essentials of living—such as housing, food, childcare, education, and medicine—have become increasingly unaffordable as corporations squeeze working people for every penny of profit they can get away with. Republicans recognized this, taking advantage of peoples’ frustrations with Democrats, sweeping into the White House and taking control of both chambers of Congress.

The Republican campaign in 2024 shamelessly scapegoated immigrants and pitted non-immigrants against them. Democrats could have stood up to the lies that Trump and his cronies peddle about immigrants, whose labor built and continues to drive real production in this country. Instead, Democrats folded and joined in on the dogpile. Let us be very clear—immigrants are not to blame for the plight of working people in the U.S. The problem is the capitalists and billionaires who exploit the labor of all working people. UE stands firmly with non-U.S.-born workers.

Despite the political onslaught brought on by the Trump Administration, the remarkable upsurge of working-class organizing that rose in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic shows no signs of abating. We are seeing this in both fights in the shop, as union members take advantage of the leverage afforded by a tight labor market to press for higher wages, and on the new organizing front. In addition, 2025 had the largest May Day demonstrations in decades, organized by coalitions of labor unions and immigrants rights organizations, as well as massive ongoing protests against the right-wing assault on workers and against genocide and war. However, this upsurge has yet to find a coherent or consistent political expression, as our nation’s politics continue to be defined by increasingly sharp rhetorical divisions between the two corporate parties, neither of which is interested in uniting or supporting the working class.

UE locals have also been active at the state level in fighting for themselves. In early 2024, graduate workers in Locals 1466 and 1498 teamed up at the New Mexico state legislature to fight for their wages. When their employers claimed there was no money in their billion-dollar budgets for raises, workers decided to make the change themselves. They navigated the complex and confusing political landscape, created their own materials, and met with their representatives directly during the whirlwind 30-day legislative session. In doing so, workers won millions in state allocations explicitly for increases to graduate worker salaries. Local 1105, University of Minnesota Graduate Labor Union, won a campaign through the state legislature to expand their bargaining unit to include graduate fellows.

Indeed, public-sector workers are still fighting for their right to bargain collectively and are taking matters into their own hands at the state legislature. UE Local 150 members continue to advocate at the North Carolina state legislature for this right. Members organized their own political action day, speaking to their representatives about overturning the Jim Crow-era ban on collective bargaining in North Carolina and other issues that concerned them. They have coupled this with strong rallies at their workplaces, exemplifying the importance of participating in both political action and building worker power at the workplace. The fight for collective bargaining continues, particularly in the South, and UE stands firmly in support of winning collective bargaining rights for all workers.

UE members have also taken action in support of the union’s Green Locomotive Project (GLP), a campaign to create good union jobs through a just transition, address climate change, and clean up pollution in working-class communities near railyards. Local 1077 has been active in supporting efforts to win legislation in California to clean up railyards, and New Mexico Locals 1466, 1477, and 1498 wrote a joint letter to Congressman Gabe Vasquez, urging him to push the EPA to approve the waivers necessary for such legislation to come into effect.

As workers, we have the knowledge and skills to run society while billionaires contribute nothing, but profit from our labor. We must fight and organize independently from both major political parties in order to unite around our class interests. As UE, we should approach this in two major ways. First, recognizing the reality that workers need major changes as soon as possible, UE should push for reforms that are beneficial to the masses of working people. This includes (but is not exclusive to) the following: Medicare for All, canceling student debt and making higher education free, protecting and expanding the rights of non-U.S.-born workers, expanding the right to manufacture more green-powered locomotives and other products that will abate climate change, expanding the right to form unions and bargain collectively, and organizing for a federal minimum wage of $17 per hour and national rent control. Second, we should build upon the increasing willingness of the American people to vote for candidates who are independent of both parties to create a true political alternative, a labor party that can unite and speak for the working class. We need to engage other labor unions and work with allies who are already making efforts at electoral strategies independent of the two major parties.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Calls on the union at all levels to:
   1. Educate and mobilize the membership to carry forward a working-class political program;
   2. Support only lawmakers and candidates who consistently take concrete actions to defend working people;
   3. Mobilize the membership and work with allies to promote worker issues, including full collective bargaining rights for all workers, and to elect pro-worker candidates;
2. Calls on locals and regions to contact lawmakers on key issues through petitions, letters, phone calls, emails, lobby visits, annual political action days, town hall meetings, rallies, marches, civil disobedience, and other means to win positive political change;
3. Urges all locals to undertake campaigns to register members and their families to vote, including campaigns at the workplace, and to encourage participation in all elections, from the local to the national level;
4. Encourages locals and regions to engage in local independent political action to ensure that all people are able to exercise the right to vote;
5. Encourages UE regions, locals, and members to become involved in working-class movements for economic, racial, and environmental justice;
6. Reaffirms our support for the formation of an independent working-class political party.

Guided by UE’s principles, in the last two years we have refocused our education program to empower rank-and-file leaders with trainings on the skills and knowledge needed to run their locals, regions, and national union, and to collectively fight the bosses and the politicians who support their interests.

Only when members run their locals do we have a member-run national union that is able to fight back against this administration’s attacks on civil rights and workers’ rights. Workshops held at regional council meetings, sub-regional meetings, and national conventions, as well as training sessions organized by local unions, have focused on equipping members with the skills needed to fight back in an era of increased anti-worker attacks. Educational events help members and local union officers learn about policies on grievance handling, workplace representation, preparation for bargaining, how to wage a strike, union financial integrity and practices, data management, and other leadership skills. The work of the Southern Workers Assembly and our union’s participation in Labor Notes Conferences and Troublemakers Schools have contributed to our efforts to bring forward new activists and leaders who will carry the union’s work into the future.

In the last two years we have welcomed a great number of new members and leaders into UE. Through our program of worker-to-worker education, they have been trained by established locals in skills necessary to run strong, militant locals steeped in UE’s principles. The worker-to-worker education model draws on the direct transfer of the experience and knowledge each of our locals has in waging shop floor fights. Workers trained by other workers on how to fight the boss gain confidence to undertake such fights themselves. This education program has also proven that when workers are called upon to be experts in their own fights by educating other workers, they gain the confidence to take on their own bosses in even bigger fights. The model creates a number of on-ramps for development of a new generation of leaders, especially among those from the most marginalized groups. This leads to an exponential increase in the leadership capacity that is required to run locals powerful enough to win against the bosses without relying on staff.

A lot of UE members are young. The challenges facing young workers today—including precarious employment, student debt, climate change, and attacks on democratic rights—require a union that actively engages with and supports its younger members. The labor movement depends on the engagement and leadership of the next generation to ensure its continued strength, relevance, and resilience. UE has a proud history of developing rank-and-file leadership and empowering young workers to take up the fight for justice in the workplace and beyond. The Young Activist Program has been a vital initiative providing education, leadership training, political analysis, and movement-building opportunities for young UE members, helping to develop future leaders of the union. Past participants of the Young Activist Program have gone on to take up important roles within the union, contributing to organizing, bargaining, political advocacy, and internal union democracy. Reinvigorating the Young Activist Program is a continued commitment to developing a new generation of rank-and-file leaders rooted in working-class values, militant unionism, and opposition to racism, sexism, bigotry, and capitalist exploitation.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Commits the national union to establish a worker-to-worker educational program to:
   1. Organize and facilitate the exchange of members across locals for education purposes;
   2. Sponsor paid time for workers to engage in worker-to-worker education;
2. Commits the national union to establish a member-run education committee which works with locals and members to produce education programs, trainings, and materials, and evaluate education needs, the results of which are to be reviewed by the committee and made available via the UE website ueunion.org. The GEB will take this up at the first meeting of 2026 to be presented to the membership at the 2026 regional council meetings;
3. Commits the national union to provide educational materials and workshops to assist members to run effective local unions and successfully wage local, national and international struggles, including:
   1. Steward training and grievance handling, democratic operation of a local, local union finances and integrity, and preparing for negotiations and in-shop struggles, with training tailored to the needs of each local;
   2. Sub-regional educational and training conferences;
   3. A day of workshops at the national convention and workshops for use at regional, sub-regional and local membership meetings;
   4. The UE Steward and other materials for local officers, stewards and members;
   5. Political education that counteracts corporate media influence and promotes a working-class consciousness;
   6. Maintenance and promotion of the UE website;
   7. Continued publication of the UE NEWS;
   8. Continued translation of materials into Spanish and/or other languages;
   9. Providing language interpretation of meetings where appropriate;
   10. Utilizing video teleconferencing to conduct educational training;
   11. An updated UE Leadership Guide, to include digital access;
   12. Sponsoring paid time exchanges between members of different locals;
4. Calls on all locals to:
   1. Provide leadership development of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ members;
   2. Educate their members about UE history and principles;
   3. Regularly publish local newsletters;
   4. Recognize the educational value of monthly membership meetings;
   5. Hold classes to introduce new members to the union, explaining policies, structure, and collective bargaining agreements;
   6. Seek the right to conduct union orientation for new hires during work time;
   7. Use websites, social media, and union bulletin boards to educate members;
   8. Encourage and support younger members in education opportunities;
   9. Negotiate employer-paid lost time for members to attend training and educational events;
5. Commits the national union to revitalize and update the Young Activist Program by:
   1. Prioritizing this program in upcoming budgets and strategic planning;
   2. Actively identifying and encouraging young members to participate in the program;
6. Commits the national union to establish a mentorship program to pair new young union members with veterans of rank-and-file unionism, retirees, and alumni, with the purpose of developing skills in the following: negotiating skills and tactics, managing a UE local, and dealing with the boss.

The last decade has been among the most difficult periods in UE history, as a combination of plant closings, layoffs and union busting significantly depleted our membership, and thereby the resources available to the union at all levels. With severely limited resources, we were forced to make many difficult decisions, including reducing our administrative staff to the bare minimum. This presented a variety of challenges to the national union, to the regions, and to locals.

Now that a remarkable wave of new organizing has brought our membership back to a sustainable level, and provided the union with more resources, it is an appropriate time to reaffirm our commitment to financial transparency (“open books”) and prudent spending (“tight fists”), and to ensure that the union at all levels is able to maintain these practices.

UE’s commitment to “open books” has been critical in getting us through this recent period. The difficult decisions that were frequently needed were made through a democratic process by elected rank-and-file members fully informed of the union’s financial situation. In order for members to make informed decisions, it is critical that the union at all levels provide regular financial reports to the membership. And in order to ensure that officers are accountable, the books must be regularly audited by trustees at the national, regional, and local levels.

Our commitment to “tight fists” has been equally important. We have gotten through this period by being very wise about how we have used our limited resources. Indeed, our frugality allowed us to still spend significant resources on organizing the unorganized—without which we would not have experienced the membership growth that has brought us back to financial stability.

Although we now have more resources, we should not abandon the principle of “tight fists,” but rather work to ensure that our resources continue to be used wisely at all levels of the union. We must rebuild our strike fund so that our members have full confidence in taking on the boss, continue to improve and modernize our administrative and accounting systems so we can provide support to locals, and maintain our commitment to new organizing to strengthen our union and the working class as a whole.

Recommitting to the principle of “open books, tight fists” is particularly important as we return full financial autonomy to the UE regions. Regional officers, executive board members, trustees and regional council delegates will now have full responsibility for ensuring both financial transparency and wise spending of their resources.

As we grow our finances, we recognize that the global working class faces existential crises of labor exploitation, imperialist war, racialized and gendered violence, and tightening repression on labor organizing. We must invest our financial resources in ways that ensure that they are used as a tool to build our collective strength, not as an aid to the rapacious profit of corporations.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Commits the national union to:
   1. Updating our materials on handling finances;
   2. Creating modular trainings for local financial officers;
   3. Creating digital tools for financial reporting and online payment of per capita payments;
   4. Assisting locals in making use of these resources;
   5. Continuing to upgrade our accounting systems to build capacity for reporting;
   6. Supporting locals in their enforcement of union security clauses;
   7. Modeling best practices in providing regular financial reports;
2. Calls on locals and regions to:
   1. Consider developing best practices regarding finances if they do not already have them;
   2. Provide financial reports at each meeting of the body;
   3. Have regular trustee audits and submit the audit reports to the national office;
   4. Ensure that their financial books are made available in a complete and timely manner for their annual outside audits and preparation of government filings;
   5. Engage their members in decision-making about how dues money is spent to carry out the goals of the union in the most effective manner;
3. Instructs the Secretary-Treasurer to invest and expend UE’s financial resources in a manner that:
   1. Respects the values established in the union constitution or enumerated through previous national convention resolutions, such as UE’s endorsement of Boycott, Divest, Sanction;
   2. Does not benefit employers where workers are striking, undermine union power, or enable the weakening of labor organizing;
   3. Does not fund the war industry, violate international human rights norms, support prisons and police domestically or internationally, or in any way abet the perpetuation of genocide;
   4. Does not expand the scale of the climate crisis or deepen the environmental harms faced by the working class;
4. Commits the national union to developing resources to assist the financial officers and treasurers of UE locals and regions in enacting policies similar to those described in point 3 above at the local and regional level.

Workers around the world face the same conditions: bosses who maximize their profit by moving their investments without regard to their impact on communities or the environment. As long as there are places where workers toil for starvation wages without health and safety protections, it’s hard to achieve or maintain good wages or conditions anywhere. We must work collaboratively across borders in order to effectively fight back against the multinational corporations that dominate our economy.

UE encourages our members to build relationships with workers in other countries through international travel and other exchanges. Over the past two years, UE members have renewed our tradition of worker-to-worker exchanges with our international allies, with UE members traveling to Cuba, Mexico, Quebec, and Japan to deepen our solidarity with workers in those countries, and hosting international allies at the 2024 Labor Notes conference in Chicago.

In May 2024, UE sent our first delegation since 2017 to visit with our close Mexican ally the Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT). FAT and UE members discussed organizing opportunities, political dynamics, and the challenges facing working women in their respective countries. The FAT also arranged a meeting with the Alianza de Tranviarios de México (ATM), an independent union representing workers in the electric tram and trolley system in Mexico City, to discuss UE’s Green Locomotive Project. In May 2025, UE General President Carl Rosen attended the triennial convention of the Conseil central du Montréal métropolitain (CCMM-CSN) of UE’s close Quebec ally Confédération des syndicats nationaux, which brings together 110,000 CSN members in the greater Montreal area, and in August Local 506 Business Agent John Miles traveled to Japan to join our close ally Zenroren in commemorating the 80^th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

UE also strengthened relationships with numerous international allies from Japan, Quebec, Canada, France, Australia, Great Britain, Norway, New Zealand, and more at the Labor Notes Conference in April 2024. The conference provided opportunities for many UE members to meet and exchange experiences with their counterparts from other countries. Following the conference, the Zenroren delegation stayed in Chicago an extra day to continue their exchange with UE and meet with the Chicago Teachers’ Union.

UE is also actively working to build solidarity with workers in the Wabtec chain globally, who share the same employer as UE Locals 506, 610 and 618, building links with Wabtec workers in Great Britain, Brazil, and Italy. In November, UE Local 618 Business Agent Janet Gray and Staff Coordinator John Thompson will travel to Australia to participate in the Congress of IndustriALL, the global union federation in the manufacturing sector. IndustriALL played a key role in setting up a global alliance of General Electric workers in 2019; we are hopeful that this congress will help us set up a similar alliance in the Wabtec chain.

International partnerships inspire UE’s approach to a wide variety of our work. In July 2024, the National Labor Network for Ceasefire, which UE helped initiate, hosted a webinar with Palestinian trade unionists and the advocacy organization Workers in Palestine. Hundreds of U.S. unionists heard moving testimonies directly from Palestinian trade unionists about the living and working conditions for Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank.

The tariffs announced by President Trump will affect workers, not just in the U.S., but around the world. In early 2025, UE President Rosen spoke with Lana Payne, the National President of Unifor, a close UE ally and Canada’s largest private-sector union, about ways to approach Trump’s tariffs from the perspective of international solidarity among workers.

International solidarity has always informed UE’s approach to questions of international trade, and we worked closely with both the FAT and Canadian unions in opposing the initial passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and in demanding improved labor standards when its successor agreement, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), was negotiated. The USMCA includes provisions requiring the three countries to periodically review, and possibly amend, the pact, and reviews of the labor and environmental chapters of the agreement are scheduled to take place starting this year.

Although Trump called USMCA “the greatest trade deal ever,” the U.S. trade deficit has actually increased under the USMCA, compared to under NAFTA. UE is part of a large coalition of labor, environmental, and community groups that plans to mobilize to demand that changes be made to the agreement to improve labor standards in all three countries.

International solidarity is especially important as the world sees a rising tide of right-wing authoritarian governments, which often use appeals to nationalism and demonization of immigrants and foreign workers to justify attacks on human and labor rights. We know from history that the labor movement—and international solidarity among workers—have played a key role in defeating authoritarian regimes in the past, such as apartheid in South Africa and the military dictatorship in Brazil.

An inspiring and more recent example is the leading role that the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions played in the defeat of an attempted military coup in December 2024, when South Korea’s right-wing president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, banning all political activity, strikes, and “gatherings that incite social unrest.” The martial law order was overturned within hours, after Korean citizens, including many KCTU members, took to the streets and surrounded the parliament building. Following marches, demonstrations, and strikes called by KCTU affiliates, the South Korean parliament voted to impeach Yoon in December; he was removed from office in April and replaced in June by Lee Jae Myung, a parliamentary leader who had helped lead opposition to the coup.

By remaining unwavering in our commitment to international solidarity in the coming period, we advance our interests in promoting democratic, rank-and-file worker control at home and abroad.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Reaffirms our solidarity with the FAT of Mexico; Zenroren of Japan; Unifor of Canada; CSN of Quebec; FIOM of Italy; Central Union of Workers (CUT) of Brazil; CGT of France; New Trade Union Initiative of India; Kilusang Mayo Uno of the Philippines; Unite the Union of the United Kingdom; Korean Confederation of Trade Unions; and other democratic worker movements around the world;
2. Reaffirms our participation in and support of the global union federation IndustriALL;
3. Commits to building relations with unions abroad through direct contact, progressive forums and networks, and other means, as well as establishing and deepening relationships with workers in sister shops who globally share our employers;
4. Condemns the murder and persecution of trade unionists, harassment of unions, and union busting anywhere in the world;
5. Encourages locals and members to increase their involvement in our international program and to make contributions to the UE-FAT Solidarity Fund and UE Research and Education Fund;
6. Commits to ongoing worker-to-worker exchanges with our allies and educational work with our members in order to deepen our alliances and understanding of global labor conditions so that we may engage in collective action together;
7. Joins our ally Zenroren in commemorating the 80^th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this month, and reaffirms our commitment to work with Zenroren to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.

Racism is one of the greatest evils and has always been a roadblock to building a strong labor movement. It is a specific form of discrimination based upon the false belief that some groups of people are inherently biologically superior to others. Racism provides a basis for institutionalized systematic oppression and exploitation that is foundational to American capitalism.

Racism and white supremacy are promoted by capitalists to justify the exploitation, oppression, theft of land and resources from, and the erasure of the history and culture of Black and Indigenous peoples. Both were also a means of dividing the working class and justifying the brutal system of slavery, colonial genocide, Jim Crow, vigilante murders, and police brutality and killings.

The persistence of institutional racism affects all peoples of color, and is evident in the economic and social oppression and exploitation experienced by Black people in particular. Black people suffer from disproportionately higher unemployment, lower wages, and poorer working conditions. On average, Black people are twice as likely to die from disease, police murders, accidents, and homicide as whites. Black people are more likely to be arrested, three times more likely to become prisoners once arrested, and serve longer terms. Racists and white supremacists blame the victims of these conditions, rather than blaming the capitalist system that creates these injustices.

People of color, especially Black people, are more likely to be stopped by police, searched, arrested, and become the victims of police and vigilante violence. The murder of countless people of color by police is outrageous. This is not merely the result of individual racist police officers but of a widespread, systematic disrespect for the lives of Black people and other people of color.

Racism and white supremacy extend beyond the U.S., and are a core element of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The Israeli project of clearing Palestinians out of Gaza shares common roots with the displacement and militarized police violence faced by Black, brown, and Indigenous people in the U.S. Multiple police departments in the U.S. have received training provided by Israeli forces, bringing the rabid tyranny demonstrated by the Israeli military to U.S. streets.

While America has had a long history of racism, the second Trump Administration has openly embraced white nationalism in a manner not seen in generations. The right-wing demonization of so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) programs has morphed into the use of DEI as a thinly-veiled racial slur. The administration is demanding that various institutions, from legal firms to universities to reproductive health services providers, abandon “all DEI efforts” or face lawsuits or cuts to their funding. A recent federal settlement with Brown University goes even further, requiring the university to submit annual reports listing the race/national origin, GPA, and test scores of all of its students, under the presumed threat that the university will face legal action if nonwhite students underperform white averages. Numerous federal appointees, both civilian and military, are being purged by the Trump Administration as well, with a high percentage of those targeted being people of color, particularly Black people.

The second Trump Administration has also seen a wholesale attempt to erase the history of Black and other nonwhite Americans. In March of 2025, the Trump Administration purged 26,000 items referring to nonwhite contributions to the military, from the Tuskegee Airmen to the Navajo Code Talkers to Jackie Robinson’s service. Memorials dedicated to the service of nonwhite soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery have also been removed. Trump complained on Juneteenth that the U.S. had too many federal holidays. He has also ordered a review of all exhibits of the Smithsonian (an independent, but federally-supported network of museums) to adjust their “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals,” with one White House official stating that they “will explore all options and avenues to get the woke out of the Smithsonian and hold them accountable.” The implication is that even the National Museum of African American History must downplay the reality of Black history if it means to survive.

Police brutality and state repression continue to deepen and broaden, being further encouraged by Trump, most recently in pro-brutality comments made in support of his deployment of National Guard troops into Washington, DC to combat an entirely fictional crime wave. In July 2025, William Anthony McNeil Jr., a 22 year old Black man, was violently assaulted in Florida—was punched in the head through his car window, dragged through the street, and beaten for the crime of asking to speak to the officer’s supervisor after being pulled over for driving without his headlights on while it was daytime and not raining.

In response to continued police violence against Black people, Black Lives Matter became a mass movement. After the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, somewhere between 15-26 million people participated in demonstrations across the U.S., making the Black Lives Matter protests the largest protest movement in U.S. history. UE members were a part of these protests, and marched and bravely stood up to white supremacy, hatred, racism, and violence. The need for a mass movement to stop racist repression continues.

Since our last convention, a second cohort of UE leaders completed their participation in the UE Leadership and Staff Development Program, designed to develop the leadership of UE members from racial and ethnic backgrounds who are underrepresented in UE leadership or on UE staff. Several program participants have joined the UE staff or been elected to the General Executive Board. A third cohort is now underway, and members of the cohort are participating in this convention.

Working-class unity can never be taken for granted. Winning depends upon our success in the fight against racism. UE and the wider labor movement is not immune from racism. We must consciously work to overcome racism in our diverse working class.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Recognizes that an important part of fighting racism is affirming it exists, especially in light of the current racist attempts to whitewash history;
2. Reaffirms UE’s policies of aggressive struggle against racism and in support of equal rights;
3. Calls on locals to defend our members aggressively against racism and discrimination;
4. Calls on locals to develop pressure campaigns against any employers that discriminate against people of color in their workplace, including in promotions, hiring practices, wages and otherwise;
5. Declares its support of workers and their communities’ fight against divisive racist terror;
6. Declares its support of Palestinians and all those facing oppression due to racism and white supremacy;
7. Opposes the assaults on DEI, and accessibility efforts, as well as on any other affirmative actions being taken to mitigate the impact of racism in our society;
8. Directs the UE Education Department to continue providing workshops on racism and discrimination at all levels of our union;
9. Reaffirms the union’s commitment to developing the leadership of members of color, including through our Leadership and Staff Development Program;
10. Calls for elimination of racial profiling, police brutality, and “stop-and-frisk,” a repeal of “stand-your-ground” laws and stands in opposition to the politicians that would support these policies;
11. Urges the union at all levels to support and work with local organizations like Southern Workers Assembly, Black Workers for Justice, NAACP, National Conference of Black Lawyers, Southern Movement Assembly, National Movement for Black Lives, and other organizations fighting racism and discrimination;
12. Condemns all attacks on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, religion, race, color, creed, or caste, particularly those on people who are Black, Arab, Muslim, Latinx, Jewish, Indigenous, and Asian;
13. Calls on UE at all levels to make our members and communities aware of the increase of hate groups in our workplaces and communities, to provide information to help them to recognize and combat all forms of hate, and to expose racism in the media, and urges UE locals to regularly monitor such activities in their local communities. and engage in outreach to materially uplift and organize their local communities impacted by racism;
14. Urges locals to set up unity councils;
15. Demands strict enforcement and just punishment for violation of existing anti-discrimination and hate crime laws;
16. Urges the union movement to expose and condemn racially biased and selective reporting which blames people of color for the poverty they are suffering as a result of government and corporate policies;
17. Urges locals to study the Freedom Manifesto put out by National Assemblies for Black Liberation;
18. Urges locals to work with local municipal workers’ unions and community groups to reallocate funds from over-bloated police departments to meet the needs of city workers and community wellness;
19. Calls upon the union at all levels to support political candidates that vehemently oppose racism and discrimination of all kinds and at all levels of government;
20. Calls on the union at all levels, including locals, to examine the racial, cultural, national, citizenship, and ethnic makeup of their elected leadership as compared to their membership, and to work to encourage a diverse and representative leadership body.

Women and gender-nonconforming people have always been in the vanguard of the labor movement, combating racism, sexism, bigotry, and capitalist exploitation. Women and gender-nonconforming labor leaders like Clara Lemlich, Mother Jones, Fannie Sellins, Mary Moultrie, Dolores Huerta, and Marsha P. Johnson have led the fight for improved working conditions and gender justice in the U.S. In 1909, the women-led New York Shirtwaist Strike transformed the conditions of garment workers in the country, paving the way for decades of labor reforms for all workers. During the West Virginia coal wars and the Empire Zinc mine strike in New Mexico, women who lived on mine company property played an outsized role in maintaining and organizing strikes and pickets. Women labor leaders also played a prominent role in the liberatory movements starting with the civil rights movement and beyond.

However, despite generations of strong female leadership, women still earn lower wages and face worse conditions than men. Currently, women working full-time make only 83 cents per dollar earned by men, and this pay gap is worse for women of color, with Black women earning approximately 66 cents on the dollar, and Latinas, approximately 59 cents compared to a white man. At this rate, it will take until the year 2088 for gendered pay gaps to be erased.

Much of the gendered pay gap is because our corporatized society penalizes women who juggle the dual roles of worker and caregiver, work that disproportionately falls on women. While under the Biden Administration some laws, like the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) and the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers (PUMP) Act, expanded accommodations for pregnant and nursing mothers in the workplace, only 27% of civilian workers have access to paid family leave. Mothers are more likely to face job disruptions than fathers due to unaffordable and inconsistent childcare, and the percentage of women in the workforce has remained lower than prior to the pandemic, with Black women most acutely impacted.

Women have organized not only for better wages and benefits, but also for workplaces free of harassment and discrimination on the basis of gender presentation, sexual orientation, age, and race, among others. In FY 2024, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported an estimated 7,500 to 8,500 complaints, most filed by women. Fifty-eight percent of women report having experienced gender harassment at work. Unions play a key role in reducing gender and racial disparities in pay and rates of unjust firings. Although it is the employer’s legal duty to provide workers with a safe and healthy workplace, it is the responsibility of union members and leaders to aggressively hold the boss accountable and to defend members who face harassment, discrimination, and bullying. Sexual harassment takes an intense physical, mental, and emotional toll and has been shown to limit workers’ careers and force them out of the workforce.

UE locals have been at the forefront of the fight against sexual harassment, winning and enforcing contract protections such as gender equity; nondiscrimination; anti-harassment; and interim relief measures in grievance procedure clauses. Many UE locals, including Local 150 in North Carolina and Local 115 in New Jersey, have organized against sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, citing widespread sexual harassment as one of the main reasons they organized and fought for stronger workplace protections.

Sexual harassment and discrimination are illegal, prohibited under most union contracts, and against UE’s values. Sexual harassment is perniciously deployed against women who are seen as advocating too much for themselves and their coworkers. It is a tool of the boss, used to stoke division and sow distrust between workers and prevent them from claiming their collective power. An environment where sexual harassment is tolerated and perpetuated weakens our union as a whole. The fight against sexual harassment is a fight for women and for all workers.

Beyond combating sexual harassment in the workplace, we must combat all forms of sexual harassment in our union. In the labor movement, women seeking positions of leadership often face sexist attacks, harassment, and bullying. Although UE has led the fight for gender equity, we are not immune from sexism and sexual harassment. Fighting to end sexual harassment must begin with our conduct as union members and leaders, and we must hold each other to account to build a union where women rank-and-file members and leaders are empowered and respected. UE’s call to organize all workers, “regardless of skill, age, sex, nationality, color, race, religious or political belief or affiliation, sexual orientation, disability or immigration status,” must be renewed over and over again.

UE has always held that reproductive rights are a key element of women’s rights, and reproductive rights, like many others, are under assault under the second Trump Administration. While he insisted during his 2024 campaign he would leave abortion “up to the states,” instead we have seen a massive federal intrusion into reproductive care. In April of 2025, Trump attempted to block over 1,000 clinics from family planning funding under Title X, including many Planned Parenthood branches. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” went even further, attempting to cut Medicaid funding to any clinic that provided abortion services (for the moment blocked by a federal judge). To be clear, the Hyde Amendment has stopped federal funding for abortion since 1980. Now the Trump Administration is trying to eliminate all funding for organizations providing services like STI testing, pregnancy testing, or gynecological exams if they also happen to provide abortion services which still remain legal.

The Trump Administration has begun efforts to eliminate access to mifepristone, a safe and effective drug used in miscarriage care and the majority of all U.S. medication abortions. The evidence being used to justify this attack is junk science from a Project 2025 cosponsor. There are even indications that the Department of Justice may use the Comstock Act, a little-known 1873 law which stops the mailing of “obscene” material, to ban the mailing of mifepristone, making abortion access much more difficult unless women have direct access to clinics—clinics which other elements of Trump’s policy are doing everything to shut down.

UE members need to apply ever-greater pressure on politicians and bosses to advance and maintain women’s rights, while also ensuring that women’s rights are fully respected within our own union.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Demands that Congress:
   1. Expand the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to cover all caregivers, regardless of family structure;
   2. Enact national paid parental leave and universal childcare policy;
   3. Pass legislation which establishes the right for health care professionals to provide abortion care and the right for their patients to receive care, free from bans and medically unnecessary restrictions that single out abortion care;
   4. Repeal the Hyde Amendment;
   5. Pass legislation to advance health equity for Black women and other women of color, by addressing the drivers of maternal mortality, morbidity, and disparities;
   6. Build subsidized, livable-wage childcare infrastructure;
   7. Ban salary history inquiries to reduce pay disparities;
   8. Expand WIC (Women, Infants, and Children program), SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), and other crucial social support programs;
   9. Pass legislation that protects and continues to support the right to reproductive freedom as a whole;
   10. Reinstate and expand global aid programs supporting reproductive justice;
2. Demands state legislators repeal state-level abortion bans and restrictions;
3. Calls on the national union to:
   1. Promote the reestablishment of a UE Women’s and Gender Nonconforming Caucus, including adding it to convention programs or agendas;
   2. Develop anti-sexual harassment workshops, for use at regional council meetings and national conventions;
   3. Require all General Executive Board members and national union staff to attend anti-sexual harassment training;
4. Calls on the union at all levels to:
   1. Oppose harmful legislation targeting women and families;
   2. Bargain for pay equity, safe workplaces, and inclusive policies for all women in the workplace;
   3. Promote leadership development for women and gender non-conforming members;
   4. Condemn all attacks on women and gender-nonconforming people, especially those who are people of color or immigrants;
   5. Commit to fight all forms of sexual harassment within our union and the labor movement;
   6. Educate members, officers, and staff on sexual harassment and create programs, trainings, and workshops to combat harassment, intimidation and sexist attitudes, including making use of the UE Steward article on stopping sexual harassment;
   7. Enforce anti-harassment standards;
   8. Promote employer-funded training for women entering nontraditional fields;
   9. Demand employer-paid childcare and family leave provisions;
   10. Support political candidates who are pro-labor and pro-choice;
   11. Provide quality childcare for meetings and conferences;
   12. Educate members on PWFA and PUMP Act rights and nursing accommodations;
   13. Promote global aid programs supporting reproductive justice;
5. Urges locals to:
   1. Establish women’s caucuses for the purpose of fighting for women’s issues in the workplace, and to provide a space for women and gender-nonconforming people to build community and solidarity;
   2. Establish explicit spaces for members who are women of color to build community and claim their power;
   3. Expand and strengthen protections against sexual harassment and discrimination as a bargaining priority;
   4. Defend our members aggressively against sexual harassment;
   5. Strengthen health and safety contract language and ensure injury reporting in women-dominated jobs;
   6. Negotiate leave benefits for all workers—not just those covered by FMLA;
6. Encourages all members to:
   1. Support and work with organizations fighting for women’s and family rights;
   2. Stay active, organized, and vocal in the fight for workplace and societal gender equity.

Immigrants helped build this country and continue to play a central role in our union. Since its inception UE’s aim has been to fight for all worker rights, regardless of status. Employers and the politicians that represent them seek to exploit divisions between immigrant and native-born workers, driving down wages and stripping away hard-won workers’ rights.

Over the past 20 years, Democrats and Republicans have raced with each other on who can most brutally attack immigrant workers. During President Donald Trump’s first term, there was a concerted effort to punish asylum seekers and new immigrants through twisted, illegal, and immoral policies. Nearly every aspect of immigration policy was redesigned in an explicit effort to reduce the number of non-white people in the U.S., from placing new arrivals into literal concentration camps to turning immigration judicial proceedings into kangaroo courts where individuals have no hope of prevailing.

Despite hope that immigrants’ rights would improve with the inauguration of former President Joe Biden, Biden continued and expanded Title 42, an archaic public-health order which allows the expulsion of most adult migrants without access to the asylum process, purportedly due to the Covid-19 public health emergency, although cases were much lower in the countries of origin for most of these migrants. Title 42 expired and Biden reinstituted Title 8. While Title 8 has more pathways to asylum, it can be just as burdensome as Title 42. For example, Title 8 is more punitive for those caught crossing the border. The current situation is untenable, shelters and detention centers are at capacity, with it being reported that there are shelters who turn away at least ten families with children every day. Those seeking an interview for asylum are forced to use an app called CBP One, which immediately excludes asylum seekers with older cellphones or without cellphones at all. Other problems with this app include facial recognition biases harming those with darker skin, giving applicants appointments thousands of miles away, and separating families by giving them different appointments.

In this current term, Trump has taken brazen action brutally attacking immigrant workers with vicious, high-profile Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids; abductions and detention of international workers like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk; the illegal deportation and months-long detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia; the forced self-deportation of UE Local 300 member Momodou Taal; the deaths of Jaime Alanis García and Carlos Roberto Montoya Valdez; renewed McCarthyite threats of internments and deportations of both citizen and non-citizen workers based on their political views, especially around support for the Palestinian people; attempting to revoke birthright citizenship; overnight, unilateral revocation of the legal status of international workers without justifiable grounds; and the attempted suspension of Harvard’s certification to enroll international students, meaning existing international students must transfer or lose their legal status.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” recently signed into law now paves the way for ICE to be the largest federally-funded law enforcement agency, in place of healthcare and food security for millions. Employers have a history of weaponizing workers’ immigration status to sow division within the workplace to keep wages low and to scare workers into thinking they don’t deserve rights and protections worth fighting for. UE members have seen the boss use tactics such as “losing” I-9 paperwork and implementing E-Verify to accomplish this. Even after only eight months in office, Trump’s second term promises to be even more destructive than his first and strip away even more rights of immigrant workers.

Denying immigrant workers decent wages and conditions undermines the wages and conditions of all. All workers, regardless of immigration status, must have the right to form unions, to file complaints against unfair treatment without fear of reprisal, to receive unemployment, disability and workers’ compensation benefits, and to have access for themselves and their families to affordable housing, healthcare, education and transportation.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Demands an end to all concentration and/or internment camps for immigrants, and an end to the criminalization of asylum seekers, refugees, and those who provide humanitarian aid to them;
2. Demands the complete abolition all ICE operations, starting with an immediate moratorium on all ICE raids, arrests, deportations, harassment, seizures, I-9 audits, visa revocations, and other abuses of non-citizen, especially undocumented, workers;
3. Calls for an end to all political attacks against the sanctuary city movement and encourages all locals to actively support all efforts in their community to defend immigrants from abuse and harassment;
4. Supports the inclusion of immigrants in all current and proposed public healthcare programs, including Medicare for All;
5. Calls for the Trump administration to expand access to asylum interview appointments;
6. Demands that Congress enact immigration reform legislation that:
   1. Includes a legalization program, allowing all immigrants currently living in the U.S. to remain here permanently and without penalty;
   2. Protects worker rights for both current and future immigrants, including overturning Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB;
   3. Prioritizes family unification;
   4. Liberalizes political asylum procedures;
   5. Rejects guest-worker programs;
   6. Repeals the REAL ID Act;
   7. Ensures immigrants have equal access to higher education, including student loans, financial aid, and in-state tuition;
7. Urges locals to negotiate contract language that:
   1. Protects jobs and contract rights regardless of immigration status;
   2. Allows undocumented workers to update immigration status without loss of rights;
   3. Prevents the employer from taking adverse action in the event of the receipt of a Social Security “no-match” letter;
   4. Prevents the employer from participating in voluntary ICE enforcement programs;
   5. Obligates the employer to refuse entry to ICE agents who do not possess a valid judicial warrant and to notify the union if contacted by ICE;
   6. Requires the employer to supply an independent translator and allow union representation when communicating on important matters with workers not fluent in English;
   7. Makes available copies of the contract in each language spoken by employees;
8. Encourages locals to work with and financially support local immigrant rights coalitions which assist undocumented workers and fight to fix our broken immigration system;
9. Calls on locals with immigrant members to educate employers on the rights of immigrant workers, the employer’s right to resist ICE harassment and intimidation, and the perils of ICE’s voluntary enforcement initiatives;
10. Urges locals to educate themselves about federal laws related to immigrants and refugees, and to assist their immigrant members in attaining documented status and citizenship if they so desire;
11. Calls upon all states to repeal hateful, anti-immigrant bills, such as Florida’s SB 1718;
12. Demands that state motor vehicle agencies change policies and programs that make it impossible for immigrants to legally own and operate vehicles;
13. Calls upon the union at all levels to continue to provide education and materials for members and the community about the real causes of worker migration to the U.S;
14. Urges the union at all levels to refuse to collaborate with ICE;
15. Demands that political leaders at all levels use their power against Trump’s actions, by refusing collaboration with federal authorities that target immigrant communities;
16. Calls upon locals to create positions which facilitate the participation of non-citizen workers in the leadership of the union, to encourage more non-citizen participation in union activities, and to address the specific challenges of non-citizen workers;
17. Calls upon the union to expand resources dedicated to supporting non-citizen workers, including but not limited to rights trainings and connecting them to legal resources related to immigration and international travel.

Working class unity is a core belief of our union. Article IV of UE’s constitution stipulates that all working persons are eligible for membership “regardless of skill, age, sex, nationality, color, race, religious or political belief or affiliation, sexual orientation, disability or immigration status.” We know that the bosses and billionaires use rhetorical, legislative, and other attacks on LGBTQ+ people to divide our class and weaken our movement to fight against them. We must remember who our true enemies are. They are not our LTBTQ+ community members.

While the ability to legally marry was a great victory for the LGBTQ+ community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer/Questioning, and other gender identities and sexual orientations), more than half of this community in the U.S. continues to struggle for basic rights such as safe and affordable housing, freedom from workplace violence, and to not be discriminated against because of who they are. Heartbreakingly, this discrimination is even more prevalent against LGBTQ+ people of color, who experience exponentially greater threats of violence simply because of the color of their skin.

Since January 2025, the Trump Administration and its allies have accelerated the removal of hard-fought protections, modifying federal law to strip protections from those most vulnerable to discrimination and legitimizing biological fundamentalism that puts at risk everyone who appears gender non-conforming. The administration has rolled back the clock on gains in areas of employment, housing, education, the military, health care, and numerous other government programs while trying to weaponize federal law against transgender people across the country in an effort to erase them from everyday life. This has led to increased physical attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. Among the first official acts of this administration was to sign executive orders targeting transgender people, spreading harmful and inaccurate rhetoric that ignores the existence of intersex people and centuries of gender diverse people across world cultures.

For LGBTQ+ individuals, the current moment is marked by a rapid erosion of the basic right to self-determination. Stoking fears rooted in deep, psychosocial hatred, the federal government now seeks to insert its eyes, ears, and hands into every bedroom and bathroom both by direct surveillance and enforcement, and by empowering those who would harass and harm LGBTQ+ individuals to do so with impunity. Denying trans individuals passports that accurately reflect their gender identities makes it near impossible for them to safely travel or identify themselves. Dismantling efforts towards gender-affirming care puts both the mental and physical health of trans individuals at risk.

The recent decision by a U.S. District Court in Tennessee v. Cardona strips trans individuals of harassment protections under Title IX, opening the door to invite back a veil of repression that had only started to lift. The administration has declared that sex is an immutable binary biological trait, yet any such definition as such fails to hold water. The message is clear—you do not have the right to define your identity and your relationships with others. That is the purview of the administration and its dogma, which will be enforced through harassment and repression. When such basic rights are denied to even one person, they are denied to all. We as members of UE must vehemently defend the rights of all—an injury to one is an injury to all.

Meanwhile, many states continue to push false narratives and “religious liberty” laws which allow for anyone to claim religious belief as an excuse to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals, including in employment and access to healthcare. To date, there have been 115 trans-specific bills prefiled in 2025 alone. These laws are also often constructed or vaguely worded so as to allow discrimination—up to and including termination—against unmarried women for being pregnant or using birth control. Sometimes, these laws protect further forms of bigotry, such as against interracial marriage, as long as the discriminating party claims a “religous” conviction. This is all done in an effort to control people who do not conform, or who are seen as “different,” by those who are quite possibly scared of these differences. Should this trend of bills follow those introduced last year, other attacks may affect censorship in schools around LGBTQ+ issues and our community’s freedom of speech and expression more broadly.

Moreover, violent acts against the LGBTQ+ community still occur far too frequently, with the majority of those murdered being trans women of color. We must unite to fight against all discrimination, starting within our own communities and families. We must take up the cry that an injury to one is an injury to all.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Encourages the formation of LGBTQ+ caucuses at all levels of the union;
2. Calls on locals to bargain for protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression; health insurance, including health insurance coverage for transition-related healthcare for transgender individuals, and pension coverage for couples of all genders and sexual identities, equal access to bathrooms and other spaces that align with their gender identities; and contract language that provides domestic partners the same rights as married employees;
3. Calls on all levels of the union to continue to mobilize and organize to protect our LGBTQ+ comrades from the dangerous rollback of protections and continued persecution from the right-wing administration; and to support organizations fighting for the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals;
4. Calls on all levels of the union to reaffirm support for the LGBTQ+ community and denounce the discrimination it increasingly faces;
5. Directs the UE Education Department to update, continue to develop, and disseminate anti-oppression workshops and materials at all levels of the union to educate our members and the community on the destructive nature of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination;
6. Urges members to boycott establishments, institutions, and organizations that discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community.
7. Urges locals to demand gender-neutral language in our collective bargaining agreements;
8. Encourages all members to be conscious and make use of gender-neutral language in everyday conversation;
9. Support and encourage the development and growth of LGBTQ+ leaders on all levels of the union;
10. Opposes any legislation that would curtail the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals to participate in marriage, access medical care, be recognized in society and by the law, and any other laws that would impinge on the rights of individuals to live their lives as free and equal citizens;
11. Calls on all levels of the union to use gender-neutral language in their constitutions, official communications, and other documents.

UE recognizes that disability rights are fundamental human rights, and that those who live with a disability of any kind deserve the same opportunities, compensation, and protections as all other workers. Discrimination against any person on the basis of disability is a violation of our inherent dignity and worth.

People with disabilities face systemic barriers, discrimination, and exclusion in various aspects of life, including employment, education, healthcare, transportation, housing, and access to information and communication. Barriers that impede or hinder those with disabilities go against the principles of our union.

Most workers will experience some form of disability in their lifetime. Though the severity of disabilities varies, every worker with a disability also has a right to a healthy and safe workplace. Although much progress has been made since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), much remains to be done. Public access, workplace accommodation, accessible transit, legislative representation, access to education and vocational training, and job opportunity should be a priority of the labor movement as much as any other front on the fight for worker and human rights. Fellow workers, regardless of circumstance or ability, deserve full access to society and opportunity, and the dignity of labor.

UE affirms that all workers with disabilities should enjoy all human rights and fundamental freedoms, and believes that an inclusive society benefits all members by fostering diversity, innovation, and a stronger sense of community.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Affirms its unwavering commitment to the full realization of the rights of people with disabilities, as enshrined in international and national legal frameworks;
2. Calls for the immediate and effective implementation of policies and programs designed to eliminate discrimination against people with disabilities and promote their full and effective participation and inclusion in society on an equal basis with others;
3. Demands Congress strengthen the Americans with Disabilities Act;
4. Calls on the union at all levels to commit to accessibility and accommodations in operations;
5. Urges all relevant stakeholders, including governments, civil society organizations, businesses, and communities, to:
   1. Promote accessibility by ensuring physical accessibility to buildings, transportation, and public spaces, as well as digital accessibility to information, communication technologies, and services;
   2. Ensure inclusive education by developing and implementing inclusive education systems at all levels that provide quality, accessible, and appropriate education for persons with disabilities without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunity;
   3. Advance employment opportunities by promoting equitable employment opportunities, prohibiting discrimination in the workplace, and providing reasonable accommodations to enable persons with disabilities to secure, retain, and advance in employment;
   4. Guarantee access to healthcare by ensuring non-discriminatory access to comprehensive health services, including mental health services, that are sensitive to the specific needs of persons with disabilities;
   5. Support independent living by fostering environments that support the independent living of persons with disabilities, including access to community-based services and assistive technologies;
   6. Combat discrimination and stigma by undertaking public awareness campaigns to challenge negative stereotypes, prejudices, and harmful practices concerning persons with disabilities and promoting a culture of respect and inclusion;
   7. Ensure participation by actively consulting with and involving people with disabilities, through their representative organizations, in the development and implementation of legislation, policies, and programs concerning them.

Starting with the UE 53^rd Convention in 1988, delegates to UE conventions have adopted resolutions opposing the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; supporting the human rights of the Palestinians; opposing the one-sided policy by which the U.S. government funds and arms the Israeli government; and calling for negotiations toward a just and peaceful solution to this longstanding conflict.

At our 74^th Convention in 2015, we took our commitment to peace and justice for Palestine and Israel one step further, endorsing the worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS arose from a 2005 call by Palestinian trade unions and hundreds of Palestinian civil society organizations for a worldwide, nonviolent campaign of boycotts to pressure Israel to end its apartheid rule over the Palestinians. BDS was modeled after the 1980s international solidarity campaign that put economic pressure on South Africa’s government and helped end apartheid.

The Israeli government used the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas (which happened shortly after our last convention) as a pretext to launch a military assault against the entire population of Gaza. They have killed over 90,000 civilians, the majority of them women and children, and displaced virtually the entire population. They have decimated the healthcare system, bombed every last Palestinian university, systematically killed journalists covering the conflict, and are engaging in deliberate starvation of the population. Israel is now openly proposing illegally moving Palestinians from their land to other countries, some of which are themselves war-torn. There is only one word which is adequate to describe Israel’s actions, and that is genocide.

In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Israeli government continues to confiscate homes and land to expand Israeli settlements. Palestinians are forbidden from reacting to acts of violence by Israeli settlers. In a recent report, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) found that on average 100 Palestinians are attacked monthly by Israeli settlers in the West Bank (up from 30 in 2024) and 168 have been killed since the start of 2025. Since 1967 Israel has settled more than 750,000 of its citizens in the West Bank, and has been building walls that prevent Palestinians from accessing needed resources. Farmers are cut off from their fields and water supplies, which could soon wipe out Palestinian agriculture in the Jordan River Valley. All of this is illegal under international law.

For the past several decades, the U.S. working class has been forced to fund this genocidal project through U.S. military aid to Israel, which UE has long called to end. The ruling class, Democrats and Republicans alike, scramble to provide intellectual and political justification for continuing to send billions of dollars in weapons and aid to Israel, while millions of working people here at home lack jobs, healthcare, or adequate housing, and are increasingly left homeless by devastating climate catastrophes and forced into unlivable and undignified conditions. Because Israel’s military is so heavily funded and supplied by our government, the U.S. labor movement has a special responsibility to speak out against what is being done with our tax dollars.

Despite the brutality of Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people, the U.S. ruling class is using false claims of “antisemitism” to smear anyone who criticizes Israel, and to justify repression of protests against Israel’s actions. Members of UE and other unions have been suspended, fired, or detained because of their protest activities. Much like scapegoating of communists during the McCarthy era, these baseless accusations are being used to attack UE and other militant unions and organizations.

Due to the undue influence of pro-Israel power brokers such as American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Christians United for Israel (CUFI), many American states have passed laws forbidding involvement in BDS activities, and paint any opposition to Israel’s crimes as bigotry and antisemitism. Israel rightly proclaims “never again” in response to the genocidal Holocaust by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s, yet engages in these unconscionable actions.

UE has played an important leadership role in mobilizing labor opposition to Israel’s actions, including cosponsoring a labor statement calling for a ceasefire in October 2023, helping to initiate and lead the National Labor Network for Ceasefire (NLNC), and working with other unions to send a letter to Biden demanding that he end U.S. military aid to Israel in July 2024. Both NLNC and the letter to Biden were joined by unions representing the majority of union members in the U.S.—the first time in the history of the modern labor movement that a significant part of the U.S. labor movement has opposed the foreign policy of a Democratic President.

In the face of Israel’s genocide, we intend to continue to mobilize our members and our allies to demand an end to the Israeli apartheid regime and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and to pursue effective means to achieve it, such as BDS.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Demands that the U.S. government immediately cease all military aid to Israel, and instead pressure Israel to:
   1. End their apartheid policies, and the genocide, occupation, and destruction in Gaza, as well as the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and;
   2. Negotiate a peace agreement on the basis of equality, democracy, and human rights for the Palestinian and Israeli people, including Palestinian self-determination and the right of return for refugees;
2. Endorses the BDS movement and urges the union at all levels to become engaged in BDS and the movement for peace, justice and equality for Palestinians by:
3. Creating forums for locals that have undertaken campaigns for divestment to lead workshops for member-to-member education so that other locals may learn from them;
4. Creating and distributing educational materials about BDS;
5. Identifying areas of investment not in compliance with BDS;
6. Opposes all anti-BDS legislation, and opposes all efforts to outlaw BDS, existing BDS legislation, and otherwise punish critics of Israeli policies;
7. Condemns the use of accusations of “antisemitism” to silence critics of Israel, and the use of such charges to suspend, fire, detain or deport people whose only “crime” is speech or protest.

Education as a whole, but especially higher education, is a tool through which many can gain economic mobility. The ability to think critically and question the status quo is key to agency, freedom, and the ability to enact change. To ensure equal access to opportunity, economic mobility, and intellectual freedom, education, and especially higher education, must be widely accessible, democratically run, and free from corporate and political interference. Yet despite the incalculable value that it provides, higher education finds itself under greater threat than ever.

Colleges and universities, public and private, have always been run by bosses, for bosses, whether as exclusive institutions for the landed gentry or as a means of accumulating wealth at the expense of the workers of both the present and future. Higher education has undeniable historical roots in systems of power and oppression, including slavery, land theft, militarism, and exploitation.

The increasingly corporate character of the American university in an age of privatization should therefore come as no surprise. Tuition and state funding are siphoned away from teaching and research to fund real estate transactions, “strategic initiatives,” and the salaries of countless administrators. Tuition and fees have more than doubled in the past 20 years across both public and private institutions, outpacing inflation by 40 percent. Simultaneously, career academics are being squeezed out, as institutions rely more and more on adjunct and contract faculty, in part because they are cheaper to hire and easier to fire. Students are forced to pay more and more for increasingly less valuable education, while instructors and professors have even less workplace protections, graduate student wages stagnate, and administrators and coaches continue to draw million-dollar compensation packages.

By the end of 2024, 42.7 million Americans were drowning in student loan debt. Together, this totals over $1.77 trillion, with the average student owing over $38,000 in federal loans and almost five percent of these borrowers defaulting on their loans. This disproportionately affects low-income students and students of color who have been deceived into attending private for-profit colleges and trade schools, waylaid by the promise of a better future.

The current presidential administration fears the working class having access to the economic mobility and critical thinking that higher education provides, and has not shied away from attacking it. Vice President J.D. Vance has openly called for an aggressive assault against the country's universities, directly labeling professors as the enemy. The Trump administration has withheld billions in federal research funding and informally blacklisted keywords in grant proposals, with the goal of coercing universities into censoring research and curricula in accordance with the right-wing political agenda. Research in lifesaving and critical fields, such as public health and climate change, are urgently under threat. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, which safeguard equitable access to higher education and upward mobility, are being jeopardized. By politicizing research funding, the Trump administration further weakens job protections for academic workers, making it harder for them to organize, collectively bargain, and speak out.

Marginalized communities have been, and will continue to be, disproportionately affected by this effort. This has already been seen in the abduction of numerous international students by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), revocations of student visas and SEVIS status, discriminatory grant terminations for research studies that focus on or involve marginalized groups, and threats to school accreditors who require DEI-related policies or coursework.

Universities are not innocent in this battle, as many have preemptively capitulated to Trump’s bullying, so yet again the burden of fighting the deterioration of freedom lands on the workers. Faculty senates, unions, and student organizations around the nation have called on university administrators to take precautionary measures to protect themselves from Trump’s attacks. The UE Higher Education Conference Board urged university administrations across the country to stand up and take decisive, preemptive action to protect their students by forming a Mutual Academic Defense Compact, an agreement between universities to support each other, materially and financially, in fighting back against Trump. Yet many administrations have refused to respond to the demand, instead requesting patience and understanding as they navigate “financial headwinds.”

The attack on higher education, especially publicly-funded institutions, is a blatant attack on economic mobility for the working class, aimed at villainizing the institution that can and should facilitate accessible education for all. These attacks will dramatically accelerate existing crises in higher education, including crippling student loan debt for higher education, the devaluing of post-secondary degrees, and the lack of jobs for academic workers with advanced degrees. This deterioration is unacceptable, and symbolizes a greater decline in our nation’s valuation of the working class, and what they deserve access to.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Reaffirms our union’s support for the independence of higher education and an end to political interference;
2. Reaffirms support for higher education locals in their struggles to secure better working conditions and a better life for their members;
3. Urges such locals, and all other affiliates of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America to organize new workers across higher education—including organizing at new institutions and organizing other workers at institutions with a UE presence;
4. Demands colleges and universities:
   1. Formally propose and establish a Mutual Academic Defense Compact, such as that demanded by the UE Higher Education Conference Board on April 16th, 2025;
   2. Commit in writing to actionable ways they will protect and defend the rights and protections of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and international and immigrant students and workers;
   3. Protect, preserve, and advance diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, instruction, and research;
   4. Return to democratic decision-making processes that involve input from the students and workers, such as Faculty Senate, Student Senate, and campus union leadership;
5. Demands that the federal government:
   1. Cease its politicized attacks on higher education;
   2. Restore and expand research funding, particularly that which does not have military applications;
   3. End its flagrant attacks on biomedical science and cease its deliberate dissemination of dubious “alternative medicine” over peer-reviewed science;
   4. Immediately cease its harassment of international students and workers and refrain from using a university’s right to admit international students as a political bargaining chip;
   5. Act in accordance with any and all court rulings that have deemed such attacks as unconstitutional, such as, but not limited to, reinstating grants that have been discriminatorily rescinded, releasing international students abducted by ICE, and lifting unnecessary and discriminatory travel bans;
6. Demands that state governments:
   1. Refrain from politicized interference in the functioning of public universities by appointing qualified candidates to positions of governance who commit to defending academic freedom, including but not limited to freedom of speech on campus and freedom of instruction;
   2. Increase state support for the core operations of public universities in the face of a loss of federal support;
   3. Assist colleges and universities in their fight against federal repression;
   4. Protect and defend the rights of marginalized students and workers, regardless of their country of origin, in the face of federal attacks on their constitutional freedoms.

On July 30th, 2025 Medicare and Medicaid celebrated their 60^th birthdays. These groundbreaking programs became life-saving and poverty-reducing benefits for seniors, the disabled, and many within the working class. When coupled with other public or subsidized programs, including Veterans Administration (VA) benefits, State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges, these programs improved life expectancy, broadened health access, lowered costs, and drove down the U.S. uninsured rate to an all-time low of 7.9 percent in 2023.

However, the work of decades is now being unwound. Despite earlier promises to the contrary by President Trump, his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBB) contained $911 billion in cuts to Medicaid. The Act creates new, more onerous paperwork for low-income recipients, with the presumption that eligible recipients will be kicked off insurance. It also cuts direct and indirect funding to states, forcing them to choose between steep new taxes or immediate Medicaid cuts. These cuts will also result in the closure of rural hospitals, as well as a reduction of services provided by the hospitals that remain open. Already a rural hospital in Nebraska has announced its closure due to the changes, with at least 300 more rural hospitals nationwide in immediate risk of closure (UNC Sheps Center report).

Less well known, the OBBB didn’t leave Medicare untouched. New rules which would have made Medicare premiums affordable for low-income enrollees have been postponed to 2034. The Act also cut off access to Medicare for many documented immigrants and restricts the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Perhaps worst, absent further congressional action $490 billion in Medicare cuts start in 2027.

At the same time, the Biden-era expansions of the ACA subsidies expires at the end of 2025. Without further legislative action, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates ACA premiums will rise by as much as 75 percent. When taking this into account, along with the Medicaid and Medicare cuts, 16 million more people may lack health insurance by 2034, with the percent of American residents without insurance potentially higher than before the ACA was passed.

Cuts these deep will cost lives. According to a study by the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, at least 42,500 additional people will die annually due to these policy changes, through a mixture of losing health coverage, losing access to prescription drug benefits, and elimination of a Biden-era rule on staffing of nursing homes. All of this, just to help pay for a $1 trillion tax break to billionaires and corporate fatcats.

The U.S. healthcare system is not designed to protect the health of Americans. Instead, it is designed to accumulate as much profit as possible for private businesses. From 2000 to 2023 the average pharmaceutical company had a profit margin of nearly 14 percent—almost twice that of the median Fortune 500 company. For-profit hospitals and other providers have every incentive to set fees as high as possible. Insurers keep their own costs low through denial of care. Both sides war with one another, setting up huge bureaucracies to adjudicate claims, and pushing through waves of corporate consolidation to try and outgrow the other. American workers are caught in the crossfire, with none of these groups looking out for our interests.

Our dysfunctional healthcare system leaves Americans drowning in medical debt. An investigation by the Kaiser Family Foundation found over 100 million people in America struggle with medical debt, including 41 percent of all adults. They also found that, in the last five years, more than half of U.S. adults have gone into debt because of dental or medical bills. About one in five of those in medical debt reported that they didn’t expect to ever pay their debt off. About two thirds of those in medical debt have reported that they have delayed care for themselves or a family member because of cost. In 2025, 36 percent of all Americans reported they had to delay medical treatments due to cost, including 75 percent of the uninsured. Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy, accounting for 66.5 percent of all bankruptcies in the U.S.

The patchwork system of U.S. health insurance is unsustainable, even as a reactionary assault against it continues. The U.S. is the only Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country not to guarantee healthcare to all as a fundamental human right. The U.S. system costs twice as much per capita as that of other OECD nations. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports that the U.S. spends $14,570 per capita on healthcare. In contrast the United Kingdom spends $6,023 per capita, and Canada spends $7,013. Yet, these countries that spend half as much–and many others–gauarantee healthcare to all and achieve better health outcomes.

The health inequities of the U.S. healthcare system are felt the most by people of color. Members of racial and ethnic minority groups disproportionately suffer from inequitable health insurance coverage and higher rates of medical debt. These racial groups experience higher rates of illness and death across a wide range of health conditions, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and hypertension.

Fortunately, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Pramila Jayapal have introduced the Medicare For All Act of 2025 to the House (H.R. 3069) and Senate (S. 1506). The Medicare For All Act would provide universally guaranteed healthcare coverage to all; eliminate co-pays, deductibles, and premiums; eliminate the racial disparities in healthcare coverage; provide reproductive healthcare and gender-affirming care; allow unions to negotiate higher pay and benefits; reduce our healthcare costs; eliminate medical debt; reduce preventable death; and make our healthcare system about health instead of about profit.

Thanks to the efforts of the labor movement and other activists, 15 senators and 105 house members have already re-endorsed the Medicare for All Act. However, it will take a mass movement of workers applying pressure at every level of government to win it. We must continue to organize and educate, to ensure when an opening for health care legislation arrives once again, it’s not a half-measure like the ACA, but full, universal healthcare for all.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Demands Congress:
   1. Enact the Medicare for All Act and in the meantime expand Medicare to include full coverage of dental, vision, and hearing, negotiation of drug prices, and lowering of the age of eligibility;
   2. Reverse all recent spending cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, extend the ACA enhanced subsidies, and pass legislation halting the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut Veterans’ Administration (VA) healthcare provision;
2. Supports efforts to institute single-payer programs at the state level;
3. Encourages locals and regions make use of UE’s “How to Fix Healthcare” workshop and to follow the action steps outlined in the workshop, including:
4. Use UE’s Healthcare Cost Calculator, especially during contract negotiations;
5. Educate members about the real cost of their existing healthcare and organize members to call and visit their congresspeople in support of Medicare for All;
6. Collaborate with their employer on a mutually-agreed-upon public statement in support of Medicare for All;
7. Urges locals to designate or elect at least one member to be a UE Medicare for All activist who would share Medicare for All information with the members;
8. Opposes all further efforts to undermine and/or privatize the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health Service, and VA health benefits;
9. Encourages the union at all levels to participate in coalitions for universal healthcare, including Labor Campaign for Single Payer, Physicians for a National Healthcare Program (PNHP), and Healthcare NOW!;
10. Urges locals to contact their local VA to learn what medical benefits are available to our veteran members, and to lobby for restoration of fully-funded medical benefits for veterans and their families;
11. Encourages locals to support the growing campaign for paid sick days and family leave in cities and states across the country;
12. Calls upon the local, state and federal governments to expand coverage for mental health and substance abuse issues.

Climate change poses an existential threat to humanity. The science is unquestionable: 97 percent of peer-reviewed scientific literature affirms that human activity is causing global warming. Since UE’s last convention, we have seen more and more extreme weather events, with devastating and deadly wildfires, floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, and tornadoes becoming regular features of the news cycle. Global temperatures will continue to rise unless we massively reduce our use of fossil fuels.

In the 1930s and 40s, faced with the economic devastation of the Great Depression and the existential threat of Nazism and fascism, working people played a leadership role in the political and economic movement known as the “New Deal.” The New Deal helped our country recover from the Great Depression, facilitated the establishment of the industrial unions (including UE) that brought a decent standard of life to tens of millions of working-class people, and positioned our economy to be able to transition to defeating Nazism and fascism in World War II.

Like the transformation of our manufacturing infrastructure and economy that took place during World War II, a just and successful transition to a sustainable industrial and manufacturing base will require massive infusion of federal and state resources, coordination between government, industry and labor, and democratic participation of workers through widespread unionization. Millions of workers could be employed strengthening our infrastructure, rebuilding our rail and transit systems, converting to renewable energy sources, protecting against the effects of rising temperatures, and in many other areas.

A just transition also requires a real commitment to guaranteed income, benefits, and direct assistance for workers and communities. Workers who lose fossil-fuel jobs should retain their pay and compensation as they transition into new types of work, and should be provided with education and retraining opportunities well before they get laid off, and guaranteed jobs when their facilities close. Communities that have been devastated by pollution or damaged by the effects of rising global temperatures, which are disproportionately low income communities of color, should receive massive investments which ensure good union jobs and a healthy future.

The labor movement has a leading role to play in ensuring that this transition is just, humane, and based on solidarity and valuing people over profit.

The Green New Deal proposed by the youth-led Sunrise Movement, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, and others offers our best hope to meet the challenge of climate change while creating millions of good union jobs. While the current situation in Congress makes immediate passage of the Green New Deal unlikely, the fight by UE locals representing workers of Wabtec and rail crew transportation contractors like Hallcon and PTI to push the railroads and policymakers to invest in green locomotives shows the future we must fight for.

UE rail crew drivers at Hallcon and PTI in Locals 155, 977, 1077, 1177, and 1477 have stepped up activity in the fight for the Green New Deal by testifying before the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Members highlighted the polluting nature of the railroad industry, and how the negative effects are predominantly located in working-class neighborhoods. Environmentally unfriendly locomotives release particulate matter and other pollutants into surrounding railyards, affecting UE members at work. Many UE rail crew drivers also live around rail infrastructure, meaning they are regularly exposed to pollution. Forcing the railroad industry to adopt better environmental standards is a matter of community and workplace health and safety.

Wabtec employs members of UE Locals 506, 610 and 618 and dominates the freight locomotive market within the U.S. It has the capability to build new, low-emission locomotives, as well as fully battery-powered locomotives suitable for use in rail yards; however, demand for new locomotives is currently low, which has led to less work.

Nearly two thirds of locomotives operated by major North American railroads are more than 20 years old—and are dirty locomotives that, without outside pressure, railroads will continue to operate for decades to come. Forcing railroads to replace or upgrade older locomotives with purchases of new cleaner or zero-emission models would result in hundreds of new jobs in Erie and Greensburg, as well as considerable reduction of pollution, particularly in rail yards often clustered in urban areas near communities of color. The Green Locomotive Project has built relationships with environmental activists and other trade unions, worked with federal politicians to draft legislation, and our most recent push for legislation came closer to making a major breakthrough in Washington than UE had managed for decades.

It is time to renew the demand raised by our union in the 1970s in response to the energy crisis: bring the energy industry under democratic control through public and social ownership. Public and cooperative utilities have a long history in this country and the conversion to renewables provides us with an opportunity to provide power for the many—not the few. It is also time to bring the railroads under democratic control through public ownership, as UE’s General Executive Board called for in January 2023.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Endorses the Green New Deal legislation introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey;
2. Endorses the Civilian Corps for Jobs and Justice Act of 2025, which would use the AmeriCorps model to create 1.5 million living-wage jobs, working to help communities respond to climate change and implement a just transition;
3. Endorse the passage of H.R. 2995 Protection from Cumulative Emissions and Underenforcement of Environmental Law Act of 2025;
4. Demands Congress implement the policy prescriptions of the Green Locomotive Project;
5. Commends the Sunrise Movement on their bold campaign of organizing young people to take direct action to force our elected representatives to address the pressing issue of climate change;
6. Encourages UE members to find creative ways to participate in activities that educate, organize and mobilize our members and the community at large to support the Green New Deal, and do so without violating collective bargaining agreements if applicable;
7. Encourages the union at all levels to educate members about climate change and creative solutions that reduce carbon output while creating good union jobs;
8. Urges all UE members to become involved in environmental justice organizations and struggles;
9. Calls on environmental organizations to incorporate a just transition into their platforms;
10. Demands Congress hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for the damage they created, including but not limited to criminal liability and punitive fines;
11. Demands that all environmental policies, including those targeting climate change, incorporate a just transition for workers and communities affected;
12. Supports UE’s participation in worker-oriented efforts to address climate change such as Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED), Labor Network for Sustainability, the Blue-Green Alliance, and the Just Transition Alliance;
13. Reaffirms our support for public ownership of the energy industry and railroads;
14. Supports continuing efforts to build alliances with environmental and community organizations and to develop organizing strategies for renewable-energy workers.

The struggle for a healthy and safe workplace is fundamental to the labor movement. It was one of our earliest major demands alongside pay and a shorter work week. It is every union’s obligation to correct dangerous situations. Our goal, as a union, is to force employers to ensure we are all able to get through our workdays safely and make it home to healthy lives.

Workers can spend up to half of their day in the workplace, and workplaces impact health and well-being. It benefits both employers and employees if workplaces are safe and support mental health and healthy behavior. A healthy workplace is more than just safe; it considers health practices,⁩ the psychosocial environment, and is supportive of healthy eating and physical activity. Natural light, ergonomics, green space, noise, food choices, exercise, commuting, fairness and flexibility are all important to employees. Employers who provide healthier options at the workplace see benefits such as reduced insurance costs and absenteeism, along with increased job satisfaction, morale and productivity.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “while employers have a responsibility to provide a safe and hazard-free workplace, they also have abundant opportunities to promote individual health and foster a healthy work environment.” The workplace can influence healthier social norms. Healthy workplaces support healthy eating and regular physical activity which can prevent obesity and chronic diseases. Furthermore, workplaces can improve their employees’ knowledge of healthier lifestyle choices and be a place for preventative health screenings.

Prior to the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) in 1970, those lacking a union contract containing strong health and safety language had little to no protection. OSHA was a great step forward, but left out many workers, including independent contractors and public-sector employees on the state and local level. While some states have adopted safety and health legislation to cover their public employees, many states have adopted no protections at all and others have very little enforcement of their own rules. This results in situations where public-sector workers have been severely injured or even died on the job with no penalties faced by their employers. In addition, the Act has historically been broken and underfunded, with infrequent inspections and nominal fines for violations. Under the Trump administration, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which is the sole agency responsible for the evidence-base research that informs OSHA policy, has effectively been eliminated and 11 OSHA offices in states with the highest workplace fatality rates have been closed.

There were 5,283 fatal work injuries recorded in the U.S. in 2023, an 8.9 percent increase from 2021. That means, on average, a worker died on the job every 99 minutes in 2023. Approximately 135,000 workers died from known occupational diseases in 2023. Nearly 3.2 million work-related injuries and illnesses were reported, but underreporting is widespread. The AFL-CIO estimates that private industry is responsible for between 5.2 and 7.8 million workplace injuries and illnesses annually.

Though it is difficult to track causes, suicide particularly affects the working age population and meta-analytical evidence indicates workplace setting is associated with suicide risk, especially among people working in healthcare, construction, production, and agriculture. A multitude of studies have shown that exposure to psychosocial job stressors is associated with elevated risk of suicide ideation, attempts and death. Low job control, lack of social support from supervisors, and harassment are particularly dangerous risk factors.

Fighting against ongoing health and safety issues at Hendrickson Truck Suspension in Kendalville, Indiana has helped UE Local 770 build a strong union in the 28 years they have been affiliated with UE. Stewards are constantly vigilant of workplace safety issues from forklift accidents to supervisors watching videos on their cell phones in production areas, using labor-management meetings, grievances, and shop floor action to address problems the company would rather ignore. Unfortunately, Hendrickson is a long way from promoting a healthy workplace culture. Management regularly engages in workplace bullying, and the extreme disrespect takes a toll. Psychological stress and management’s attempts to delay medical care in favor of productivity when members are sick or hurt at work has led to multiple tragedies in the shop, including the loss of Local 770 Committeeperson and Steward Cain Quarry in January 2025. Members continue to fight for each other on the shop floor to honor Cain’s legacy, and have pulled together to create the social support system Hendrickson lacks.

Most workers in the U.S. and most UE members no longer work on a factory floor. Workers in the service industry have workplace safety issues which are not heavily regulated by OSHA, even if the workers themselves are nominally covered. Office workers often suffer from repetitive stress injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome, yet there are no ergonomics standards established by the federal government. Workers in retail, education, health care, and social services often have to deal with customers, students, or patients who threaten their physical safety, yet OSHA has largely been silent on establishing best-practice procedures to deal with these hazards. Workers from different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, workers of marginalized genders or who are gender minorities in a given workplace, and workers with disabilities all have different needs which should be addressed to ensure equity in workplace safety.

While only some of the jobs our members perform are recognized as being dangerous, all of us can be exposed to situations which threaten our safety and impact our health. Our obligation is to look after the health and well-being of our fellow workers through the collective action of our union. But we also must force legislators to adequately protect working people through a strengthening of our nation's health and safety laws.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Calls on locals to:
   1. Make health and safety a top priority both during and outside of contract negotiations;
   2. Set up strong independent health and safety committees, and ensure training on health and safety for their members;
   3. Exercise their right to accompany OSHA inspectors on workplace visits;
   4. Contact the national union before becoming involved with Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP);
   5. Engage the membership in aggressive struggle to address hazards in the workplace;
   6. Support local labor-initiated Committees on Occupational Safety and Health (COSH) groups;
   7. Demand their employers provide access to paid time off for testing and quarantine for all reportable diseases as defined by the CDC, with no loss of sick time;
2. Demands Congress expand OSHA to include:
   1. Coverage for all workers, including those in the public sector and federal contractors;
   2. Significant rulemaking regarding safe working procedures when dealing with risk of attack from patients, students, customers, or other individuals;
   3. A better funded inspection process, which includes unannounced and unrestricted inspections;
   4. Sharply increased penalties on employers, including punitive damages and blacklisting from government contracting opportunities;
   5. Prosecution of bosses for conditions which lead to death or severe injury on the job;
   6. Federal heat safety standards for indoor and outdoor employees;
3. Supports strengthening workers’ compensation laws in all states, with improved provisions on injuries sustained from physical attacks in the workplace;
4. Opposes any attempt to further restrict the rights of workers to sue their employers over job-related injuries, and unsafe conditions;
5. Demands the Trump Administration reverse cuts that negatively impact OSHA and NIOSH, and increase funding for OSHA.

While workers have always faced a hostile legal environment in the U.S., that environment has become even more dangerous under the second Trump Administration. Within the first six months of taking office, Trump’s Department of Labor has waged a shameful assault on workers by proposing the repeal of 63 regulations that protect workers. One such repeal—to reveal the brutality of the proposals—would mean that employers would no longer be required to provide proper lighting for “inherently risky professional activities” such as construction and mining.

In the private sector, Trump’s administration poses existential legal challenges, and in the public sector, unprecedented rollbacks. Upon entering office, Trump immediately hobbled the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency in charge of union rights in most of the private sector. His white-supremacist, pro-billionaire administration appointed Republican lawyer, Marvin Kaplan, as the new chair of the NLRB and fired its pro-worker General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. Then, Trump made an unconstitutional and unprecedented move of dismissing NLRB member and first Black woman to serve on the board, Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB not only all-white male but also without a quorum and formally unable to issue decisions, including on unfair labor practice charges (ULPs). For UE’s graduate workers in particular, Trump’s moves spell trouble. For instance, Cornell University graduate workers, members of UE Local 300, are courageously fighting a federal case spearheaded by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a segregationist organization which challenges their right to recognition as workers, to have a union, and to enforce their union security provisions.

The legal threats currently faced by the graduate workers put them in immediate solidarity with public-sector workers—who have led militant struggles under hostile labor law for decades. While the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), overseen by the NLRB, provides private sector workers with a federal “bill of rights,” it remains silent on the issue of public workers. Thus, public sector workers in 39 states currently lack the legal right to strike. In the South, workers face Jim Crow era bans on collective bargaining, union formation, and striking—originally crafted to suppress organizing of the Black working class. For instance, in West Virginia public workers have no legal framework for collective bargaining; in North Carolina they are explicitly banned from collective bargaining; and in 2017 public-sector workers in Iowa lost almost all collective bargaining rights. These workers are thus leading the fight to improve labor laws—for where oppression reigns, resistance blooms. For example, public service workers in UE Local 150 got the UN’s International Labor Organization to rule that North Carolina’s ban on public-sector collective bargaining violates international human rights standards. In Eastern Virginia, municipal workers are organizing with UE to take advantage of a partial but historic repeal of the ban on their right to collectively bargain.

We need a complete reset of labor law in the U.S. Two laws currently introduced in Congress, while not sufficient, would be substantial steps in the right direction. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act—H.R.20), is a bill intended to strengthen worker’s rights and make it easier to organize and bargain. This bill has become a major focus in the broader labor movement, and many UE locals have taken action in support. The Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act (H.R.2736) is a bill which would set minimum standards for collective bargaining rights for public sector workers nationwide.

History has shown that in both the private and public sector, improvements to labor law have always been won by workers taking action in their workplaces and in the streets, defying existing law when necessary until politicians had no recourse but to address our issues.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Encourages UE members and locals to learn more about their legal rights and effective tactics by reading Preparing For and Conducting A Strike: A UE Guide, as well as Labor Law for the Rank & Filer: Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law by Staughton Lynd & Daniel Gross, among others;
2. Directs the national union to develop a member education curriculum on labor law covering relevant state and federal law, protection for citizen versus immigrant workers, and updates on relevant legal developments;
3. Calls on the union at all levels to:
   1. Join efforts to pass the PRO Act;
   2. Join efforts to pass the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act;
   3. Join any state legislation efforts to secure private and public workers’ right to unionize and strike—including the employees status of graduate workers;
   4. Develop creative strategies to use worker strike action to win concrete gains for workers while demonstrating the need for comprehensive labor law reform.

Protecting public workers’ rights is crucial for creating thriving workplaces and communities. Public workers provide vital services such as healthcare, sanitation, and education. But in many states, public workers do not have the right to collectively bargain with their employer. While their labor is vital to communities across the country, these public workers are left without a voice in their workplace. Silenced and unprotected, these public workers are exposed to unfair treatment and unjust working conditions. Violating public workers’ right to collectively bargain is not only unjust to the workers, it is unjust to the communities they serve. UE is committed to fighting for public workers’ rights to collectively bargain, and fights for those workers in states where collective bargaining is banned or nonexistent.

Collective bargaining should be recognized as a right for all workers. The right to collectively bargain is essential for public workers in the fight for better working conditions and better public services for local communities across the country. Through collective bargaining, workers can directly participate in deciding the conditions of their labor. When workers have a voice, workplace democracy is possible.

In 1935, the U.S. passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which protected private-sector workers’ right to collectively bargain. However, the Act was silent on the issue of public employees. Due to the lack of federal protections for public workers, the right to collectively bargain varies drastically from state to state. In North Carolina, public workers are explicitly banned from collective bargaining. State governments have gutted long-established collective bargaining laws for public workers in Wisconsin and Iowa. In 2025, the Utah legislature banned collective bargaining in the public sector, although it has not yet gone into effect pending a referendum to overturn it, and legislation in Idaho aims to diminish public worker unionizing efforts. Federally we have seen illegal mass firing of union employees following Russell Vought’s Project 2025 playbook, and the Trump administration simply canceling existing union contracts.

Brought to North Carolina by UE Local 150, members of the United Nations’s International Labor Organization ruled that the state’s ban on public-sector collective bargaining violates international human rights standards. Denial of collective bargaining in the southern states is a vestige of slavery and Jim Crow; the fight for public-sector collective bargaining requires multi-racial and multi-generational coalitions to come together and fight for workers’ rights.

Despite legal setbacks, public workers are speaking up and fighting back with renewed energy. In response to organizing efforts, Virginia partially repealed their ban on collective bargaining for public workers in 2020, demonstrating that the legacy of Jim Crow can be repealed. The new legislation provides that individual municipalities can pass resolutions allowing their workers to bargain collectively. Municipal workers across eastern Virginia’s Tidewater region are actively organizing with UE and have made significant progress towards passing such resolutions.

In North Carolina, the Southern Workers Justice Campaign and the Hear Our Public Employees (H.O.P.E.) coalition are leading the fight to repeal the prohibition of collective bargaining, forging unity and solidarity between the labor movement and the civil rights movement. The work of our locals in North Carolina and Virginia, with their multi-racial membership and leadership, represents a powerful weapon for social progress.

While our union fights to repeal the bans on collective bargaining, public workers on the ground can fight for their rights with “Workers’ Bill of Rights” campaigns. A Workers’ Bill of Rights is a list of demands that articulate the basic rights of workers in a given workplace. For example, state mental-health workers and municipal workers in UE Local 150 have developed strong Workers’ Bill of Rights campaigns to elevate basic demands such as safety, adequate staffing levels, proper training and equipment, the right to refuse excessive overtime, family-supporting wages, and more. Many advances have been made establishing standards as part of Workers’ Bill of Rights campaigns.

The Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act (H.R.2736) would set minimum standards for collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers nationwide, ensuring that states such as North Carolina create a legal framework for exercising those rights and restoring those rights in states such as Iowa where they have been curtailed. Passage of the Act would result in a seismic change for millions of public workers at the state and local level.

While new federal legislation would be a welcome development, public-sector collective bargaining rights were originally won through struggle. In the 1970s, a series of strikes happened across the country at federal, state, and local levels. These strikers had no legal protection, and could have been terminated for their participation, but worker unity was strong enough to protect their jobs. Ultimately, public officials decided to “tame” the ferocity of public employees through the offering of collective bargaining rights—usually in exchange for a ban on strikes and forcing workers through legalistic methods of contract settlement such as arbitration.

In order to restore what rights have been lost, and to bring them to states where they were never won, worker power must be a credible threat to the employer. We must return to a period of widespread workplace agitation and mobilization. We must develop and revitalize public-sector worker unions and unite with allies to establish laws that grant full labor rights to all public workers.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Calls for the union at all levels to initiate campaigns for public worker collective bargaining rights, including the right to strike. Campaigns will fight to establish these rights in states where we lack them, retain and strengthen them in states where they exist, and restore them where they have been stripped away;
2. Demands that North Carolina repeal its ban on collective bargaining, General Statute § 95-98, that prohibits state and local governments from both entering into collective bargaining agreements with their employers and striking;
3. Calls on local governments in Virginia to pass resolutions protecting public workers’ right to collectively bargain;
4. Demands that the state of Iowa reverse its 2017 changes to its collective bargaining law;
5. Demands the state of Wisconsin repeal Act 10 of 2011, which stripped public workers of their rights;
6. Demands Congress pass the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act (H.R. 2736);
7. Supports the Southern Workers Assembly in its call to organize the South;
8. Supports the Southern Workers Justice Campaign building awareness and support for collective bargaining rights of public workers in North Carolina and Virginia;
9. Encourages locals to discuss with their members solidarity dues and donations to the Southern Worker Justice Campaign;
10. Supports the education of elected officials and the general public regarding the need for collective bargaining for public employees;
11. Supports work at the international level challenging the violation of public workers’ rights;
12. Calls on the union at all levels to support Workers’ Bill of Rights campaigns for public-sector workers in states where collective bargaining is currently banned;
13. Calls on locals to mobilize in support of candidates for elected office who will restore and improve collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees;
14. Calls on state and local governments to stop attacks on public employee’s right to pay union dues through payroll deduction, including bans and charging high administration fees.

The right of workers to withhold their labor—to strike—is among the most important of human rights. No society can truly claim to respect liberty and deny workers the right to strike. International law recognizes the right to strike as a fundamental human right.

One of UE’s core principles, embedded in the preamble to our Constitution, is to “pursue at all times a policy of aggressive struggle to improve our conditions.” Throughout history, strikes have been critical to the growth of the labor movement, including UE. The right to strike is vital to maintain and improve our wages, benefits, and working conditions, and to resist the attack on democracy by anti-working class elements.

Strike action, and credible strike threats, played an important role in securing several UE contracts over the past two years. In June 2025, members of Local 1018, the union representing workers at Lanterman Regional Center, a non-profit organization in Los Angeles, California, won a 4.5-percent pay increase and the right to strike during the reopener negotiations after a 17-day strike. In May 2024, members of GOLD-UE Local 261, the union representing graduate teachers and researchers at Dartmouth College, went out on a 59-day strike that ended in a 17.5 percent raise, union shop, the right to arbitrate Title IX harassment grievances, and innovative just cause language, among others.

Strike threats from thousands of members in Locals 1043 and 300 (representing graduate workers at Stanford and Cornell) won both unions industry-leading contracts, including union shop, just cause, and wage increases. In Local 300, the quality of the strike threat from graduate workers, especially international graduate workers, forced their employer to agree to one of the strongest just cause protections in higher education.

In Local 1123, representing workers at National Consolidation Services (NCS) in Bolingbrook, Illinois, every single member signed a public strike pledge, winning just cause protections, reasonable cause before drug tests, and a wage reopener for 2026 that includes the right to strike over wages.

In the public sector, workers in 39 states lack the legal right to strike. As UE’s public-employee members can attest, mandatory arbitration disempowers the rank and file in the negotiation of their own contract. Recent legislative attacks on public workers included rollbacks of the right to strike where it once existed.

As was the case with the public-sector labor upsurge in the 1970s, just because a strike action is nominally “illegal” doesn’t mean it can’t be successful. Teachers in Massachusetts went on strike in 2024, risking fines and worse consequences in a state where public-sector employees are barred from striking. They won a living wage and parental leave by standing together on the picket line and forcing their employers to cave.

The Trump administration and far-right organizations like the National Right to Work Committee are trying to strip away our legal rights to bargain collectively on behalf of our fellow workers. For higher education locals in the private sector, this possibility is closer and more real than ever. The one power we will always retain—a power that no government or legal entity can strip from us—is the power to mobilize workers in a strike.

It is not just UE members who are using strikes to improve their conditions. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 31 major work stoppages in 2024, involving 271,500 workers—fewer than in 2023, but still near a 25-year high.

Fundamentally, the legal power we have to enforce our contracts, the authority we bring to the bargaining table, and the ability to advocate for our coworkers all exist only because we have organized enough workers that by standing together we can shut down production. Our right to strike is our most fundamental right as workers, and in times of legal peril and threats to all the other rights we have, striking could become our only recourse.

History is clear that, when faced with authoritarian or fascist governments, the labor movement is key to restoring democracy, precisely because unions have the power to strike and shut down significant parts of the economy. This was demonstrated most recently in South Korea when the president declared martial law in order to overcome political opposition and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions led the successful effort to overturn the coup through not only demonstrations but also strikes in key industries.

Across the world, unions have made use of general strikes both to bring down authoritarian regimes and to protect or advance important social programs and protections. It is a tool that the U.S. labor movement has failed to learn how to use, but it appears to be increasingly necessary that we do so.

It is essential that we prepare to strike. We prepare financially, we prepare locally, we prepare nationally, and we prepare together. When the boss tries to divide us, we fight—and we win—by standing together as unions and as workers.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Calls for the continued use of the strike as the primary weapon against the employer, characterized by careful planning and timing, full membership involvement, and mobilization of community and political support;
2. Urges locals to increase communication and coordination, and align their timelines, to maximize the collective strike power of UE workers;
3. Calls upon locals and regions to include as part of their political action work a demand for the restoration of the right to strike for private and public workers without retaliation or replacement;
4. Directs the national union to provide renewed member education on UE strike policy;
5. Urges locals to seek the right to strike on grievances as part of their collective bargaining demands;
6. Encourages UE members and locals to learn more about the need to restore the right to strike by reading Joe Burns’ books Reviving the Strike and Strike Back; and learn about their legal rights and effective tactics in strikes by reading Robert Schwartz’s Strikes, Picketing and Inside Campaigns; and the UE pamphlet Preparing For and Conducting A Strike: A UE Guide.

The 2024 elections were, in large measure, a referendum on the American economy. Working people who voted for Donald Trump, and gave him the margin of victory, overwhelmingly cited the economy as their reason for doing so.

Working people’s dissatisfaction with the economic legacy of the Biden administration is not hard to understand. After the largest expansion of government programs to help working people in decades—the various Covid-relief packages passed in 2020 and 2021—produced a historic reduction in poverty, the Biden administration and the Democrats were unable or unwilling to extend those programs or make them permanent. The programs that helped millions of working people make it through the pandemic period were thus allowed to expire just as supply-chain issues began to drive up inflation, a situation that corporations were able to exploit to raise prices and make super-profits.

The lack of support from the government and increased prices for groceries and other retail goods followed decades during which working people suffered massive increases in the cost of housing, healthcare and education while wages stagnated. Although real wages have increased in the last few years, especially for the lowest-paid workers, the cumulative effect of inflation on top of the loss of government support and the decades-long increase in the overall cost of living has meant economic pain for most working people.

However, the Trump presidency has offered little relief for working people. None of his administration’s many policy changes have benefitted American workers. Companies are now shifting tariff-related costs to consumers, with inflation again rising. At the same time, American manufacturing employment is flat. Trump’s incoherent tariff policies have resulted in American-assembled cars (which use some raw materials and parts from Canada and Mexico) becoming much more expensive than cars imported from Japan or Germany. The recently-passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” extended old and created new tax cuts for billionaires and big business on the backs of steep cuts to Medicaid and food programs for low-income people. Trump’s executive actions and Congressional budget cuts laid off tens of thousands of federal workers, slashed collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands more, and imperiled millions throughout the public, nonprofit, and higher education sectors. And the strongest legacy of President Biden—the most pro-worker National Labor Relations Board in decades—is being swiftly undone.

Trump’s second presidency is also a sharp departure from the traditional, rules-based order of American capitalism, shifting our country into a crony capitalist system, where powerful entities must “pay to play.” His trade policy amounts to extracting tribute from countries, and increasingly corporations. Businesses, law firms, and universities are threatened with private legal action or regulatory scrutiny unless they make millions of dollars in payouts. A recent analysis by the New Yorker has found that the Trump family has personally profited to the tune of $3.4 billion from the various crypto ventures, real estate deals, and licensing agreements, a number which will only balloon further with over three more years of corrupt self-dealing ahead.

The Democratic Party is—belatedly—realizing they must promise something more than simply undoing the damage of Trump. Many Democrats are now embracing so-called “abundance politics” which identifies the problem as a lack of “building things,” from housing to transit to clean-energy infrastructure. There is a valid critique that the Democratic Party has been too focused, when it gains power, simply on appropriating money through large federal bills, and not ensuring the money is actually spent. However, the abundance movement is spearheaded by some of the biggest enemies of the working class in the Democratic Party. Many are attacking key party constituencies (including labor) as impediments to “getting things done,” using it to push for further pro-corporate deregulation. If this is the vision of the economy in 2029 and beyond, the working class will continue to have the deck heavily stacked against us for decades to come.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) remains the most popular political figure in the country. Together with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), his Fighting Oligarchy tour has been providing needed backbone while the institutional Democratic Party signals near total capitulation. But perhaps most notable in recent months was the out-of-nowhere primary win of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City. Mamdani is running on a platform of rent control, universal pre-K, a $30 per hour local minimum wage, eliminating bus fares, publicly-owned grocery stories, and new taxes on millionaires. This platform appears set to drive him to victory in America’s largest city, finding broad popularity among the city’s diverse working class, including many who voted for Trump in 2024.

Despite the pieces of a potential new American economic agenda already being in front of us, they are unlikely to pass without a militant mass movement. The Raise the Wage Act of 2025 (H.R.2643/S.1332) would increase the minimum wage nationwide to $17 per hour by 2030, indexing future increases to median national wage growth. The Medicare for All Act (H.R.2069/S.1506), has been reintroduced in Congress as well, as has the College for All Act (S.1832), which would make public colleges and universities tuition free for approximately 95 percent of American students. Congress should also resurrect the Green New Deal, creating millions of good, union jobs while addressing the threat of climate change. The boldness of these policies has inspired even more ambitious proposals to direct our society’s wealth into other projects that are socially useful and create good jobs, including infrastructure, public and cooperatively-owned housing, and a social wealth fund.

As record numbers of Americans approach retirement, more than 56 million lack any retirement plan through their employer, with almost half of workers over age 55 having zero retirement savings. The situation is only worsening, with pensions under attack, the Republican Party once again floating reduction of Social Security, and even perversion of already underfunded 401(k) plans by allowing employers to push their workers to invest retirement money in crypto Ponzi schemes. Working-class allies like Senator Sanders are proposing partial solutions, like the Social Security Expansion Act (S.770), which would expand Social Security benefits and fully fund the program for the next 75 years. We should go further, expanding Social Security into a true “single-payer” source of retirement income, similar to pensions in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, but these bills would provide strong movement in the direction of universal retirement security.

Our union has long supported shortening the workday and workweek. We should resist any attempt by employers to weaken one of the labor movement’s most fundamental victories—the eight-hour day and forty-hour workweek—and instead push our employers and government to shorten the workday with no cut in pay.

Workers and farmers have a strong mutual interest in an America where economic growth and social justice have higher priority than rewarding corporations, their officers, and their investors. The outlook for farming appears sharply negative, between falling exports due to Trump’s nonsensical trade policy and looming labor shortages due to ICE’s draconian war on migrant workers. All of these strains, plus those of increasing floods and droughts, fall even harder on family farms. Solidarity among trade unionists, family farmers, and farmworkers is crucial to forging an agricultural policy based on justice and prosperity.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Demands Congress:
   1. Enact a federal climate jobs program to provide good, union jobs while addressing climate change;
   2. Provide adequate financial support to states and municipalities to meet the needs of their people, hire adequate staff, and provide their workers with decent wages and benefits;
   3. Pass the Raise the Wage Act of 2025;
   4. Pass the Medicare for All Act;
   5. Enact paid family and medical leave, including parental leave, as a nationwide policy, without requiring use of other paid time off benefits;
   6. Enact legislation to establish free public higher education and forgive student debt;
   7. Address the housing crisis by declaring a moratorium on home foreclosures and evictions and investing in public and cooperative affordable housing;
   8. Enact comprehensive financial regulations including eliminating offshore tax havens, taxing economic speculation, breaking up or nationalizing banks that are “too big to fail,” and reducing corporate influence in politics;
   9. Reform the tax system by restoring higher tax rates for the wealthy and corporations;
   10. Remove the cap on Social Security taxes so that all contribute the same percentage of earnings to the trust fund, and to tax unearned income (capital gains and investment income) on the same basis as wages and salaries;
   11. Address the country’s retirement security crisis by expanding Social Security to pay retired workers 75 to 90 percent of their pre-retirement income, and in the meantime pass the Social Security Expansion Act;
   12. Return the retirement age for Social Security with full benefits to age 65 and reject all efforts to privatize Social Security, reduce benefits, undermine cost of living adjustments (COLA) or raise the retirement age;
   13. Restore funding for trade assistance programs such as Trade Readjustment Allowances (TRA) and Trade Adjustment Act (TAA);
   14. Enact legislation to establish a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay;
2. Calls on regions and locals to:
   1. Apply political pressure on elected officials to enact the policies in this resolution;
   2. Educate our members and communities about income and wealth inequality and policies that can address it;
   3. Work with and join organizations promoting a just economy;
   4. Articulate bargaining goals within a broader economic framework that calls for greater equality;
3. Reaffirms our longstanding policy of overtime pay for any hours after eight and our goal of reducing the work week;
4. Calls upon the labor movement to pursue a shorter work week with no loss in pay;
5. Calls on Congress and state legislatures to improve existing overtime laws and regulations, provide for their vigorous enforcement, and oppose employer-imposed “comp time” and “flex time” schemes;
6. Supports an agricultural policy that will allow farmworkers and farm families a fair return for their efforts and a decent standard of living.

There are nearly 50 million students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools in the United States. Public education is a cornerstone for a democratic society and the only viable education option for most working-class families. Federal and state cuts to public education are a direct attack on democracy that disproportionally punishes the working class.

The Department of Education, created by Congress in 1979, identified its purpose to be: “ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual” by serving as a “supplement and complement [to] the efforts of States.” Within the first six months of his second presidential term, Donald Trump has signed numerous executive orders targeting public education institutions, from Head Start programs to public K-12 schools and higher education institutions.

These executive orders, which aim to dismantle the Department of Education, would limit access to education. Funding cuts to public education will not only exacerbate the already critical personnel shortage experienced in public schools, but continue to amplify the gap between publicly funded education and privatized education only accessible to the wealthy. Considering that between 10 and 15% of Americans under 18 live in poverty, this means they could lose the equal access to education the Department of Education was created to advance. The furtherance of this gap will disproportionately affect students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and non-citizen students and workers, as legislation continues to be introduced that deliberately targets them.

In a 2023 report from the Education Law Center, 36 states received a C or below grade for educational funding, with 13 receiving an F grade. Every year, the EdWeek Research Center surveys teachers and administrators about their confidence in their districts' financial health, and these educators are only becoming more pessimistic. Rising costs of supporting students and continued cuts to educational budgets at the federal and state levels result in an unsustainable situation. Students cannot be given the education that they deserve without the financial support of their communities. But as states continue to step back from the responsibility of educating the next generation, the Trump Administration openly plans to drastically cut support even further, decimating the opportunities of students nationwide, and increasing the burden placed on teachers. It is unacceptable for the Trump administration to continue to abandon the federal government’s responsibility to provide quality, accessible education to all, while 90 percent of teachers spend money out of their own, hard-earned paychecks, to ensure their students have a functional and productive classroom. This personal sacrifice on behalf of teachers is even though they make, on average, 23.5 percent less per week than their non-teacher, college-educated peers.

Shortages of teachers, custodians, bus drivers, food service workers, librarians, paraprofessionals, and other school support staff undermine school safety and the availability of educational services. The chaos of having fewer staff available is an ongoing problem, and effects on American society will be long-lasting. Teachers' ability to select relevant, appropriate curriculum and standards of classroom behavior is increasingly limited due to attacks that require teachers to focus on agendas rather than facts. Spreading misinformation and limiting diversity in curriculum will leave students further behind in their critical thinking, problem solving, and social-emotional skills such as empathy. It also makes it harder for students of marginalized identities to feel included in school and accepted by society, impacting their academic performance, their health, and their futures. When curricula are altered in such alarming, oppressive ways, it is important to remember that we are not only altering learning, we are altering the future of society.

Non-teaching staff are respected even less than teachers, dedicating their lives to the wellbeing of students while often receiving significantly below a living wage. At the bargaining table, support staff are patronizingly told that if they want a living wage, they should get a teaching degree—even though schools could not function without a variety of workers to support students and the learning environment. When paraprofessionals are not available or are assigned too many students, students with disabilities miss out on crucial services that are written into federally-required individual education plans. Building support staff are forced to complete the same amount of work with fewer coworkers, resulting in safety, hygiene, and maintenance problems. School food service workers must navigate and enforce arcane nutritional guidelines to make sure their program generates profit for their districts, and are sometimes forced to maintain free and reduced school lunch programs using highly processed, unappealing food produced by the same exploitative companies producing food for prisons. Bus drivers face longer routes with increasingly dangerous and disruptive student conduct, all while being responsible for their students' safety in a culture of increasing distracted driving and road rage. Despite collective bargaining agreements outlining responsibilities, staff often agree to fulfill additional responsibilities and stress for the welfare of students at their own expense. All workers in schools suffer from frustrating conditions that lead to burnout and further decrease the availability of qualified staff.

At public higher education institutions, years of corporate-style initiatives, privatization, and administrative bloat have hollowed out academic departments as university leaders and politicians seek to roll back tenure protections and undercut organized labor at every possible turn. This mismanagement has been accompanied by declining state investment, skyrocketing tuition, administrative bloat, increasing use of adjunct and contract faculty, and an overall collapse in trust in institutions of higher education. All of this has left public universities woefully underprepared for the ferocity of the federal assault over the past several months.

Although the Trump administration has focused much of its ire on private institutions such as Harvard and Columbia, public universities have not been spared, and Trump is trying to shake down UCLA for $1 billion. Attempts to slash federal research funding and eliminate indirect cost recovery will punch hundred-million-dollar holes in the budgets of every major research-focused institution, holes that will no doubt be used to justify further austerity and crackdowns by presidents and provosts who will continue to collect oversized paychecks as their students and staff face repression, surveillance, and uncertainty.

Across all public education, it is clear that both the persisting status quo prior to Trump’s attacks, and the current state of active hostility towards public education and critical thinking are utterly untenable in a future that prioritizes the working class.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Demands Congress:
   1. Pass laws implementing free public higher education and student loan forgiveness for all;
   2. In the meantime, put a moratorium on all student loan defaults, introduce default forgiveness, implement measures so that loans can be repaid at no more than 10 percent of annual income, reduce student loan interest rates to the same rate available for banking entities, and ensure interest cannot accrue until after graduation;
   3. Maintain funding for Title II intended for professional development, mentoring programs, and class size reduction;
2. Opposes the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education;
3. Demands of the U.S. Department of Education:
   1. Recommit itself to its original mission of ensuring access to quality education for all;
   2. Bar the use of taxpayer-funded voucher programs that siphon public funds from public schools and funnel them to private and charter schools;
   3. Eliminate all high-stakes testing;
   4. Work with borrowers to seek loan forgiveness if schools have deceived them or committed fraud;
   5. Ensure curriculum is developed in a fashion that recognizes the existence of racism, sexism, classism, and other issues in the world and aims to develop students’ critical thinking on such topics;
   6. Fund school personnel programs to maintain appropriate student-to-staff ratios;
   7. Provide vocational training and job placement services for individuals transitioning into the workforce, including those who have advanced degrees but need further direction to reach the desired level of job placement;
4. Demand that state legislatures:
   1. Fully fund public education;
   2. Preserve tenure systems;
   3. Address economic and racial segregation by disconnecting educational funding from property taxation;
   4. Advocate for the removal of police forces from schools;
   5. Establish and protect a curriculum that recognizes the existence of racism, sexism, classism, and other issues in the world and aims to develop students’ critical thinking on such topics;
5. Urge membership and locals to:
   1. Engage in local school board elections through a variety of methods
   2. Actively lobby Congress and state legislatures on this program;
   3. Support all campaigns that advocate universal access to free education;
6. Demands an end to book bans, censorship, and restrictions on curricula taught in libraries, school districts, and universities.

UE has warned for years that when the government claims the power to surveil, detain, and deport people without due process, it can and will use that power against innocent people, particularly those who speak out against government policies, and especially those who represent a credible power base, such as the labor movement. We saw this during the McCarthy period in the 1940s and 50s when the combined forces of the federal government, big business, and their business-union co-conspirators nearly destroyed UE and progressive trade unionism.

The second Trump administration has exacerbated existing threats and violations of civil liberties in the U.S. and sought to systematically erode the civil liberties of the American working class.

Working people are upset at the corruption and inaction of their own government. The rising prices of food and gas continue to outpace housing costs and inflation—all while the U.S. government starts and prolongs wars around the globe. Rather than providing material solutions to these crises, the Trump Administration has instead sought to redirect anger against our broken system toward our fellow workers, scapegoating immigrants and other vulnerable groups and grossly violating their civil rights.

The wielding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in raids and crackdowns is not about immigration—it is about power. These raids are a systematization of violence and fear to protect the interests of the ruling class. The Trump administration has vastly increased the ICE budget in order to create a private secret police, shielded from any legal accountability, who kidnap people off the streets while wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves.

Large demonstrations have been held across the country calling for ICE out of their cities. President of SEIU California David Huerta was snatched from the street in a violent sweep in Los Angeles and, in a dramatic escalation, the National Guard and the U.S. military were deployed in June 2025 in a desperate attempt to intimidate people out of exercising their First Amendment rights. The National Guard has now been deployed to Washington, DC, targeting the entire population of the city, demonstrating that once the government feels like it can use this type of force against immigrants, it has a free hand to do it against anyone, with multiple cities, including Chicago, now threatened as well

Over the past two years, thousands of students on hundreds of campuses across the country built solidarity encampments, walked out of graduation ceremonies, and went on hunger strikes to demand a ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Palestine. Participants in these movements have been met with intimidation, both from their university administrators and the federal government, threatening academic expulsion, withholding of degrees, and legal action. For example, UE Locals 150 and 300 had members suspended for exercising their freedom of speech by attending a Palestine protest. As in the cases of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mohsen Mahdawi, Leqaa Kordia, those exercising their First Amendment rights have been abducted by federal agents and illegally detained in ICE facilities.

These retaliatory actions on college campuses are also a blatant attempt to weaken the U.S. labor movement. Grant Miner, a graduate worker at Columbia University and the President of UAW Local 2710, was expelled for his activism and solidarity with the encampments. Even in the face of flagrant and systematized repression, students have bravely continued to speak out, and graduate workers across the nation continue to fight for recognition and bravely use their voices to demand fair contracts. As we enter several arduous years of political and economic struggle, sustained organizing and unionization efforts will be critical to strengthen the ability for students to stand for their beliefs.

The danger of the current moment is exacerbated by new technologies. Government powers of domestic surveillance have long been deployed against labor, especially militant trade unions like UE. In recent years, the dangerous alliance between domestic surveillance agencies and Silicon Valley has only expanded the tools available for suppressing organizing workers. Artificial intelligence (AI) sits at the center of these new instruments, representing a dramatic growth in surveillance capabilities and dangerous threat to labor power and job security. Opaque conglomerates, in partnership with the federal government yet lacking any public accountability, now design this “transformative” technology with an eye towards the suppression of progressive labor power.

Bosses try to instill fear in workers during union organizing campaigns—that is the kind of fear that the government is trying to spread across society as a whole. Corporations trying to defend their profit margins have been behind a number of these civil liberties abuses. Big business has pushed for laws to criminalize those who protest them or expose their misconduct. They hire private mercenary firms, modern day successors to the Pinkertons, who work with law enforcement to stamp out protests.

The question of capital punishment is historically of great concern to union members. On numerous occasions our government has framed and executed labor leaders, including the Haymarket martyrs, Industrial Workers of the World leader Joe Hill, immigrant labor activists Sacco and Vanzetti, and the coal miners known as the Molly Maguires. Tom Mooney, who spoke to an early UE convention, and the legendary Big Bill Haywood, were spared the death penalty only after massive campaigns to save them.

The chilling effect of denials of our democratic freedoms and civil liberties curbs progress in the U.S., limits the ability of all workers to make democratic choices for the future of our country, and thereby undermines our livelihoods, living standards, and working conditions. Without robust and proactive defense of our civil liberties, we risk the continuation of our broken system that puts profits over workers. It is clear that the fight to protect and regain civil liberties must continue regardless of which party controls the White House.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Opposes any change in the law that would further undermine our right to defend the interests of working people, specifically including changes designed to make picket-line activity subject to federal prosecution or would undermine working people’s ability to form a union and exercise their rights to collectively bargain;
2. Urges all locals and members to support organizations such as Defending Rights & Dissent, the National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, the National Conference of Black Lawyers, and Amnesty International;
3. Demands Congress investigate revelations of political spying and disruption by the FBI and other federal agencies and pass legislation definitively outlawing these practices;
4. Opposes any laws designed to limit the right to protest or further militarize domestic law enforcement;
5. Demands the end of use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers and journalists;
6. Calls for legislation to protect our civil liberties in the workplace, including:
   1. Prohibiting random or blanket drug testing in the workplace;
   2. Banning telephone, internet, and AI monitoring of employees;
   3. Further restricting the use of lie detectors, cameras, GPS, AI, and other surveillance technologies in employment;
   4. Full respect of the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals;
   5. Creating policy that re-thinks and re-imagines how we can use technologies to benefit all working people, not just the billionaire class.
   6. Reject the use of AI in the use of technologies for the purpose of surveillance and control;
   7. Opposing preventive detention and Justice Department policies that allow for closed hearings, secret evidence, refusal to name those detained, elimination of attorney-client privilege, and long detentions without bond without any specific articulated reason;
7. Demands Congress reform the process for placing groups on terrorist lists to ensure that they have sufficient notice and a meaningful opportunity to respond to charges;
8. Supports constitutional reform seeking to nullify the Citizens United decision, putting an end to unlimited financial influence of the billionaire class in our country’s democracy;
9. Supports legislation to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, supports strong whistleblower protection legislation, and opposes efforts to intimidate or bar the press and other news media from reporting on government activities;
10. Supports repeal of McCarthy-era “speech crime” laws, including the Smith Act and the Subversive Activities Control Act, and opposes exclusion of immigrants or refugees based on political beliefs or memberships;
11. Supports the abolition of the death penalty and an end to mass incarceration.

The U.S. military budget—projected to reach $1 trillion in 2026, larger than those of the next ten nations combined—continues to soar out of control with bipartisan support. Threats or use of military force are still a regular feature of U.S. foreign policy, under presidents of both major parties. When not engaging directly in military action around the world, the U.S. fights proxy wars via the funding and arming of foreign forces, many of which have atrocious human rights records. All of this is done on the backs of working people, not only in the U.S., but all around the world. The U.S. military-industrial complex is a global enterprise that siphons funds from workers and turns those dollars into endless war, demolished cities, broken lives, dead children, and brazen genocide.

The U.S. government defends excessive military spending by claiming this supports people in uniform who put their lives on the line, but in reality more than half of the military budget goes to private, for-profit contractors. There is no end in sight to the long-held practice of awarding lavish contracts to politically-well-connected defense contractors, who cannot pass an audit and who are protected from scrutiny by the politicians they have bought. American military policy leaves nothing but misery in its wake, while reaping huge profits for wealthy warmongering elites. War is good for their business, and they are indeed thriving.

In the Middle East, the U.S. is involved in a tangled, contradictory web of alliances and wars. The Biden administration, and now Trump, have continued America’s long tradition of meddling in the region. Most notably, the U.S. government continues to support Israel’s widespread aggression, carrying out genocide in Gaza, as well as bombing Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Biden failed to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran, keeping in place the severe economic sanctions imposed by the first Trump Administration that are themselves a form of warfare. Trump has now escalated with direct missile strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, further fanning the flames which perpetuate the cycles of war and occupation throughout the region. Simultaneously, the U.S. has maintained its close relationship with Saudi Arabia, a dictatorship with a human rights record no better than Iran’s. The U.S.-Saudi alliance has prolonged the Yemeni Civil War since 2014, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands dead, the starvation of over 100,000 children, and the displacement of millions from their homes.

Cuba poses no economic or military threat to the U.S. Our government has no justification for the economic blockade of Cuba, which, as members of UE Local 150 who visited the island this past year learned first-hand, makes it more difficult for Cubans to access medicine, food, and essential life-giving supplies. The blockade hurts workers in both countries. Jobs are lost, while U.S. manufacturers are denied a major market just 90 miles offshore. Instead of restoring diplomatic relationships and lifting the economic embargo, the U.S. prefers to portray an island nation of fewer than 10 million people as a threat.

UE has long warned of the danger of nuclear weapons, a position only strengthened by our close relationship over the past three decades with the militant Japanese union federation Zenroren. As workers from the only nation that has suffered a nuclear attack, Zenroren has a deep commitment to the abolition of nuclear weapons as absolutely necessary to winning a decent life for working people. The current escalation of tensions with China and Russia raise the specter of nuclear war, which would be catastrophic for human life.

The question of militarization is one with which we are intimately familiar as a working class. At the level of budget appropriations, we see how defense and policing budgets continue to rise with bipartisan support while life saving policies like healthcare and housing, public services, education, and science budgets continue to shrink. As the U.S. funds violence abroad, militarization at home continues to target migrant populations, workers of color, and pro-Palestinian organizers. Under Biden, budgets for CBP and ICE rose to $29.4 billion, a considerable increase from Trump’s budgets in the previous term. Now Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” has put ICE on steroids, expanding its funding to exceed all but the largest 15 military budgets in the world. Each new presidency builds on the same violent legacy of mass disappearance and forced deportation of migrant families and communities. This is happening today across the country, carried out by masked federal agents and aided by local law enforcement.

As a labor movement, we face the threat of disappearance off the streets if our political activity threatens the ruling class. We face deportation if our citizenship status does not fit an increasingly narrow definition of “legal.” Our workplaces are hyper-surveilled and secured— in many cases, by armed police. Universities function as extensions of repressive government power, collaborating with police and federal agencies to militarize campuses, brutalize protestors, disappear activists, and impose policies and academic discipline to repress popular movements.

The biggest threat to the people of the U.S. is not Iran, China, or military invasions from other countries, but a rapacious military-industrial complex, which:

• Fails to provide living-wage jobs, affordable healthcare, education, housing, and necessary social services;
• Exacerbates the climate crisis;
• Threatens nuclear war or nuclear catastrophe;
• Furthers systemic racism and gender discrimination.

These circumstances call for us to be steadfast, principled, and unyielding in our resistance. Further, we must recognize our responsibility, as workers in the U.S., to workers elsewhere who are affected by U.S. foreign and military policies. UE has a long history of standing with our international comrades. We have been on the front lines of anti-war efforts from the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq—and most recently in our call for a ceasefire in Palestine in October 2023 and arms embargo in 2024.

Foreign and military policies should defend the interests of working people, not the wealthy. UE has long believed that the labor movement should promote its own foreign policy based on diplomacy and labor solidarity. As members of UE, we must lead the U.S. labor movement into becoming a force that is willing to use mass political action, strikes, and other militant tactics to win the struggle against militarism and imperialism.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Calls on the union at all levels to:
   1. Inform and engage members on the need to change U.S. foreign policy to promote diplomacy, democracy, and workers rights, and encourage members to take action to secure those changes;
   2. Facilitate forums for members to share their experiences leading campaigns around international and foreign-policy issues, and workshops for member-to-member education so that other locals may learn from them;
   3. Promote involvement in labor-based efforts to effectively create that change;
   4. Support About Face, formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War, and other anti-war, pro-peace worker organizations;
   5. Educate our members on how U.S. imperial ventures are an attack on U.S. workers;
   6. Engage in a discussion within UE and beyond on how to build strike power to leverage political demands;
   7. Coordinate with other unions to take action on demilitarizing the economy;
2. Calls on the national union to:
   1. Make space in the UE NEWS for articles on international and foreign-policy issues, and to encourage members to submit articles on those subjects;
   2. Disseminate, and as necessary create, materials relating U.S. foreign policy to the concerns of the workers and specifically about the history of Palestine and its relationship to U.S. labor;
3. Demands the U.S. government invest in peace and build economic security at home by:
   1. Reducing the military budget while improving wages, healthcare, and pensions of soldiers and veterans;
   2. Reappropriating defense savings into transportation, housing, healthcare, education, renewable resource development, or other peaceful infrastructure;
   3. The creation of a fund to guarantee any worker or soldier displaced by conversion from a war economy to a peace economy up to four years’ living allowance and educational expenses;
4. Further demands the U.S. government abroad:
   1. Cease using U.S. military and intelligence agencies in interventions against nations which pose no threat to the American people;
   2. Cease all harassment of and economic sanctions on Venezuela;
   3. End the use of taxpayer money for further militarization of Latin America;
   4. Seek an immediate, negotiated end to the conflict in Ukraine;
   5. Cease the use of drones to attack foreign nationals or U.S. citizens;
   6. Reinstate the agreement negotiated with Iran which prevents its development of nuclear weapons, and normalize relations with the country;
   7. Cease military aid to countries with disgraceful human rights records;
   8. Cease all funding for the National Missile Defense program and the U.S. Space Force, and support efforts at the United Nations to ban all weapons in space;
   9. End incentives for corporations to profit from exporting weapons abroad;
   10. De-escalate tensions with China;
   11. Normalize relations with the Cuban government, and end the blockade on trade and travel for Americans;
   12. End pressure against countries that wish to trade freely with Cuba;
   13. Cease funding and support for Cuban-exile terrorist groups;
   14. Comply with the United Nations call for an end to the inhumane over 60-year Cuban embargo;
   15. Reinstate humanitarian aid to countries in need;
5. Supports the struggle of our sister union Zenroren to halt the repeal of Article 9 of Japan’s constitution, to close all U.S. military bases in Japan, and to halt all efforts to convert the Japanese Self-Defense Force to offensive purposes;
6. Welcomes the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons by the United Nations, and demands that the U.S. government take all necessary steps to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons;
7. Calls on the corporate media and the U.S. government to end its campaign of misinformation, fraud, and manipulation against the interests of our working-class comrades abroad;
8. Supports the efforts of Veterans and Labor for Sensible Priorities to pass the People Over the Pentagon Act.

Our union has undergone profound changes over the past several years. Like generations before us, we must ensure that UE’s founding principle of rank and file control is applied in ways that work for our union in our current era. Effective member-run unionism and the need to build unity across our union to take on corporate forces requires that we evaluate and improve the process of UE national officer elections. We need an election process that maximizes member engagement and allows members in UE locals across the country to make informed decisions about the direction of our union. We need processes that encourage broad, honest and open discussion of the issues confronting our union while discouraging divisive personal attacks. Above all, we need to ensure that our election process helps us to forge unity and build a stronger union, while fostering healthy and vigorous debate over our path forward.

Structural changes in UE, evolving communications technology, the changing nature of the workforces we represent, and recent experience all advocate for a serious rethinking of how we conduct our elections. Although the General Executive Board has made minor changes to try to improve the election process, more substantial changes will require amendments to the UE constitution. A core democratic practice of UE has been that proposals to make important structural changes via constitutional amendments are brought to the regions and locals through a consultative process over the period of several months or longer, usually with the assistance of a task force established by the GEB for this purpose, prior to being brought to a vote. This ensures that important decisions are done thoughtfully and with the full input of UE locals. This process has been used repeatedly in recent decades for restructuring the regions and the GEB as well as changing the dues and per capita formulas.

Such an approach can be used in order to prepare changes in time for the next UE national officer election cycle in 2027. Article 27 of the UE constitution allows for a referendum vote of the locals on constitutional amendments without the need for a convention. This process was successfully used in 2020 in order to temporarily amend the UE constitution to deal with the restrictions brought on by the Covid pandemic. We can enact a deliberative consultation process across the locals and regions over the next twelve months, culminating in a referendum vote in the fall so that amendments will go into effect at the start of the next constitution year in December of 2026.

As always, building unity within UE, especially when faced with the vicious forces currently in power in the country, should be an important consideration in any plans we make. Engaging in an inclusive, collective process across the union on how we want our member-run union to function at the national level is a critical part of ensuring we can indeed build the unity we need.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Directs the General Executive Board to establish a task force on UE national officer elections with the following charge:
   1. Solicit input from UE locals and regions on changes needed to best improve the conduct of UE elections to ensure democratic and civil debate across the union in future election cycles in keeping with the principles of member-run unionism;
   2. Review best practices of national election procedures in other unions;
   3. Draft proposals for constitutional amendments and other changes to present to the January 2026 GEB meeting;
   4. Incorporate input from the January 2026 GEB meeting in order to prepare a presentation for discussion at the spring 2026 regional council meetings;
   5. Incorporate input from the spring 2026 regional council meetings to present a revised proposal to be finalized at the May/June 2026 GEB meeting;
   6. Solicit locals representing at least the constitutional minimum of 25% of the membership to endorse the resulting constitutional amendments and submit them to the GEB prior to the September 2026 GEB meeting so that locals can vote to approve them by referendum and have them become effective December 1, 2026;
2. Directs the GEB and/or national officers to appropriately enact practices that result from the above process which do not require constitutional amendments;
3. Encourages all UE locals to contribute to the union-wide discussion of best practices for UE national officer elections;
4. Calls on UE regions to include time on their agendas at the spring 2026 regional council meeting for a thorough discussion of the task force presentation.

North Carolina has seen a growing movement of labor activism and union organizing, especially in sectors historically underrepresented in the labor movement. UE Local 150 in North Carolina has demonstrated strong leadership, organizing success, and deep engagement with community and social justice struggles. Holding the UE national convention in North Carolina would highlight and support the work of Southern labor organizers and provide national visibility to the ongoing struggle for workers’ rights in the South.

Convening in North Carolina would send a strong message of solidarity to workers across the region and strengthen the union’s presence in the South. A North Carolina location would offer an opportunity for broader member participation from Southern locals and provide a valuable educational and organizing experience for new leaders in the region.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Supports the selection of North Carolina as the host state for an upcoming UE convention;
2. Directs the UE national office to work with Local 150 leadership and community partners to ensure an inclusive, accessible, and impactful convention that uplifts Southern labor struggles and builds lasting connections for organizing and solidarity throughout the region.

Carl Rosen walked his first UE picket line at the age of five, when his father joined his fellow members of UE Local 1114 in a four-month strike at Goodman Manufacturing on Chicago’s South Side.

Following college, he got the training needed to be a maintenance electrician and eventually hired on at Kerr Glass on Chicago’s Near West Side in 1984. He spent the next 10 years as a rank-and-file member of UE Local 190, which had kept alive some of the militant traditions of the Farm Equipment Workers (FE) union it had originated with.

Carl was recruited as a steward within his first year at Kerr, and over the next decade he served in multiple other positions in Local 190, from bargaining and grievance committee through local president. While a member of Local 190 he learned important lessons from the older leaders in the shop about recruiting new leaders and ensuring that the leadership of the local represented the demographics of the membership.

In 1994, Carl led a groundbreaking plant closing fight at Kerr, after the bosses announced their plans to move the plant to Tennessee. In addition to mobilizing the membership in Chicago, Local 190 took a delegation to a shareholders’ meeting in California, and filed labor board charges arguing that since the bosses had openly admitted they were moving in search of cheaper labor, they had a duty to bargain over the decision to close the plant. They won labor board support for a rare 10(j) injunction to stop the company from moving additional machinery without bargaining. By utilizing every piece of potential leverage they had, Local 190 was able to secure a strong plant closing and severance agreement, which included health coverage for life for workers 55 and over.

In 1990, Carl had been elected as the Secretary-Treasurer of UE District 11, which put him on the national union’s General Executive Board. In 1994 he was elected president of District 11, which covered members in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota. When the district merged into the larger UE Western Region in 2006, he was elected as the first UE Western Region President, with a turf now stretching from California to northwestern Ohio.

As District and then Regional President, Carl worked closely with UE Local 1111 at the Allen-Bradley plant in Milwaukee, historically one of UE’s most important shops. Local 1111 was an exemplary member-run local, and very serious about political action and being there for other workers’ fights. In the late 1990s, Carl worked with Local 1111 President Bob Rudek in assisting UE Local 896-COGS, UE’s first graduate worker local, in figuring out how to best apply UE principles of rank-and-file democracy to this new type of workplace.

In 2008, Carl served as the lead negotiator with major U.S. banks when the members of UE Local 1110 at Republic Windows and Doors occupied their plant, the first such action in many decades, which won them $2 million in severance.

Carl was elected UE General President in 2019, and helped lead UE through the Covid-19 pandemic, when the union had to quickly adjust to a new situation, creating and providing new resources for locals to help keep their members safe and figuring out how to maintain UE rank-and-file democracy using electronic communications and virtual meeting tools—including holding our first-ever virtual convention in 2021.

As general president, Carl also assisted with negotiating first contracts for two of UE’s new graduate worker locals, Local 256 at MIT and Local 1043 at Stanford. Both of these contracts were negotiated by large committees of rank-and-file members who took on much of the work themselves, and won by locals that were able to organize majority support for strike action if necessary.

As district and regional president, and continuing as general president, Carl maintained the UE hall in Chicago—the single biggest investment that the union had until it was sold in 2024. The hall was used not just by UE, but by a wide variety of other unions and community organizations that shared UE’s values, making it an important center of working-class life in Chicago. Prior to the sale of the hall, Carl regularly hosted tours of its well-known murals, using the opportunity to tell the history of UE, the CIO, and the U.S. labor movement, including its interconnections with other movements for social justice.

In addition to working with UE locals, Carl has been a leader in UE’s coalition, international, and political action work. During his time at Kerr, Carl had joined with other labor activists to form the Chicago Area Strike Solidarity Committee (CASSCO) and was a regular at the picket lines of other unions. CASSCO eventually developed into the Chicago chapter of Jobs with Justice, which Carl helped build into a robust coalition of labor and community-based organizations. With UE winning multiple organizing drives among immigrant workers in the Chicago area in the early 2000s, he worked with other union leaders to forge strong labor support for the massive immigrant rights protests that took place over the following years.

Carl has represented UE on several international delegations, including to Brazil for the World Social Forum, to India to meet with the New Trade Union Initiative, to Japan to join Zenroren for a commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, to Canada for multiple meetings with Unifor, and to Quebec for the most recent congress of the CCMM-CSN. He has hosted many of UE’s international allies in Chicago, including helping several of them dedicate plaques on the Haymarket Memorial at annual May Day commemorations. He was a founding leader of U.S. Labor Against the War to stop the wars in the Middle East and divert the spending to human needs, and played a key role in the formation of the National Labor Network for Ceasefire.

Carl’s political action work has included building independent political organization in Chicago, working closely with now-Congressman Chuy Garcia; enthusiastic participation in the attempt to construct a U.S. Labor Party in the 1990s; and working with other Chicago-area unions to build United Working Families as a vehicle for working-class political power in the more recent period. As UE General President, he has worked closely with independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and was tapped as a surrogate speaker for Sanders in his 2020 presidential campaign. He was instrumental in building the coalitions Labor Action to Defend Democracy, which mobilized labor to take action in case of attempts to steal the 2020 election, and Labor for Democracy, which is currently leading labor opposition to the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine our rights and freedoms.

Throughout his more than four decades in UE, Carl has shown an exemplary commitment to UE principles, and to ensuring that UE’s members have the tools and knowledge they need in order to maintain UE for future generations.

The delegates to this 79^th UE Convention extend to him a heartfelt thanks for his long service to UE, and our best wishes for a long, happy and healthy retirement.

Mark Meinster is stepping down at the end of his current term as UE’s Director of Organization, after almost three decades serving the union as a Field Organizer, International Representative, and national officer. He plans to continue helping to build UE and the broader labor movement after his term ends.

Mark joined the UE staff in 1997 and was assigned to the organizing campaign at the University of Vermont in what was then UE District 2 (now part of the UE Eastern Region). After a difficult 18-month fight, UE organized and brought 350 service and maintenance workers under a first UE contract. He then worked throughout New England organizing new locals, bargaining contracts and running strikes in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, learning how to bargain and organize from long-time UE staff and leaders steeped in the militant, democratic traditions of our union.

Later, Mark was transferred to UE’s District 11 (now part of the UE Western Region) where he led campaigns to organize thousands of immigrant manufacturing workers in the Midwest. Winning these fights required building deep, long-term relationships with community organizations in Chicago and Milwaukee.

After leading efforts to bring the first wave of government contractors into our union, working with organizing committees to form UE Local 208 in Vermont and Local 1008 in California, he returned to Chicago to help UE locals wage militant struggles against plant closings, including the historic and inspirational six-day plant occupation of Republic Windows and Doors by UE Local 1110 in 2008. During that fight, workers risked arrest to force the nation’s largest banks to compensate workers for their stolen wages and benefits.

In 2009 Mark co-founded Warehouse Workers for Justice, a worker center supporting organizing among thousands of Illinois logistics workers who power the global retail supply chain. WWJ led a successful 2012 strike at the Walmart Import Distribution Center, the first strike at a Walmart-owned facility in the U.S., which ended temp employment in Walmart’s warehouses. In 2014 Mark co-founded the Raise the Floor Alliance (RTF) to support Chicago-area worker centers. RTF went on to win Chicago’s Paid Time Off and Fair Scheduling Ordinances, as well as the Illinois Domestic Workers Bill of Rights and Responsible Job Creation Acts.

Mark’s work with WWJ also led to the organization of Renzenberger (now Hallcon) rail crew transportation drivers into UE. Starting with 160 Chicago-area drivers, UE organized 2,000 Hallcon workers across more than 150 railyards, winning the first national contract by UE since our early days.

In 2018 Mark was tapped by then Director of Organization Gene Elk to lead UE’s efforts to rebuild our organizing capacity, overseeing a new national organizing team. With support from the Canadian union Unifor, UE won campaigns across 15 states in three years, adding 2,500 new members to our ranks in key base industries including rail crew transportation, retail groceries, government contractors, manufacturing and the public sector.

At the start of the pandemic, while most other U.S. unions ceased their organizing efforts, Mark worked with allies from the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to create an innovative new organizing effort, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), which harnesses the power of thousands of volunteers to assist workers in organizing their workplaces.

Elected Director of Organization in 2021, Mark’s focus has been on securing UE’s future for the coming generation. As a national officer, he worked with graduate worker leaders, key staff and the other national officers to bring 30,000 graduate workers into UE and under contract by this year’s convention. He oversaw the rebuilding of the UE Legal Department and the expansion of the UE Communications and Information Department, the creation of the new online UE leadership development training series Building Union Power, the launching of a new staff management structure, and efforts to increase the diversity of the UE staff.

Throughout his career, Mark has been guided by a deep commitment to UE’s principles, and has applied these principles to today’s realities by generating new tactics to not only fight the boss, but to fight for a better world.

The delegates to this 79^th UE Convention extend to him a heartfelt thanks for his long service to UE, and our best wishes for the future.

The Policy Action Committee of the 79th National Convention moves the following plan of action in the period up to the next national convention.

Aggressive Struggle

1. Calls on the union at all levels to educate our members about the necessity, effectiveness, and most useful strategies of workplace struggle, including, but not limited to
   1. Collective action for political change;
   2. Building cross-union and community solidarity among the working class
2. Calls on the union to commit to these principles of education by:
   1. Encouraging members and locals to participate in and/or assist the formation of the Labor Notes troublemaker’s schools;
   2. Submit articles for publication to outlets, including but not limited to Labor Notes and UE News;
   3. Encourage the purchase, subscription, and use of books such as, but not limited to, the Troublemaker’s handbook;
   4. Encourage participation in, supporting of, and joining in worker-forward community organizations such as Jobs with Justice, the Southern Workers Assembly, and the upcoming Labor Notes conferences

Independent Rank-and-File Political Action

1. Encourages the union at all levels to
   1. Be proactive in researching and engaging with candidates in advance of upcoming elections to ensure political actions protect working people rather than the corporate interests that govern the current U.S. major political parties;
   2. Continue supporting political actions that promote the well-being of workers, such as, but not limited to, Labor for Democracy, the Working Families Party, or a yet to be established program;
   3. Actively support the formation of, or alignment with, an independent working-class political party, organization, or program.
2. Educate members and their respective communities on workers’ issues and how politicians and political programs can support them.
3. Urges all locals to develop a set of standards regarding endorsing lawmakers and candidates, such as, but not limited to:
   1. Supporting only lawmakers and candidates who consistently take concrete actions to defend working people;
   2. Provide adequate time and resources to members and locals to research candidates prior to holding a vote on endorsements;
4. Urges all locals to undertake campaigns to:
   1. Register members and their families to vote;
   2. Encourage participation in all elections, from the local to the national level;
   3. Become involved in working-class movements for economic, racial, and environmental justice through, but not limited to, contacting lawmakers through petitions, letters, phone calls, emails, lobby visits, annual political action days, town hall meetings, rallies, marches, civil disobedience, and involvement in labor councils.