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. In some contracts — notably in the Wabtec chain — our members retain the legal right to strike over some grievances after receiving the company's final answer. The existence of this right, even if infrequently exercised, adds a strong incentive for management to settle.

Withholding our labor — striking — is among the most powerful tools workers have. A one-day strike by Locals 625 and 626 in November 2019 was a key element in their successful contract negotiations. The first UE contract at the Kentucky Consular Center was won through a “virtual” strike conducted by members of UE Local 728 while working from home during the pandemic — and the threat of a second one.

The power of strikes is not limited to contract negotiations. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many groups of workers throughout the country, both union and non-union, have struck or walked out to protest unsafe working conditions, in many cases winning immediate improvements and hazard pay. In August 2020, professional athletes in the NBA, WNBA, NFL, MLB, and professional tennis struck to demand action to end the police killing of Black people.

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. These include Workers’ Assemblies in Durham, Charlotte, Raleigh and Fayetteville, NC. These assemblies, encouraged by the Southern Workers’ Assembly, 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 42 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 77^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 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;
6. Directs the national union to provide renewed member education on UE strike policy; 
7. Urges locals to seek the right to strike on grievances as part of their collective bargaining demands;
8. 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 March 25-27, 2022;
9. 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 bargaining situation of our varied membership over the last two years has largely been defined by COVID-19.  Some employers’ fortunes waned and members needed to fend off deep cuts in wages and benefits.  Just as many employers did well, with members able to push for further advantage.  Nearly everywhere members had to negotiate special memorandums of understanding regarding issues such as paid time off, worker safety, and hazard pay—often on multiple occasions.  

In 2021, the working class is at a decided advantage when it comes to higher wages.  While the elevated unemployment of the pandemic has not fully come to an end, many workers are unwilling to return for the low wages offered by management.  Workplaces—both union and non-union—are as a result increasing their starting pay, which in turn has caused a record level of voluntary quits, as workers leave their existing positions in favor of higher pay elsewhere.  We have already had this reap dividends at the table, with first year wages reported as up to three times higher than prior to the pandemic.  

Many members received some reprieve on health insurance last year, as premium increases were relatively low due to many individuals forgoing healthcare treatments.  However, utilization began to return to normal in 2021, and is expected to make a full “recovery” by next year.  Bosses will continue to find ways to shift costs onto workers, including pushing for higher premium shares, higher deductibles, coinsurance and copays, more restrictive provider networks and pharmaceutical formularies, or some combination of all of these.  A new potential avenue that employers may begin to abuse is telemedicine, which expanded nearly 40-fold during the pandemic, now makes up approximately 15% of all office visits, and is much cheaper for insurers and employers to cover.  

The right to retire remains in crisis.  Defined-benefit pension plans are now rare in the private sector, and increasingly under threat in the public sector as well.  During the pandemic members faced down multiple demands by employers to temporarily suspend defined-contribution plan payments.  UE continues to prioritize the protection of members’ retirement benefits.  

Even during the depths of the pandemic, UE members have minimized losses and made significant gains.  This is a testament to what a rank-and-file union can accomplish. We can and will accomplish even more during the post-pandemic period.  

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Calls for education 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, especially those of the same employer, engaged in contract fights;
4. Calls on locals to keep members informed 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, workshops, and in-person support by regional or national officers. 

The power of working people to advance our interests, resist employer attacks on our conditions, and reshape our society to serve the many, not only the few, can only be realized when we are united in purpose and action. For this reason, organizing the unorganized has always been our union’s primary task. 

Even when faced with the attacks on labor unions, working people, immigrants, people of color, and women waged by the Trump administration and other right-wing forces, and even with pandemic conditions, we come to our 77^th National Convention able to report significant progress on the organizing front. With help from rank-and-file UE members  we organized thousands of new members in California, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

But we did so despite a difficult environment for working people and their unions. The Trump labor board, populated by union-busting lawyers who are just now being moved out of Washington, reversed small gains made during previous administrations, like quick organizing elections. The internment of immigrant families on our southern border, support for white supremacists in Charlottesville and elsewhere have only intensified the attacks on working people.  

Meanwhile, the percentage of American workers represented by unions is dangerously low at just 10.8 percent, one of the lowest points in a century. A weaker labor movement, huge corporate tax cuts passed by the Trump administration and pandemic-related job loss has resulted in unprecedented income inequality. Already-weak labor laws are further undermined by employer efforts to evade compliance through the use of temporary staffing agencies, subcontracting, and independent contractor schemes. Privatization continues apace, decimating good public-sector jobs. 

Workers are fighting back and UE is helping to lead the way. Since our last national convention, hundreds of thousands of working people have taken to the streets to protest brutality against people of color and to support the Black Lives Matter movement.  UE and other unions, along with hundreds of other community and civil rights organizations, successfully registered millions of voters and threw out Trump and the white supremacists who dominated his administration. 

But even in light of this renewed militancy and political activism, workers continue to face tremendous obstacles to organizing, from a legal regime stacked against workers, to intense union-busting by employers, to a constant propaganda barrage from the corporate media. In Bessemer, Alabama we witnessed the kind of “legal” union busting campaign which a company like Amazon can employ to stop a predominantly black workforce from becoming its first unionized shop in the U.S. Amazon exploited all of its legal advantages against its workers, like holding deceitful captive audience meetings and plastering its workplace with anti-union propaganda. It also utilized other questionable tactics including new traffic patterns to limit organizer gate access and conspiring with the Post Office to set up temporary mailboxes inside of the plant.  This is one of many reasons why UE strongly supports the PRO Act, which restores workers’ right to organize and establishes meaningful penalties on employers who violate those rights.

But facing these challenges means that our organizing work needs to be stronger and smarter. To meet the challenges, UE formed a larger team of dedicated organizing staff. We’ve developed new tools to allow workers to contact us when they are looking for a union. We’ve employed new technology to track and analyze our work and developed new strategies to more effectively generate organizing leads.

As the “Union for Everyone,” we have brought UE’s style of aggressive, rank-and-file unionism to new sectors of the economy where workers are hungry for a fighting, democratic organization. At the same time, we have doubled down on organizing efforts in industries where we have developed a strong track record, such as rail crew transportation, government contractors, graduate workers at both public and private universities, the rail manufacturing sector and consumer grocery cooperatives. 

Our innovative organizing work and use of militant tactics should continue. Plant occupations, strategic organizing strikes, and the establishment of pre-majority unions and civil disobedience should be selectively used where warranted by conditions in the workplace.

We will need more trailblazing, along with new ideas and new approaches, if we are to turn the tide for working people on the organizing front. In searching for these new approaches and tactics, our union needs the ongoing involvement of UE Young Activists and rank-and-file volunteers who have assisted in recent organizing struggles. UE should also continue to involve allies in labor and community groups who are willing to join us in our organizing work.

Workers’ rights to organize and take collective action are human rights. They are fundamental to all democratic societies and we demand that the rights to organize and bargain with employers be restored for all working people.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^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, uniting workers from a wide range of occupations in the common pursuit of improving the situation of the working class through the practice of democratic, rank-and-file unionism;
2. UE will provide a home to workers across the economy, and in the private sector 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 government contractors, rail manufacturing, rail crew transportation, consumer grocery cooperatives and private nonprofits;
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 plays 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 welcomes and embraces the historic movement among thousands of graduate workers to win collective bargaining rights and improve working conditions and wages on both private and public campuses, and will work with organizing committees to build rank-and-file UE local unions;
5. UE will build its ranks primarily in existing UE base areas, giving top priority to areas where the existence of viable organizing targets, the availability of staff, the active support of member volunteers and community allies, and other key strategic factors enhance our prospects for success;
6. UE will continue to develop the UE-Unifor North American Solidarity Project through cross-border organizing work among Canadian and U.S. transnationals at companies like Hallcon and Bombardier, as well as in other specific sectors and employers. Through this alliance Unifor and UE will continue to share organizing expertise and strategic approaches to building worker power. UE and Unifor local union members and staff will continue to play a vital role in this cross-border organizing project;
7. UE reaffirms its commitment to the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a joint project with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). EWOC assists workers through a distributed grassroots organizing program to support organizing in the workplace for improvements in conditions, safety, and fairness on the job;
8. UE will build rank-and-file unions among state, county and municipal employees in states where we currently have public workers under contract, as well as in states where our public employee members are denied the right to collective bargaining, and we will fight to win full bargaining rights for public workers in states where those rights are abridged;
9. UE will defend and support our public-sector locals in states like Iowa as they build organizing campaigns to win recertification elections and maintain representational rights;
10. UE will test new models and methods of organizing in all sectors, including alternative strategies for gaining recognition of the union, as well as strategies for building pre-majority unions in workplaces where formal recognition cannot be achieved in the short term. We will make use of new technologies for data management and communications to strengthen our organizing; we will look for opportunities for joint organizing with other unions and workers’ centers; and we will revive past organizing methods, including recognition strikes and other militant organizing tactics;
11. 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;
12. 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;
13. 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 to find the next organizing campaign;
    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;
14. UE will continue our successful Young Activist Program to find and develop activists and leaders for the future; we will prioritize young activist involvement in organizing, and we will ask our young activists to occupy the front line in fighting for workers’ rights.

Working people continue to face daily assault. The economic and political attacks and repression against working-class and oppressed communities and organizations have intensified. Organized labor — barely one-tenth of the workforce today — is the last defensive bastion 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.

At our last convention, delegates unanimously endorsed the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been a staunch ally to our union since his days as mayor of Burlington, VT in the 1980s. His campaign platform read like the UE policy book. Putting Bernie Sanders in the White House would have been a historic achievement for the working class. However, following Sanders’ strong performance in Iowa and victory in Nevada, corporate and establishment forces in the Democratic Party coalesced around Joe Biden, and Sanders withdrew from the race in April of 2020. Nonetheless, his two historic campaigns for president have fundamentally shifted the political terrain, highlighting the fundamental conflict between the working class and the corporations who seek to exploit us.

With historic voter turnouts in many different states during the 2020 presidential election, working people sent a clear message: no to the right-wing anti-worker agenda of Trump and his allies.  Some states that have traditionally gone red were flipped to blue, and more working people and unions mobilized to get out the vote.  UE members from across the nation participated and helped turn out coworkers and community members to the voting polls.  Many UE locals had meetings to inform their members about what was at stake in the election.  Joe Biden won the presidency, but our work is far from over since he has had a history of supporting a corporate agenda and has long been part of the Democratic Party establishment.  

The new year opened with a dramatic bid by Trump to hold on to power, as he encouraged his supporters to disrupt the certification of electoral college results by Congress on January 6. Hundreds of people broke into the Capitol Building, breaking windows and vandalizing congressional offices, in a clear attempt to overturn the will of the voters through violence — a coup. While this coup attempt was unsuccessful in overturning the election, the “big lie” that Trump actually won the 2020 election has become Republican Party orthodoxy, with the pro-Trump leadership in the House ousting Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her caucus leadership position for daring to question it.

The Democratic Party, after years of being largely dominated by corporate interests, is now facing an internal battle as unabashedly pro-worker candidates are running and winning at the congressional, state, and local levels. This, combined with campaigns like Fight for $15, teachers’ strikes, and other pushbacks against economic inequality, has put pressure on Democratic politicians to stand up for working people. However, much of the Democratic Party establishment remains quietly indifferent or even hostile to our agenda.

This internal fight within the Democratic Party has been playing out in struggles over two budget reconciliation bills in 2021. The American Rescue Plan Act, passed in March, brought real gains for working people: it extended unemployment, provided direct payments to individuals, increased the child tax credit and gave significant aid to state and local governments and education, while including virtually no corporate welfare. The 2022 budget resolution introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders in August includes provisions to create millions of good paying jobs, make it easier for workers to join unions, and expand and improve Medicare. However, corporate Democrats have been threatening to withhold their support unless the bill is watered down. As the 2022 elections approach, it remains to be seen whether the Democrats will continue to use their majority to deliver for working people, or cave to their corporate wing and give working people no reason to come to the polls.

The Republican Party is not leaving anything to chance. Having convinced a significant part of their base that the democratic process is not legitimate if it results in Democrats being elected, Republican-controlled state legislatures have been busy passing legislation designed to suppress the votes of working-class people and people of color. While legislation has been introduced in Congress to protect the right to vote (the For the People Act, S. 1), Republican intransigence means that it stands no chance of passing unless the Democrats are willing to get rid of the filibuster.

If Republicans regain control of either or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections, the insufficient but real gains for working people made in 2021 will be at risk, and any further gains in the federal arena will become virtually impossible. It is essential that working people defeat the anti-worker and anti-democratic Republican Party in 2022, even as we are clear-eyed about the shortcomings of the Democrats and the need to build an independent party of working people.

Fortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a new spirit of fightback to the working class. Workers have been fighting for hazard pay and putting pressure on federal, state, and local governments to pass laws protecting essential workers. Within our own ranks, UE Local 150 members that work for city and state governments in North Carolina have been putting pressure on elected officials to pass budgets that reflect the needs of public workers with wage increases, hazard pay, more PPE, and health and safety workplace policies. 

UE locals have also been active in the Medicare for All campaign throughout the nation, working with other progressive unions like National Nurses United.  UE continues to educate our members through workshops and member meetings about the importance of getting involved and supporting the Medicare for All movement.  Rank-and-file leaders from UE Local 1008 have participated in Medicare for All actions in southern California, and UE Local 150 has been an active member of the North Carolina Medicare for All coalition.

We also need to continue to fight for higher wages in workplaces.  Thanks to the Fight for $15 movement that UE is actively involved in, many states and local governments have passed $15 minimum wages, which have helped secure larger wage increases at the bargaining table.  We need to continue to build a movement that brings attention to wages and continue to fight for a federal minimum wage of $15 per hour.

The pandemic has made the public aware that workers are essential and without us, the working class, society cannot function.  As workers, we have the power to run society.  Billionaires and the ruling class are not essential to society.  We need to continue to fight and organize independently from both major political parties and unite all workers around our class interests as workers and build more working-class politics.  As UE, we need to push for reforms that help the masses of working people like Medicare for All, canceling student debt and free higher education, national hazard pay for all essential workers, health and safety for essential workers, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, a federal minimum wage of $15 per hour, national rent control, and to form our political party for the workers, by the workers.  

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^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 gain positive political action;
3. Urges all locals to undertake workplace campaigns to register members and their families to vote, and to encourage participation in the 2022 midterm elections;
4. Demands that Congress enact the For the People Act;
5. Encourages locals and regions to engage in local independent political action to ensure that all people are able to exercise the right to vote;
6. Encourages UE regions, locals, and members to become involved in Our Revolution, Labor for Our Revolution, Black Lives Matter, Fight for $15, the Poor Peoples’ Campaign, and other working-class movements for economic and racial justice;
7. Reaffirms our support for the formation of an independent working-class political party.

In order to have robust rank-and-file participation in our union at all levels, member education must remain a top priority for UE. We must provide the skills and knowledge to empower our members to take on the boss, to engage in community struggles that advance worker rights, and to run the union. We must prioritize time for this education at every opportunity. 

Our union's educational work provides members with the tools to resist employer attacks on wages, benefits, and working conditions. UE's geographic structure of regions and subregions enables us to bring a variety of educational workshops to a broader layer of local union leaders, activists, and members. Educational events help members and local union officers learn about policies on union financial integrity and practices, grievance handling, workplace representation, preparation for bargaining, and other leadership skills. Combined with workshops in regional council meetings, national conventions, and training sessions organized by local unions, this education helps members fight back in an era of increased anti-worker attacks. 

Despite the pandemic, UE has continued to hold education events. The UE Education Department has converted traditional workshops to online learning formats, which contributed to our efforts to bring forward new activists and leaders who will carry the union’s work into the future. UE also advanced member education with new workshops on topics including climate action, building solidarity for racial justice, understanding COVID-19 and workplace safety, and educating members on our principles through our new publication, Them and Us Unionism.

The union continues to benefit from its education initiatives of recent decades. The UE Steward Handbook and the UE Leadership Guide – both published in the late 1990s — remain the most thorough and useful training materials for rank-and-file leaders. The UE Steward, a newsletter of useful information and tips for shop leaders, continues to be one of the most sought after publications, and since December 2017 has been distributed via email, website and social media in addition to print. The UE News provides not only reporting on our recent struggles and other activities, but also in-depth analysis of current issues facing union members as well as UE and working-class history helping members understand our legacy. In areas with significant Spanish-speaking membership, the union provides these and other materials in Spanish to enable more members to participate, and has begun translating materials into Vietnamese. 

Our website (ueunion.org) contains information and news helpful to union members and unorganized workers, including dozens of issues of the UE Steward, and links to access the UE News archives maintained by the University of Pittsburgh. Our social media accounts regularly publicize UE educational materials, and many UE locals also have an interactive web presence through Facebook. 

A strong and effective union depends on an educated, informed leadership, an effective steward system, and an involved membership. 

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION:  

1. Commits the national union to provide both in person and virtual educational materials and workshops to assist members in running effective local unions and successfully waging local, national and international struggles, including: 
   1. Democratic operation of a local, including steward training and grievance handling, local union finances and integrity, and preparing for escalating shop floor campaigns, 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. Protecting the union in a right-to-work state and implementing strategies to maintain member unity and combat right-to-work laws; 
   7. Maintenance and promotion of the UE website and social media; 
   8. Continued publication of UE News; 
   9. Continued translation of materials into Spanish and/or other languages; 
   10. Providing language interpretation of meetings where appropriate; 
   11. Continued use of video teleconferencing to conduct educational training; 
   12. A revised UE Leadership Guide; 
2. Encourages all locals to: 
   1. Commit to leadership development of African Americans, women, LGBTQ+ members, young workers, members with disabilities, and workers of other nationalities; 
   2. Educate members about UE history and principles using the Them and Us Unionism booklet; 
   3. Regularly publish local newsletters; 
   4. Conduct classes to introduce new members to the union, explaining policies, structure, and collective bargaining agreements; 
   5. Seek the right to conduct union orientation for new hires during work time; 
   6. Establish websites, use social media, and regularly update union bulletin boards;
   7. Negotiate employer-paid lost time for members to attend training and educational events; 
   8. Hold regular steward trainings and membership involvement classes.

Workers around the world face the same conditions: bosses who maximize their profit by moving their investments without regard to their impacts 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. Due to the pandemic, our opportunities for in-person international exchanges were curtailed in the recent period. However, UE members, officers, and staff participated in numerous online exchange opportunities with union allies around the world. 

International partnerships inspire UE’s approach to a wide variety of our work. UE’s strong stance on the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade and tariff changes was informed by our alliances with the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) in Mexico and Unifor in Canada. As demonstrated in the new scrapbook we developed documenting our 30-year relationship with Zenroren in Japan, our two unions have solidified our positions on the need for peace for working people, and on the need to organize nonunion workers, especially among the growing number of precarious, subcontracted workers.

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 77^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Reaffirms support for the UE-Unifor North American Solidarity Project;
2. Reaffirms support for the Strategic Organizing Alliance with the FAT;
3. Reaffirms the deepening of our relationship with Zenroren;
4. Reaffirms our participation in and support of the global union federation IndustriALL;
5. Reaffirms solidarity with: the CSN of Quebec; FIOM of Italy; Brazilian Central Union of Workers (CUT); CGT of France; New Trade Union Initiative of India; Workers Advice Center (WAC MA’AN) in Israel/Palestine; Kilusang Mayo Uno and Partido ng Manggagawa of the Philippines; Unite the Union of the United Kingdom; Korean Confederation of Trade Unions; and other democratic worker movements around the world;
6. Stands in full solidarity with allied unions as they attempt to fight the privatization of state resources, including the CUT and the working class of Brazil as they resist extreme right-wing President Bolsonaro and his attempts to privatize Brazilian resources, and the CGT in France as they fight against the privatization of state-owned energy resources; 
7. 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;
8. Condemns the murder and persecution of trade unionists, harassment of unions, and union busting anywhere in the world;
9. 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;
10. 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;
11. Encourages the participation in global alliances to fight the rise of precarious (part-time, temp, subcontracted, and insecure) jobs.

Racism is one of the greatest evils of this country and around the world, and has always been a roadblock to building a strong labor movement. Racism is a specific form of discrimination based upon the false belief that some groups of people are inherently and biologically superior to others. It is a form of institutionalized systematic oppression and exploitation that is foundational to American capitalism, which blacks, Hispanics/Latinos, and other people of color suffer under.  

Racism and white supremacy around the world and inside the U.S. are the means capitalists developed for the purposes of exploitation and oppression, stealing the land and resources of indigenous peoples, as well as attempting to erase their history and culture.  It is also a means of dividing the working class and justifying the brutal system of coerced labor called slavery, 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 African Americans in particular. African-Americans suffer from disproportionately high unemployment, low wages, and poor working conditions. On average, African Americans are twice as likely to die from disease, police murders, accidents, and homicide as whites. African Americans are 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 African Americans, 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 Blacks and other people of color.

America has had a long history of racism, but former President Donald Trump poured gasoline onto the fire, appointing open white supremacists such as Stephen Miller to prominent roles in his administration and crafting policies explicitly intended to reduce the number of non-white Americans.  The so-called “alt-right” — thinly disguised white nationalists —  were a major part of his support, first descending on Charlottesville in 2017, and later openly attacking peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.  White nationalist groups played a major, if not dominant, role in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, with Confederate flags and other hate symbols marched through the halls of Congress.  

Police brutality and state repression continues to deepen and broaden, being further encouraged by Trump allies who still hold power. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, continues to advance the police state and its ability to squash dissent. In April 2021, Desantis signed an unprecedented bill expanding the ability of police to brutalize protesters, and requiring that after arrest, protesters remain imprisoned and ineligible for bail. 

In response to continued police violence against African Americans in recent years, Black Lives Matter has become a mass movement. After the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, polls in summer 2020 estimated that between 15 and 26 million people participated in the demonstrations in the U.S., making the Black Lives Matter protests the largest 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 Durham City Workers Union, a chapter of UE Local 150, played a critical role in 2019 of getting over $2 million proposed to hire new police redirected to pay all part time city workers a living wage of $15 per hour. Raleigh City Workers, another Local 150 chapter, have called for reducing the city’s bloated police department budget in order to invest in workers and other crucial city services.

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 77^th UE CONVENTION:  

1. Reaffirms UE’s policies of aggressive struggle against racism and in support of equal rights;
2. Calls on locals to defend our members aggressively against racism and discrimination;
3. 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;
4. Declares its support of workers and their communities’ fight against divisive racist terror; 
5. Opposes the assault on affirmative action;
6. Directs the UE Education department to continue providing workshops on racism and discrimination at all levels of our union; 
7. Calls for elimination of racial profiling, police brutality, and “stop-and-frisk,” and a repeal of “stand-your-ground” laws;
8. 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;
9. Condemns all attacks on the basis of ethnicity and religion, particularly those on Arab-Americans, Muslims and Latinxs; 
10. 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;
11. Urges regions and locals to set up unity councils on the model pioneered by Local 506;
12. Demands strict enforcement and just punishment for violation of existing anti-discrimination and hate crime laws;
13. 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;
14. Urges locals to study the Freedom Manifesto and mobilize their African-American members to attend National Assemblies for Black Liberation events;
15. 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.

UE has been leading the fight for equity for women workers since the 1940s. In the current political climate women need unions more than ever, as they are the best way to ensure greater earnings, benefits, and protections from discrimination in the workplace. Until women have full and equal rights, all workers are held back. 

Fifty percent of mothers and three-quarters of Black mothers are the sole or primary breadwinners for their families. The huge gender income gap makes it even harder for them to provide for their families. Nationally, women earn only 80 cents for every dollar men earn. While this gap is slowly closing, at current rates the gender pay gap will not be erased until some time in the mid 22nd century. African-American women only make 63 percent of what white men bring home, Native American women make only 60 percent, and Latinas only make 55 percent. 

The U.S. is ranked 65th in the world in women’s representation in national legislatures; only 26.7 percent of the members of our Congress are women. In Congress and state legislatures, men continue to push bills that eliminate healthcare opportunities for many women, including the defunding of Planned Parenthood, stripping maternity care from mandated health insurance coverage, and gutting Medicaid, the effects of which would fall disproportionately on low-income single mothers. So far, 2021 has been the most restrictive year for abortion access since Roe v. Wade became law, with new restrictive laws in at least 17 states. In August of 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand an odious law passed by the Texas legislature in 2019 which effectively makes it unlawful for a woman to terminate her pregnancy after six weeks. 

The pandemic has highlighted the challenges working women face at all times: juggling responsibilities related to children’s care and education as well as health needs across a family, all while being impacted by job losses in food service, hospitality, education, and other sectors that disproportionately employ women. The Department of Labor has noted that, “The pandemic has set women’s labor force participation back more than 30 years. Unfortunately, the pandemic stalled gains made toward closing the pay gap, and layoffs and a lack of child care have forced many women out of the workforce entirely. In February 2021, women’s labor force participation rate was 55.8% – the same rate as April 1987. And women of color and those working in low-wage occupations have been the most impacted.”

UE members need to apply ever-greater pressure on politicians and bosses to advance and maintain women’s rights. This war on women’s rights needs to stop and we must remain leaders in this fight. 

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION:  

1. Calls on the union at all levels to: 
   1. Support locals in fighting legislation that negatively impacts women’s and families’ rights; 
   2. Bargain for gender equality and to fight women’s oppression in the workplace; 
   3. Demand pay equity, recognize the intersection of race and gender, acknowledge and address the urgent political and safety issues experienced by women regardless of gender at birth, and commit to address pay inequality at all levels;
   4. Create a consistent environment to educate and support women to assume positions of leadership within their locals, regions, and the national union; 
   5. Educate members, officers, and staff on sexual harassment and programs to combat harassment, intimidation and sexist attitudes wherever found, through trainings and developed programs; 
   6. Educate members, officers, and staff about, and encourage participation in, resources available to families who need assistance, particularly those with special-needs children, such as 2-1-1, early-childhood intervention, and other local programs;
   7. Continue the implementation of the anti-harassment policy for regional councils and national conventions, including continued training of ombuds as needed, at least one of whom will be a woman;
   8. In jobs primarily held by women, demand that employers file timely injury report forms for all worker injuries, as well as report such injuries to all appropriate state agencies, while creating strong health and safety language to be placed in collective bargaining agreements;
   9. Press for employer-paid training programs which allow women to upgrade their skills to enter jobs that have been traditionally reserved for men; 
   10. Renew the fight for employer-funded childcare, both through legislation and within the union; 
   11. Support the candidacy of women who are pro-labor to run for all levels of public office; 
   12. Support pro-labor candidates that openly support women’s choice and family planning;
   13. Provide dedicated time and space for women’s caucuses at regional and national levels within UE; 
   14. Provide quality childcare for meetings and conferences to allow parents and guardians to participate in the activities of the union;
   15. Bargain language providing a safe, clean and private space for nursing parents; 
2. Supports the right of all those seeking reproductive healthcare, regardless of economic status, to choose whether to continue or terminate a pregnancy, to have access to free, confidential, and effective birth control and family planning services, to be protected against forced sterilization, and not be discriminated against because of reproductive health issues, and demands that state legislatures end all restrictions on these rights; 
3. Demand Congress: 
   1. Improve and expand the Family Medical Leave Act and ensure all workers receive full benefits to care for any family member; 
   2. Enact: 
      1. A federal paid parental leave program and a high-quality federal day care program; 
      2. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, calling for stricter and clear mandates for employers to provide accommodations for pregnant workers; 
   3. Create a subsidized system which does not penalize individuals for providing homecare and which provides a living wage and quality care; 
   4. Enact a new federal law prohibiting employers from asking about pay history in order to reduce pay disparities;
   5. Protect and expand the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other programs that assist low-income families and children;
4. Encourages UE members to engage with organizations fighting for women’s rights.

Immigrants helped build this country and have played a central role in our union since its inception. 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.

The Supreme Court’s Hoffman Plastic Compounds ruling in March 2002 decreed that immigrant workers fired for organizing a union are not entitled to back pay or reinstatement. The court effectively decided that immigrant workers “have no rights that bosses need respect.” Employers now routinely use the Hoffman ruling to fire union activists. But there are examples where immigrant workers have stood up for their rights and have won. Fermin Rodriguez, an undocumented worker fired for his union activity in Los Angeles, was reinstated in 2015 by the National Labor Relations Board after the evidence showed his employer El Super grossly violated the union rights of Rodriguez and his coworkers. 

Employers use the threat of deportation to scare immigrant workers during organizing drives. The Social Security Administration (SSA) has resumed sending out ‘no-match’ letters which are based on an error-filled database and result in employers improperly firing large numbers of workers. The E-Verify program, by SSA’s own admission, contains 17 million errors, and a 2020 estimate suggested that 760,000 workers with legal documentation have been negatively impacted since 2006.  SSA should be administering retirement benefits, not enforcing immigration laws. I-9 audits can result in the quick discharge of workers with no recourse available to the union.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents use heavy-handed raids to terrorize communities and workplaces. Following workplace raids, children who are U.S. citizens remain in the country while parents are jailed and then deported. Our immigration detention system unnecessarily locks up hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year, exposing detainees to brutal and inhumane conditions of confinement at massive costs to American taxpayers. Since the inception of the 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws, immigrant communities have been driven further into the shadows. 

While the U.S. has for decades had policies which were harsh and retributive against immigrants, under former President Donald Trump 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 attempt to reduce the number of non-white people, from placing new arrivals into literal concentration camps to turning immigration judicial proceedings into kangaroo courts where individuals had no hope of prevailing.  

Proponents of immigration reform — including UE — had some guarded hope with the inauguration of President Joe Biden.  Biden took some incremental steps to improve our immigration system.  He has worked to reunite children with their parents cruelly separated by the Trump Administration.  He has moved unaccompanied minors out of DHS-run detention facilities into more humane facilities under the supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services.  He attempted to end the Trump-era policy of forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, although a reactionary Supreme Court bizarrely ruled he had to continue this practice.  He has issued a blueprint which called for the defunding of the border wall, funding of legal representation for migrant families, and reducing court and visa backlogs.  

Perhaps most notably, in January Biden sent the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 (H.R. 1177/S. 348) to Congress.  This Act would create a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented individuals, with Dreamers, TPS holders, and some immigrant farmworkers eligible for green cards immediately.  It would also reform our current system by clearing backlogs, reducing wait times, and eliminating per-country visa caps.  Green cards would be easier for lower-wage workers to acquire. It would protect immigrant worker whistleblowers from deportation, enhance the ability of the government to prosecute employers for exploiting immigrant workers, and would require DHS and DOL to make recommendations for improving our broken verification process.  

While much of the above is sorely needed, it needs to be taken into context of a more mixed complete picture.  The U.S. Citizenship Act is not a perfect bill, and still contains provisions which continue the militarization of our southern border.  In addition, as has been the case with much of the legislation passed by House Democrats, it has stalled in the Senate, and is unlikely to move anywhere without being watered down or having pro-corporate and punitive elements added — red lines which poisoned the well for immigration reform in the past.  If any meaningful immigration reform is to pass in the near future, the Senate must ignore the archaic process related to the filibuster that requires 60 votes for a bill to proceed, and allow a bill to pass with a simple majority.  

As the odds of comprehensive immigration reform are long at the moment, we must rely upon executive action.  Biden’s record here, rather than his rhetoric, has been disappointing, and at times appalling.  With eight months of presidency under his belt, Biden has yet to dismantle many of the onerous Trump-era policies penalizing asylum seekers and green card holders.  Indeed, his administration defends them in court.  Biden has continued Title 42, a Trump-era 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, in spite of the fact that cases are much lower in the countries of origin for most of these migrants.  Over 100,000 unused green cards held over from the Trump Administration are set to expire at the end of September, and Biden has made no moves to increase the speed of adjudication to allow their use before they expire.   In July of this year Biden initially announced he would break his campaign promise of allowing 60,000 refugees to settle in the U.S. in 2021, and signaled an intent to remain at the Trump-era levels of 15,000 — a move only reversed after tremendous outcry.  In recent months even his allies within the Democratic party have become exasperated with how slowly the unwinding of reactionary Trump-era immigration policy is taking place, leading some to wonder if forces within the administration even prioritize reforming our broken immigration system at all.  

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.

Attacks on immigrants merit strong resistance by members of our union. UE must work with other unions, faith, and community groups to fight collectively for legalization and against anti-immigrant laws and sentiment.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th  UE CONVENTION: 

1. Demands an end to the separation of immigrant families, 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 federal government impose an immediate moratorium on all ICE raids, arrests, deportations, harassment, seizures, I-9 audits, Secure Communities, the 287(g) and E-Verify programs, and other abuses of 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. Demands the federal government end their VOICE program, which serves the sole purpose of stirring up anti-immigrant racism, repeal the anti-immigrant so-called “Kate’s Law,” and end all travel bans;
5. Supports the inclusion of immigrants in all current and proposed public healthcare programs, including Medicare for All; 
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 the Hoffman Plastics decision;
   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 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. Demands that state motor vehicle agencies change policies and programs that make it impossible for immigrants to legally own and operate vehicles;
12. 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.

Working class unity is a core belief of our union. Article IV of the Union’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.” 

While many still regard marriage equality as the hallmark win for the LGBTQ+ Community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer/Questioning), LGBTQ+ people across the country continue to struggle against housing inequality, workplace violence, and other forms of legal discrimination. 

Twenty-six states provide no protections whatsoever for LGBTQ+ workers against workplace discrimination.  The majority of states also provide no protections to LGBTQ+ individuals in housing, public amenities, and credit access — all of which disproportionately affect the working class.  Although President Biden reversed Trump-era policy and extended federal sex discrimination protections to LGBTQ+ individuals, attorneys general from twenty states are currently suing the federal government in an effort to roll back this policy.  

Many states continue to push “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.  These laws are also often constructed so as to allow discrimination — up to and including firing — of unmarried women for being pregnant or using birth control.  They are so vaguely worded as to sometimes allow further forms of bigotry, such as against interracial marriage, to be protected as well, as long as the individual claims a “religous” conviction.  

Violence against LGBTQ+ people still occurs far too frequently.  In 2019 the FBI reported one out of every five hate crimes were caused by anti-LGBTQ+ bias, with the number of hate crimes against trans individuals, in particular, rapidly on the rise.  In 2020, 44 trans and non-gender conforming individuals were murdered, making it the most violent year for the community on record.  As with past years, the majority of those murdered were black and brown trans women.  

We must unite and fight against all discrimination, whether in our communities, in our government, or in our workplaces. Homophobia and transphobia keep us divided and weaken the labor movement. We must take up the cry that an injury to one is an injury to all. 

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION:  

1. Encourages the formation of LGBTQ+ caucuses at various levels of the union; 
2. Calls on locals to bargain protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, health insurance and pension coverage for couples of all genders and sexual identities, and leave-of-absence language that gives domestic partners the same rights as married employees; 
3. Directs the UE Education Department to develop, in conjunction with LGBTQ+ members, anti-oppression workshops and materials for use at all levels of the union in order to educate our membership and communities on the destructive nature of LGBTQ+ oppression;
4. Supports organizations fighting for the rights of LGBTQ+ people;
5. Urges members to boycott establishments that discriminate against LGBTQ+ people; 
6. Calls on UE negotiating committees to bargain gender-neutral language in their collective bargaining agreements; 
7. Encourages all levels of the union to make use of gender-neutral language.

The deadly global COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the brokenness of the U.S. for-profit “healthcare system.” Despite having less than 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has had 25% of the world’s confirmed COVID cases and 20% of deaths. Of the 25 wealthiest countries in the world, the U.S. remains the only one that does not provide universal health care.

Because of institutional racism and unequal access to healthcare among other factors, people of color were among the hardest hit by the pandemic. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black or African-American persons were 3.7 times more likely to be hospitalized by COVID-19 than white persons and 2.8 times more likely to die from the disease. Hispanic or Latino persons were 4.1 times more likely to be hospitalized and 2.8 times more likely to die. 

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately 87 million Americans were uninsured or underinsured. A recent study by Families USA found that one-third of COVID-19 deaths and around 40% of infections were linked to a lack of health insurance. And during the pandemic tens of millions of people lost their employer-provided health insurance due to job loss, adding to the number of uninsured Americans.  

While millions of Americans were suffering and dying as a result of the pandemic, the for-profit health insurance industry was making money hand over fist. Health insurance corporations’ profits doubled during the pandemic, passing along the billions of dollars of additional profits to their CEOs and shareholders.

As the for-profit health insurance industry was swimming in billions of dollars of additional profits, millions of Americans were sinking further in medical debt. A recent study published in Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that medical debt is twice as large as had previously been estimated — $140 billion in collections as of June 2020, compared to an earlier estimate of $81 billion. One out of six Americans had medical debt being pursued by collectors during June 2020. Medical debt is the main reason for personal bankruptcy, despite the U.S. spending more than $4 trillion on healthcare in 2020.

A recent study by the Commonwealth Fund reported that the U.S. came in last of high-income countries in access to health care, equity and outcomes, despite spending a far greater share of its economy on healthcare. Half of lower-income U.S. adults reported that they did not receive care because of the cost. The U.S. is the only one of the eleven countries surveyed not to have universal health insurance coverage.

Employers cut their healthcare bills by shifting costs onto workers. Healthcare costs make it difficult for union members to negotiate other economic gains at the bargaining table. UE’s Healthcare Cost Calculator, which is available on the UE website and has been used in conjunction with the UE workshop “How to Fix Healthcare,” has demonstrated how much healthcare takes out of our paychecks. Among those members who have used it so far, the overwhelming majority are finding that they are spending over 15 percent of their income on healthcare and typically closer to 25 percent, with some members reporting more than 50 percent.

Even before the pandemic, the public recognized the U.S. healthcare system needed a complete overhaul. Polling has consistently shown that a majority of the public — and a majority of doctors — support Medicare for All. This type of system has been used successfully in Canada for decades, where polls show over 85 percent of the public approves. 

While an overwhelming majority of the public continues to support Medicare for All, it will take an organized, educated and mobilized mass movement to win it. Due to the ongoing efforts of Medicare for All supporters, 117 members of the U.S. House of Representatives — a majority of the Democratic caucus — have cosponsored the Medicare for All Act, H.R. 1976, introduced by Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA). Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is planning on introducing his Medicare for All legislation in the Senate later this fall.  H.R. 1976 would establish a national health insurance program for all U.S. residents from birth or residency; cover all medically necessary services including inpatient, outpatient, prescription drugs, mental health and substance use services, reproductive health care, gender-affirming care, dental, vision, hearing, physical therapy and long-term care; eliminate all premiums, deductibles, copays and coinsurance; abolish obscene profit-making from our health care system; reduce classism, sexism and racism by eliminating a means-tested program for the poor; save over 68,000 lives every year; eradicate medical bankruptcy; and save $458 billion every year.

UE members have been in the thick of organizing for H.R. 1976. Twenty UE members, officers, staff and retirees attended the virtual 2021 Medicare for All National Strategy Conference earlier this year, and afterwards organized a UE Medicare for All caucus to continue organizing support for Medicare for All. UE Local 150 members in North Carolina have been active in the North Carolina Medicare for All Coalition which was successful in getting a couple of representatives to cosponsor H.R. 1976. UE members in contract negotiations at the East End Food Co-op and General Electric Appliances negotiated Medicare for All language in their contracts during this past year.

While we fight to enact Medicare for All that this country desperately needs, we should also push for the expansion of Medicare, including coverage of dental, hearing, and vision, negotiation of drug prices, and lowering the eligibility age.  We must also fight to expand Medicaid on the state level. 

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION:  

1. Demands Congress enact the Medicare for All Act (H.R. 1976), 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. Supports efforts to institute similar 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: 
   1. Use UE’s Healthcare Cost Calculator, including with members in the shop especially during contract negotiations;
   2. Educate members about the real cost of their existing healthcare and organize members to call and visit their congresspeople in support of H.R. 1976;
   3. Collaborate with their employer on a mutually-agreed-upon public statement in support of Medicare for All;
4. Opposes all efforts to undermine the ACA, Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans’ Administration (VA) health benefits; 
5. 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!; 
6. 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 and preventive testing and screening of all veterans potentially exposed to depleted uranium or other toxins; 
7. Encourages locals to support the growing campaign for paid sick days and family leave in cities and states across the country;
8. 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. The UN Intergovernmental Policy on Climate Change (IPCC) described their most recent report dated August 8, 2021 as a “code red for humanity.”  They further reported changes to the Earth’s climate in every region and across the whole climate system.  Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented across thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some changes such as continued sea level rise are irreversible.  

Since UE’s last convention, we have seen monumental wildfires in the U.S. west, arctic Siberia, Greece, and Turkey.  Temperate Portland, Oregon, hit an otherworldly 118°F, while Canada hit its all-time high.  2020 tied with 2016 as the hottest year followed by 2019 as the 3^rd hottest ever.  July of 2021 has been recorded as the world’s hottest month. We have also seen record-breaking typhoons, flash floods, hurricanes and cyclones.  Global temperatures will continue to rise unless we massively reduce our use of fossil fuels.

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.

In the 1930s and 1940s, 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. 

The Green New Deal proposed by the youth-led Sunrise Movement, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others offers our best hope to meet the challenge of climate change while creating millions of good union jobs.

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.

Over the course of 2021, UE Locals 506, 610, and 618 have been working on a concrete example of just transition through their Green Locomotive Project.  The three locals’ members are employed by Wabtec, which dominates the freight locomotive market within the U.S., and has the capability to build new, low-emission locomotives, as well as new experimental hybrid locomotives equipped with onboard batteries.  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.  

Given the movement for a Green New Deal, the leadership of the three locals sensed an opening for a new program, forcing railroads to replace or upgrade older locomotives with subsidized-purchases of new cleaner or zero-emission models —  a policy change which would result in hundreds of new jobs in Erie and Wilmerding, as well as considerable reduction of pollution, particularly in rail yards often clustered in urban areas near communities of color.  The Green Locomotive Project built relationships with environmental activists and other trade unions, worked with federal politicians to draft legislation, and while the outcome is still in flux, has come closer to making a major breakthrough in Washington than UE has managed for decades.     

It is also 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.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Endorses the Green New Deal legislation introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey;
2. Demands Congress implement the policy prescriptions of the Green Locomotive Project;
3. 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;
4. 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;
5. Encourages the union at all levels to educate members about: 
   1. Climate change and creative solutions that reduce carbon output while creating good union jobs;
   2. Environmental justice struggles, including the struggle of UE members in West Virginia and eastern North Carolina threatened by pipeline projects in their areas;
6. Urges all UE members to become involved in environmental justice organizations and struggles;
7. Calls on environmental organizations to incorporate just transition into their platforms; 
8. Demands Congress hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for the damage they created, including but not limited to criminal liability and punitive fines;
9. Demands that all environmental policies, including those targeting climate change, incorporate a just transition for workers and communities affected;
10. 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;
11. Reaffirms the solution UE proposed to the energy crisis in the 1970s: public ownership of the energy industry and increased investment in rail transportation;
12. Supports the continuing efforts of the UE to build alliances with environmental and community organizations and in developing organizing strategies for renewable energy workers;
13. Calls for a moratorium on the construction of any additional nuclear fission power plants.

The struggle for a healthy and safe workplace is fundamental to the labor movement. It was one of our earliest major demands alongside higher pay and a shorter work week. It is every union’s obligation to encourage and, if necessary, force the boss to correct dangerous situations. But workplace safety cannot be solved through militancy alone.

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 remains broken and underfunded, with infrequent inspections and nominal fines.

Today most workers 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. Female workers, workers of color, LGBTQ+ workers, and differently-abled workers all have different needs which should be addressed to ensure equity in workplace safety.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made issues of workplace health and safety take on an even-greater importance for UE members. UE has relatively few members who were laid off long-term during the pandemic, and almost as few in occupations which have allowed them to work from home.  Instead the vast majority of our membership are in what became termed “essential work” — those who go to work in person no matter how prevalent COVID was in their local community.  With the Trump Administration’s dogged refusal to set any sort of enforceable OSHA COVID standards, it was up to workers to act collectively to ensure their own health and safety.  UE members negotiated — and continue to negotiate — over many practices over the course of the pandemic, including distribution of PPE, social distancing within the workplace, staggered shift schedules, and perhaps most importantly, changes to attendance and paid leave policies to allow workers who believe they had been exposed to isolate without fear of repercussion.  Although President Biden promised to release COVID emergency temporary standards for all OSHA-covered workers soon after inauguration, the Administration backtracked this summer, and only released standards covering workers in healthcare settings — a betrayal of the many working people who supported his election.  

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 77^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;
   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 all COVID testing and for quarantine as advised by their physician or employer;
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 unauthorized 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.
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 Biden Administration develop an OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) on COVID-19 which includes all OSHA-covered workers, and a permanent OSHA standard related to contagious diseases.

The Bill of Rights has never been applied in the workplace, where employers are empowered to maintain near-absolute control. With our constitutional rights shredded by our employers, our rights to organize into unions are also ignored by bosses. Our freedom to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures ends at the entrance to the workplace. Our freedoms of speech and assembly are virtually nonexistent while at work — unless you have a union. 

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), passed in 1935, was the closest labor got to a “bill of rights.” The NLRA provided labor for the first time the legal right to organize, to bargain, and to strike without interference from the employer. For the first time employers were required to recognize and bargain with a union of the workers’ choice.

In response to five million workers striking in 1946 — mass action intended to force employers to share their profits with workers who had gone through years of hardship during World War II — a reactionary Congress voted to amend the NLRA with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. The law took away the right of unions to engage in secondary boycotts, made closed union shops illegal, allowed states to pass “right-to-work” laws, allowed the President to interfere in strikes, and gave employers more tools to stop workers from organizing.

The Taft-Hartley Act, passed with the votes of Southern Democrats, was in part a consequence of the failure of the labor movement to organize the South. The South has historically had low union representation; the proportion of workers represented by a union in Southern states is less than half of that outside the South. This lack of union rights disproportionately affects black workers, as at least 55-60% of all black people in the U.S. live in the South. This is a legacy of the Confederacy, and the legislative project of Jim Crow that followed. 

Under Jim Crow, state legislatures sought to formalize white supremacy by targeting and disempowering Black workers, particularly in the public sector, by advancing a blitz of anti-union legislation. The South led the way in passing right-to-work legislation in the 1940s and 1950s and in stripping public-sector workers of collective bargaining rights.

A second grievous body blow to labor rights happened in 1981 with Ronald Reagan’s busting of the air traffic controller’s union (PATCO).  A heretofore little-noticed judicial ruling allowing for the “permanent replacement” of strikers was increasingly used by bosses to de-unionize workplaces and drive down wages and working conditions.  The threat of permanent replacement, high unemployment, and the shrinking number of unionized jobs led to a precipitous decline in the number of strikes.  Since militant action is the basis of all collective power in the workplace, this created a self-sustaining downward spiral in both unionization and worker power that has yet to be completely arrested.

In the last decade, employers have imported Jim Crow-era legislation from the South to the rest of the country. They have passed right-to-work legislation in states with deep union history like Michigan and Wisconsin, stripped collective bargaining rights from public-sector workers in Wisconsin and Iowa, and established a dangerous Supreme Court precedent in Janus vs AFSCME, which imposed right-to-work conditions on the public sector nationwide.

Today, employers brazenly violate the law and victimize working people who dare to challenge their complete control. Almost 10% of workers who engage in organizing are fired by their employers, amounting to tens of thousands every year. In 92% of union organizing campaigns, workers are subjected to the psychological warfare of captive audience meetings, such as we saw in UE’s recent campaign at Refresco.  Of those workplaces which successfully manage to organize in spite of employer-run terror campaigns, only half will obtain a first union contract.  The ranks are cut in half yet again, as only half of these units in turn win second contracts.  The percentage of unionized workers in the U.S. declined from 24% in 1979 to 10.8% in 2020, with only about six percent in the private sector.  These levels are the lowest since before the great organizing drives of the 1930s. In other industrial countries, union density is many times higher. 

In the public sector, workers in some states are prohibited from bargaining collectively. North Carolina and South Carolina have blanket statutes that prohibit collective bargaining for all public-sector employees. Even where collective bargaining is comprehensive, public workers are usually banned from striking, and are instead shunted into legalistic binding arbitration procedures.  This has had a negative effect on both the militancy which allowed mass organization of the public sector in the 1970s, and the ability of members to coordinate against assaults on their working conditions and collective bargaining rights.

President Joe Biden has made some limited improvements regarding labor law since coming into office.  Within less than an hour of being inaugurated he began the process of removing odious former General Counsel Peter Robb—a corporate consultant who actively worked with Ronald Reagan to crush PATCO.  Pending Senate confirmation, the NLRB as a whole will have a pro-union majority in short order as well, which will likely help to quickly undo Trump-era precedents on issues ranging from joint employer status to “independent contractors” to election rules.  However, these advances should be taken into context.  The precedent has been set many times now that the incremental changes to labor rights won under Democratic presidents are undone under the next Republican president.  And anti-labor Supreme Court cases like  Janus v. AFSCME remain in full force with no prospect of reversal.  

Given all executive orders and favorable judicial rulings are fleeting, we must look to legislative action if we wish to achieve changes which will outlast the current administration.  The most comprehensive labor law proposal before the current Congress is the PRO Act (H.R.842).  The bill would rein in most employer lawbreaking around organizing a union and negotiating a first contract, with punitive fines for labor law violations, a streamlined election procedure, making it harder for an employer to interfere in the election process, banning captive audience meetings, and making abuse of the terms “supervisor” and “independent contractor” by employers much harder.  The bill also undoes many critical elements of Taft-Hartley, essentially ending the enforcement of “right-to-work” laws and re-legalizing secondary strikes.  Notably it also would make the permanent replacement of economic strikers illegal, once again allowing for the use of the strike as a regular tactic to achieve a measure of justice in the workplace.  UE locals have been actively supporting the passage of the PRO Act by engaging in delegation marches, mass phone call actions and letter-writing campaigns to their congressional representatives.  

Now is the time for a law that protects workers and grants all rights and freedoms under the Constitution. In order to really safeguard workers, the right to associate — the right of working people to have the ability to say under what conditions they will or will not labor — must be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Workers whose rights were fully protected under the Constitution would be free to assemble, speak and associate anywhere and at all times, to organize without employer intervention, to bargain collectively, to strike, to boycott, or to refuse to handle goods. 

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Calls on Congress to: 
   1. Amend the Constitution to include worker rights; 
   2. In the meantime pass the PRO Act, and any other legislation giving workers the same constitutional rights to organize without restriction or limitation in the workplace that we enjoy outside the workplace, including substantial penalties for employers who violate these rights;
   3. Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act;
2. Urges UE locals to:
   1. Challenge state laws that restrict the rights of workers in the public and private sectors to organize, bargain, strike, and function freely;
   2. Build coalitions with unions and the community to expand the rights of workers;
   3. Meet with their local congressional delegation to get them to sign on to and actively support the PRO Act;
   4. 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.

Protecting public workers’ rights is crucial for creating thriving workplaces and communities. Public workers serve states, cities, and counties, providing vital services such as healthcare, sanitation, and education at all levels. But in many states, public workers do not have the right to collectively bargain with their public 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. In those latter states, UE stands by public workers demanding to be respected by their employers.

Collective bargaining is 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’ rights 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.  For example, in West Virginia public workers have no legal framework for collective bargaining. 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. 

Brought to North Carolina by UE Local 150, members of the International Labor Organization (UN) 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, allowing individual municipalities to pass resolutions allowing their workers to bargain collectively and demonstrating that the legacy of Jim Crow can be repealed. In North Carolina, the Southern Workers International 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 statewide unions in North Carolina, Virginia, and West 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, introduced in the last Congress, 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. Reintroduction and passage of the Act would result in a sea 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 77^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;
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 Congress pass the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act;
6. Supports the Southern Workers Assembly in its call to organize the South;
7. Supports the Southern Workers International Justice Campaign building awareness and support for collective bargaining rights of public workers in North Carolina;
8. Supports the education of elected officials and the general public regarding the need for collective bargaining for public employees;
9. Supports work at the international level challenging the violation of public workers’ rights;
10. 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;
11. Calls on locals to mobilize in support of candidates for elected office who will restore and improve collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees.

Privatization continues to decimate public employment. Privatization erodes and destroys existing public-sector unions, driving down wages, benefits and working conditions.

Corporations benefiting from privatization range from some of the largest global conglomerates to front-group businesses created to take advantage of tax credits and bidding requirements. West Virginia is one state that has taken a very pro-business attitude, and passed legislation in June of 2021 which allows greater use of independent contractors.  Large companies have found that they can use independent contractors’ status in U.S. labor law to lower workers’ pay and benefits, while maintaining significant control over how those workers perform their jobs.

Public-sector unions (including UE) have fought for higher wages and better working conditions for their members. These hard-fought gains can be erased overnight through privatization. Contract workers often face poverty wages and harsh working conditions and depend on government benefits such as food stamps to survive. Standards of living for such employees are generally precarious.

The fight against privatization is also a fight for racial justice. African Americans are more likely to work in the public sector, and if they do they on average earn more than if they worked in the private sector. The corporate attack on public workers has a thinly disguised racial component in the depiction of public employees as lazy and overpaid.

UE Local 893 in Iowa has fought off several privatization schemes beginning in the early 1980’s. UE Local 170 in West Virginia has relentlessly, and often successfully, opposed privatization initiatives by both the executive and legislative branches of state government since its founding in 2006. 

The contagion of privatization extends to every part of our society: public water systems and assets are being sold, public roads, bridges, and other infrastructure are being parceled out to politically connected private interests, and public education is being dismantled as corporations seek to profit by leveraging our nation’s future. The very concept of the public sector and the public good are under attack in order to increase the already historic level of wealth inequality. A determined and unified response is imperative.

THEREFORE , BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77th UE CONVENTION:

1. Opposes privatization and contracting out of public services and facilities;
2. Demands Congress:
   1. Declare a moratorium on all new federal privatization;
   2. Investigate all current contracts to determine if they result in accountability, quality of service, and savings;
   3. Restore adequate federal support for state and local governments to meet public needs without cutting wages, benefits and working conditions of workers;
   4. Cut off all funding that promotes privatization globally, namely schemes contained in the work of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
3. Demands state attorneys general investigate all current and proposed state and municipal privatization for conflicts of interest and other forms of corruption and self dealing;
4. Supports state legislative moratoriums on contracting out public sector work; 
5. Supports passage of legislation at all levels which requires work done with public funds to provide a living wage and comprehensive benefits;
6. Opposes replacing public-sector workers with inmate labor, or by forcing workers on unemployment compensation or welfare to work;
7. Supports the union’s work to organize private-sector service companies and agencies to improve the lives of these workers by bringing them up to the standard of their public sector counterparts.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the federal government’s response to it, has demonstrated that government intervention in the economy to help working people is not only feasible, but necessary. Faced with the massive economic dislocation caused by the pandemic — and the potential for widespread social unrest — even the Republican-controlled Senate agreed to the CARES Act, which provided for direct cash payments to all Americans, extended and enhanced unemployment benefits, paid sick leave, and support for homeowners, renters, students, businesses and state governments. Following the 2020 elections, a bipartisan bill in December 2020 extended or restored many of these benefits, and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), passed by Democrats in March of 2021, provided a third round of direct payments, extended unemployment benefits, increased the child tax credit, and instituted monthly prepayments of the child tax credit.

Without these measures, which have been a lifeline for millions of families during the pandemic, working people would have suffered far more. In fact, child poverty actually decreased during the pandemic, and ARPA is projected to cut child poverty in half, and total poverty by a third. An independent estimate by the Tax Policy Center suggests after-tax income for the lowest-earning 20 percent of Americans will rise by 20 percent due to ARPA, with income for the next-lowest 20 percent rising by almost 9 percent.

In spite of this, economic inequality continued to rise during the pandemic.  American billionaires’ total wealth since the start of the pandemic increased by $1.8 trillion: equal to about half of their wealth growth over the previous 30 years.  The number of billionaires also increased, from 614 to 708.  Many of the wealthiest billionaires today own major tech companies or retailers, and it is no surprise that during the pandemic — when millions of Americans were spending far more time on their smartphones and computers and having products delivered to their homes from Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other major retailers — that wealth continued to consolidate at the very top.   Their very good fortunes occurred while 41 million Americans fell sick with COVID-19, over 76 million people lost their jobs, 100,000 smaller businesses closed, 24 million Americans reported not having enough to eat, and 1 in 5 renters was behind on payments.  

The racial and gender disparity of wealth and income also deepened during the pandemic. In 2019, the median white family had eight times the wealth of the typical black family, and five times that of the typical Hispanic/Latino family in 2019, and early indications are the gap has widened since.  Black and brown workers were more likely than white workers to be unemployed during the pandemic.  When they lost their jobs, they had less savings to fall back upon, and were more likely to go into debt to attempt to keep ahead of bills. Early indications suggest that the economic recovery for workers of color is also occurring more slowly.  There remain huge disparities in income based upon gender as well, with women on average only making 82% of what men make, and women of color making significantly less than white men (as low as $0.69 on the dollar for native American women, a number which worsened by five cents during the pandemic).  Much of this difference in pay by race and gender reflects the different societal values — and salaries — assigned to different jobs (such as deciding caregiving jobs should be paid less than white-collar work), and could not be adequately addressed merely through “equal pay for equal work.” 

Fundamental political changes are needed to reverse this massive inequality of wealth and income.

Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns raised economic inequality as an important political issue, calling for a vast overhaul of the political and financial systems. In doing so, he excited a new generation of political activists. The “political revolution” inspired by his campaign has spread, with a wave of pro-worker candidates winning election to positions from city council to the U.S. Congress.

Bills and proposals from Sanders and his allies to enact Medicare for All (single-payer healthcare), raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, establish free college tuition and abolish student debt would go a long way to relieve economic pressure on working-class families. The Green New Deal proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey would create 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.

Recent strikes by Frito-Lay and Nabisco workers have brought national attention to the control that employers try to exert over their workers’ entire lives through mandatory overtime and the imposition of “suicide shifts,” making a mockery of the eight-hour workday which the labor movement fought for over a century ago.  Our union has long supported further 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.

As record numbers of Americans approach retirement, the right to retire comfortably and with dignity is threatened by attacks on pensions, Social Security, wages, and working people’s ability to save. With defined-benefit pensions increasingly rare, and 401-style accounts typically woefully underfunded by employers, Social Security is the main source of retirement income for most Americans. The drafters and supporters of the Social Security Act of 1935 hoped eventually to significantly increase the benefits, broaden the groups of Americans covered, and add medical care and other benefits. Retirement security, like healthcare, is a fundamental right for all people. We need an expansion of Social Security into a “single-payer” source of adequate retirement income, increasing the benefits to ensure that all Americans can look forward to a secure retirement.

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. America’s family farmers are suffering as they struggle to survive the one-two punch of climate change and Trump’s disastrous trade policy. Farmers are increasingly buffeted by both floods and droughts, making it extremely difficult to grow crops with any predictability. At the same time, Trump’s trade war with China, which Biden has largely continued, has led to the loss of many billions of dollars in sales of U.S. agricultural products to China. 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 77^th UE CONVENTION:

1. ​​Demands Congress:
   1. Pass a robust reconciliation bill which will create millions of good paying jobs, make it easier for workers to join unions, and expand Medicare by covering dental, hearing, and vision, negotiating drug prices, and lowering the eligibility age;
   2. Enact a federal jobs program to stimulate the economy by addressing climate change, investing in infrastructure, and assisting funding-starved state and local governments;
   3. Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by passing the Raise the Wage Act;
   4. Pass Medicare for All, single-payer healthcare legislation;
   5. Enact legislation to establish free public higher education and forgive student debt;
   6. Address the housing crisis by declaring a moratorium on home foreclosures and investing in public and cooperative affordable housing;
   7. 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;
   8. Reform the tax system by restoring higher tax rates for the wealthy and corporations;
2. Calls on regions and locals to:
   1. Educate our members and communities about income and wealth inequality and policies that can address it;
   2. Work with and join organizations promoting a just economy;
   3. 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. We call on the labor movement to pursue a shorter work week with no loss in pay;
4. 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;
5. Demands Congress:
   1. 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;
   2. Address the country’s retirement security crisis by expanding Social Security to pay retired workers 75 to 90 percent of their pre-retirement income;
   3. Reject all efforts to privatize Social Security, reduce benefits, undermine cost of living adjustments (COLA) or raise the retirement age, and that they return the retirement age for Social Security with full benefits to age 65;
6. Supports an agricultural policy that will allow farmworkers and farm families a fair return for their efforts and a decent standard of living.

K-12 public education, one of the most fundamental cornerstones of a democratic society, is under direct attack. Privatization forces seek ill-gotten gains from public education. They set up charter schools that generate profits. They impose elaborate mandatory testing that provides significant revenue to testing companies. At the same time, state legislatures are starving public education of adequate funding, driving down the quality of schooling and creating a false perception that public schools provide subpar education.

Communities of color who have long been underserved by the public education system have become pawns in the privatization debate. An outcome of charters has been to further roll back the gains of the civil rights movement and more heavily segregate K-12 education by race and class.

Higher education is also under a privatization attack. Corporate-backed reformers are imposing profit-based models onto higher education. Professors are under tremendous pressure to bring funding into the university, rather than focusing on doing good academic work that will benefit the greater society. The labor protections that professors fought hard to achieve through the tenure system are under threat of being dismantled with the increased exploitation of adjunct and other non-tenure-track faculty whose labor produces value for colleges and universities far beyond what they receive in wages and benefits.

At the same time, state legislatures are starving public universities of funding, which is pushing the cost of higher education onto the backs of individual students and their families, while university costs have continued to rise due to top-heavy, corporate-style administration. 43.2 million Americans are crippled by student loan debt. Overall student debt is now over $1.73 trillion, with average student debt over $36,406. The cost of college has risen eight times faster than wages over the last 40 years. It’s no surprise that 7.8 percent of student loans are in delinquency or default, with a disproportionate number of those who default being low-income students or students of color who have been hoodwinked into attending private for-profit colleges and trade schools.

Those who pursue graduate education are doubly affected by the crisis in higher education. The average debt for graduate students is $78,118 while more and more academic workers with advanced degrees are being pushed into contingent adjunct positions where they make as little as one quarter what a tenure-track professor makes.

Workers who are paying off student loans are delaying the purchase of homes and cars, and putting off marriage and starting families, creating a further drag on the U.S. economy.

President Biden’s American Families Plan calls for providing universal, high quality free preschool for three-and four-year olds, as well as two years of free community college across the country. It also would invest in making college more affordable for low-and-middle-income students at colleges that serve historically non-white student communities through increasing the Pell Grant amount. In addition, the plan would put money towards strategies aimed at increasing retention and completion amongst post-secondary students. Finally, in efforts to improve education at all levels, the American Families plan prioritizes improving teacher training and support, and doubling scholarships for teachers while earning their degree. Republicans in Congress, however, have shown much less interest in spending for education than for traditional infrastructure efforts, and have expressed scorn towards the tax increases for wealthy Americans that Biden is proposing in order to fund the plan. Furthermore, many components of the bill would require states to contribute part of the necessary funding, an action that remains uncertain in many places. 

Attempts to turn professional educators into automatons carrying out an unrealistic one-size-fits-all teach-to-the-test curriculum have resulted in a turnover rate of nearly 50% among new teachers in the first five years of teaching. The educational policy community has united behind the position that standardized testing does not measure educational quality. Data consistently shows that neighborhood schools outperform charter schools. But the profit-driven agenda of standardized testing and charters remains all too prevalent.

Public education is facing a crisis perpetuated by testing entities and charter schools that seek to profit off our children’s futures. Public schools should be adequately funded with full-time, unionized, and tenure-protected educators.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^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. Demands the U.S. Department of Education:
   1. Bar the use of taxpayer-funded voucher programs that siphon public funds from public schools and funnel them to private and charter schools;
   2. Eliminate all high stakes testing;
   3. Work with borrowers to seek loan forgiveness if schools have deceived them or committed fraud;
3. Demands state legislators:​
   1. Fully fund public education;
   2. Preserve tenure systems;
   3. Disconnect educational funding from property taxation to address economic and racial segregation;
4. Encourages regions and locals to actively lobby Congress and state legislatures on this program;
5. Demands that the NLRB uphold the 2016 decision granting teaching and research assistants at private universities legal protection to form unions;
6. Supports all campaigns that advocate universal access to free higher education.

UE has warned for years that when the government is given powers of domestic surveillance and “counterintelligence,” it can and will use them against ordinary, innocent Americans, 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.

Nearly two decades into the “War on Terror,” deprivations of civil liberties originally justified as emergency measures have become deeply entrenched and made permanent. They have not only failed to make us safer, they have diminished our democratic rights. Law enforcement and intelligence officials have turned a blind eye while reactionaries have plotted attacks on democracy in plain sight, while focusing their counterterrorism authorities on the same old targets — progressive movements that challenge the economic status quo.  Disturbingly, some are calling for these agencies to be granted new powers in the name of combatting “domestic terrorism.”

The Justice Department continues to use the Espionage Act, which was originally used to jail labor leaders like Eugene V. Debs for their opposition to World War I, to jail whistleblowers and journalists. As information about torture, extrajudicial executions, or mass surveillance is made public, the U.S. government responds by pursuing those who made the information public, branding their actions as being on par with those of spies and saboteurs.

Bosses try to instill fear in workers during union organizing campaigns — that is the kind of fear that the government has tried 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 protest. 

The most basic civil liberty is the right to live without fear of being harassed, beaten, or killed. African Americans and other people of color are disproportionately targeted by police and are much more likely than white people to be victims of police harassment and violence. The abundant and growing audiovisual record of law enforcement officers using excessive force against people of color when stopped for traffic or other minor civil infractions documents that race remains a major factor in depriving people of their civil liberties. Movements against police brutality, mass incarceration, and racism, such as Black Lives Matter, have become increasingly relevant over the past few years. The FBI has responded by distributing a threat assessment to law enforcement across the country claiming that opposition to racism or police brutality is likely to lead to violence against police.  

In response to working-class protests against police brutality and racism, many politicians are pushing anti-protest laws. These laws are similar to repressive legislation that have historically been pushed to restrict the labor movement.  

An increasing portion of Americans oppose the death penalty, and a growing number of states have abolished it. When evidence such as DNA testing reveals death row prisoners are innocent, it confirms our justice system is fundamentally flawed. 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 curtails political debate within the U.S., limits the ability of all citizens to make democratic choices for the future of our country, and thereby undermines our livelihoods and living standards. 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 77^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;
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, and the National Conference of Black Lawyers;
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;
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 and internet monitoring of employees;
   3. Further restricting the use of lie detectors, cameras, GPS, and other surveillance technologies in employment;
   4. Full respect of HIPAA rights;
7. Opposes 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;
8. 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;
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 foreigners 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 — at over $750 billion, 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. All of this is done at the expense of the needs of working people in the U.S. and throughout the world.

More than half of the military budget goes, not to the frontline servicemen and women who put their lives on the line, but to private, for-profit contractors. During the Trump administration, a top executive from Boeing was in charge of the Pentagon, and just this summer, senators with ties to defense contractors proposed giving them an additional $50 billion. An attempted audit of the military budget couldn’t be completed due to the huge sums that could not be accounted for. Congress appointed a commission to look at defense spending levels but most of the commission members had ties to the defense industry.

The war in Afghanistan, by far the longest in U.S. history, finally came to an end this year. It has cost over $1 trillion, and has resulted in the deaths of almost a quarter of a million people, including over 2,400 U.S. soldiers and more than 71,000 Afghani civilians. The U.S. foreign policy establishment thought it could use American military force and Western non-governmental organizations to impose a Western-friendly government without giving the Afghani people real control over their own country. The result was a corrupt kleptocracy widely resented by ordinary Afghanis, which collapsed as soon as U.S. troops were withdrawn.

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, initiated by the Trump Administration and completed by Biden, was carried out in order to refocus U.S. military and diplomatic resources on efforts to “contain” China and Russia. Rather than working with China, the world’s most populous country and second-largest economy, on urgent global issues like climate change, Biden is continuing Trump’s escalation of economic and military tensions.

In the Middle East, the U.S. is involved in a tangled, contradictory web of alliances and wars. Biden has been slow to revive the nuclear agreement with Iran, keeping in place the severe economic sanctions imposed by Trump, that are themselves a form of warfare. He has also continued a policy of confrontation with regional militias aligned with Iran.

In 2019, Congress actually found the fortitude to invoke the War Powers Act for the first time, directing the Trump administration to end U.S. support for the brutal Saudi Arabian intervention in the Yemeni civil war. Trump, however, vetoed the resolution, ensuring more profits for bombmakers at the cost of continuing large-scale civilian deaths in Yemen. This year, Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced sweeping bipartisan legislation, the National Security Powers Act, to reclaim Congress’ role in national security matters. However, the bill has yet to attract additional co-sponsors.

Meanwhile the situation of the Palestinians has been getting steadily worse. In the most recent violent attack by Israel, in May of this year, Israeli armed forces killed over 100 people, injured close to a thousand, and destroyed more than 200 Palestinian homes and 24 schools in Gaza. In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the right-wing Israeli government continues to confiscate homes and land to expand Israeli settlements. Since 1967 Israel has settled more than 750,000 of its citizens in the West Bank, and has been building a wall that separates neighboring towns. Farmers are being cut off from their fields and water supplies, which could soon wipe out Palestinian agriculture in the Jordan River Valley. At the same time Israel is treating Gaza as the world’s largest prison, with its residents trapped in abysmal economic and social conditions. All of this is illegal under international law.

Palestinian trade unions and civil society organizations have called for a worldwide campaign of boycotts to pressure Israel to end its apartheid rule over the Palestinians. The movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is modeled after the 1980s international solidarity campaign that put economic pressure on South Africa’s government and helped end apartheid.

In recent years, working people throughout Latin America elected a number of pro-worker governments, many of which then came under attack from big business forces supported by U.S. administrations, including in Venezuela and Bolivia. U.S. sanctions have largely crippled Venezuela’s economy, but have not brought down the elected government of President Nicolás Maduro — yet the U.S. government and media continue to vilify his government as a “dictatorship.” In November 2019, Bolivia’s elected president, union leader Evo Morales, was overthrown in a coup — and the U.S. immediately recognized a new right-wing government led by wealthy elites. In October 2020, in an election held only after a general strike demanding the restoration of democratic rights, the Bolivian people roundly rejected the coup leaders, giving a solid majority to Morales’s party.

Cuba poses no economic or military threat to the U.S. Our government has no justification for the economic blockade of Cuba, which 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. Although Obama had finally reestablished diplomatic relations between the two countries, the Trump Administration suspended diplomatic relations once again in 2017. Instead of restoring diplomatic relationships and lifting the economic embargo, President Biden has seized on relatively small protests, sparked by the very hardships caused by the embargo, to demand “regime change” in Cuba.

In Colombia, by contrast, widespread protests and strikes over the past year and a half have been met with violence by the U.S.-backed government. At least three dozen people have been killed in the most recent round of protests, with many more reported missing.

The U.S. government has increasingly supported autocratic rule in Haiti that contributed to the chaos that erupted with the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moise and the resulting leadership void and current scramble for power.

Our government’s involvement in wars and destabilization campaigns around the world makes us less, not more, safe. The two major U.S. wars of the past two decades, Iraq and Afghanistan, while costing us billions of dollars and the lives of thousands of our young soldiers, have produced more extremism, more war, more instability, and more danger. And the escalation of tensions with China and Russia raise the specter of nuclear war, which would be catastrophic for human life.

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.

Foreign and military policies should defend the interests of working people, not the wealthy. UE has long supported the labor movement promoting its own foreign policy ideas based on diplomacy and labor solidarity. Our government should not destabilize democracy on behalf of billionaires. It should promote peace, jobs, and justice for all.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION:

1. 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; 
   2. Promote involvement in labor-based efforts to effectively create that change;
   3. Support About Face, formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW);
2. Demands the U.S. government invest in peace and build economic security 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; 
3. Further demands the U.S. government:
   1. End incentives for corporations to profit from exporting weapons abroad;
   2. Cease military aid to countries with disgraceful human rights records;
   3. 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;
   4. Cease using U.S. military and intelligence agencies in interventions against sovereign nations which pose no threat to the American people;
   5. End the use of taxpayer money for further militarization of Latin America;
   6. Cease all harassment of the democratically-elected government of Venezuela;
   7. Cease the use of drones to attack foreign nationals or U.S. citizens;
   8. Reinstate the agreement negotiated with Iran which prevents its development of nuclear weapons;
4. Endorses S. 2391, the National Security Powers Act of 2021;
5. Demands the U.S. government end all military aid to Israel and pressure Israel to: 
   1. End the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the siege of Gaza;
   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;
6. Endorses the BDS movement and urges the union at all levels to become engaged in BDS and the movement for peace, justice and equality between the Palestinians and Israelis;
7. Opposes all efforts to outlaw BDS and otherwise punish non-violent critics of Israeli policies;
8. 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 U.S. efforts to convert the Japanese Self-Defense Force to offensive purposes;
9. 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;
10. 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 sisters, brothers, and comrades abroad;
11. Supports the United Nations call for an end to the inhumane 60-year Cuban embargo, and demands that Congress and the President:
    1. Normalize relations with the Cuban government; 
    2. End the blockade on trade and travel for Americans; 
    3. End pressure against countries that wish to trade freely with Cuba; 
    4. Cease funding and support for Cuban-exile terrorist groups.

In 1983, UE members on strike at a copy shop in Amherst, Massachusetts took control of their workplace after the owners shut down rather than meet their demands: They started their own worker-owned-and-operated co-op, Collective Copies (Local 274). It is now one of the largest and most successful copy shops in Western Massachusetts, paying good union wages with comprehensive benefits.

Since then, six more co-ops have joined UE: Hunger Mountain Co-Op (Montpelier, VT; Local 255), City Market (Burlington, VT; Local 203), New Era Windows (Chicago; UE Local 1110), East End Co-Op (Pittsburgh; UE Local 667), and most recently Willy Street Co-Op (Madison; WI; Local 1186) and Slow Bloom Coffee (Redlands, CA; Local 1011).  Local 1186 successfully unionized across three grocery stores as well as their off-site kitchen and administrative office, giving over 300 workers the right to successfully bargain for their first contract effective 2020. After the Augie’s Coffee chain in California shut down rather than recognize UE, former Augie’s workers established Slow Bloom Coffee Cooperative as a unionized worker co-op. The skill and tenacity of these UE members is an inspiration to us all.

Cooperative enterprises can offer a democratic model of economic development because they are accountable to local communities, not to distant investors. However, cooperatives — both consumer and worker-owned — are not immune from unjust labor practices. Consumer co-ops in particular are facing a coordinated effort by organizations such as the National Cooperative Grocers (NCG) to corporatize their model. UE fully supports the organization of co-op workers, not only to win justice on the job, but to keep cooperatives accountable to their mission and communities.

The Authentic Labor Front (FAT) in Mexico has a significant cooperative sector representing workers in the textile, agricultural, and insurance sectors. The UE and the FAT have exchanged delegations of co-op members. UE co-op members have also met with Zenroren co-op members to share notes, experiences, and ideas. 

As a rank-and-file union, UE has 85 years of experience operating as a democratic organization. UE is a natural home for workers in consumer and worker-owned cooperatives. UE co-ops share our union’s proud history and fighting spirit, benefiting from our status as a union with vision, integrity, and commitment that works in a principled way with other organizations in building a better world.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION: 

1. Supports the transition of capitalist businesses to worker ownership and supports legislation to facilitate this process;
2. Supports the unionization of consumer and producer cooperatives;
3. Encourages UE cooperatives to engage in solidarity work with each other, analogous to the conference boards we have for other UE employers;
4. Supports strengthening our relationship with the FAT’s and Zenroren’s co-op sectors;
5. Encourages the national union, locals, and members to utilize and promote the products and services of UE, FAT, and Zenroren cooperatives.

Over the last two years, the unions which make up the North American Solidarity Project (NASP) have substantially built upon the successes of the first two years of this formation, which is aimed at building a continental labor alliance based upon democratic and militant social unionism and true internationalism. Despite the pandemic there has been a myriad of work engaging the founding unions, UE and Unifor, the largest-private sector trade union in Canada, and the like-minded North American unions that have joined in our efforts, including National Nurses United (NNU), Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA), and the International Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) and its affiliate the Inland Boatman’s Union (IBU).

The tone was set by a large coordinating meeting hosted at UE Hall in Chicago in early November 2019 and attended by top leaders and staff from each of the unions. Following an evaluation of work done so far, the group solidified plans and structures going forward, including the establishment of regular coordination, periodic leadership meetings, and the adoption of a “Core Campaigns” document to prioritize areas of work. Those priorities include Workers Rights and Worker Power, Climate Change and Just Transition, Medicare for All, Trade and Migration, and Equity and Anti-Racism, with a special focus on Union Renewal.

In 2020, organizing staff from unions in both the U.S. and Canada held an in-depth video discussion of the challenges faced in organizing workers and some of the tactics and practices that can improve results. Plans were laid for a host of actions from Earth Day to May Day bringing together the fights for climate justice and worker rights. Although a number of the events had to be curtailed due to the pandemic, important alliances were built. A recorded video exchange on health care took place involving U.S. and Canadian workers sharing their experiences with the systems in each country. Following a cross-border meeting attended by UE Secretary-Treasurer Andrew Dinkelaker in early 2020 dealing with staff training on human rights, education staff from multiple unions worked together on developing workshops tackling a number of issues around racial justice. These workshops were used widely within UE. As the pandemic fully set in, the unions came together virtually in May 2020 for a brainstorming session on dealing with COVID. In the fall, the project hosted a large online Workers Rights and Worker Power exchange, held in the context of both the pandemic and widespread fights for racial justice.

2021 picked up where 2020 left off. Although our members were not able to cross borders to engage with one another, the increased familiarity with online communication allowed NASP unions to execute a series of Zoom exchanges. The initial exchange was composed of organizing staff from both sides of the border discussing best practices on organizing during the pandemic. This was followed by a series of public events, usually with a format of workers from multiple unions, across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, sharing their experiences. In most cases, a speaker well-experienced in the subject then summed up the discussion and laid out some thoughts on how to take the struggle forward. Topics included essential workers, health care for all, climate justice, a May Day discussion on worker unity across North America, and COVID and the class war.

The collective work of UE, Unifor, and the other NASP unions continues. Planning is already underway for more work on the Core Campaigns this fall and beyond.  This work is critical to our future and to building an independent democratic militant labor movement. 

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Commits to continuing our work with Unifor developing cooperative working relationships on North American bargaining, organizing, education, communication, and political action initiatives; 
2. Endorses UE’s continued participation in joint study and action with NASP partners in order to build a continental labor alliance based upon democratic and militant social unionism and true internationalism among workers across the continent;
3. Calls upon the union at all levels to educate the membership on the need for the NASP, its role in advancing the interests of working people across the continent, and steps that can be taken to support and strengthen the project locally, regionally, and nationally.

UE has a proud history of representing the whole range of racial and ethnic groups that make up the American working class, and of fighting to move everyone forward together. We have a strong tradition of educating members to see that dividing workers by race is a tool that employers use to exploit workers. This has also meant that historically our union has actively worked to develop a diverse leadership and staff that reflects the membership. 

Given the unleashing of overtly racist and white supremacist attacks in recent years, the greater visibility of police murders of people of color, the growing attempts to restrict voting rights, and the ongoing deep economic inequality in our country, many institutions are examining their leadership development and hiring practices to ensure that people of color are well represented in their organizations. 

We have continued to organize workplaces with a broad array of workers, and we strive to have our leadership and staff appropriately mirror that diversity. However, we recognize that currently we have fallen short in developing members for some roles. It is therefore important that we redouble our efforts. 

In our rank-and-file union, the leadership of the union comes from the membership, and we prefer to have staff that come out of the rank and file as well. It is in our interest to invest in a program that puts effort and resources into recruiting and training the people who are future leaders and staff of the union, especially from groups that are not fully represented in those roles today.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 77^th UE CONVENTION:

1. Supports the Leadership and Staff Development program initiated by the General Executive Board, a year-long development program for UE members from all racial and ethnic backgrounds who are currently underrepresented in UE leadership or on UE staff;
2. Encourages locals to participate in the program either by enrolling members or by providing opportunities for program participants to engage in hands-on work;
3. Calls on locals to take part in the membership census that the national union will be launching in order to better assess the breadth of workers that we represent.

UE Director of Organization Gene Elk will be retiring at the end of his current term, on October 31. Elk first joined the UE staff in November of 1977, and served the union as a Field Organizer, International Representative, and Secretary of the GE Conference Board before his election as Director of Organization in 2015.

Even before he came on staff, Elk had a connection to UE: his uncle Herb Nichol and aunt Lucy Nichol were UE organizers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Herb Nichol was primarily responsible for organizing UE Local 120 at Locke Insulator in Baltimore, and was later brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee for his organizing activity with UE. Lucy Nichol organized Sylvania shops in central Pennsylvania.

Elk worked on organizing campaigns in New York and Virginia, with the understanding that when the opportunity arose he would get a job in a UE shop. He moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and got a job at Colonial Manufacturing, where his field organizer was Phil Mamber, who would later serve as president of UE’s New England District 2. After about six months, UE Director of Organization Hugh Harley asked Elk to join the UE staff on a permanent basis to work in western Pennsylvania.

In November of 1981, the 3,700 members of UE Local 610 struck Wabco (now Wabtec) and Union Switch & Signal, in the first large strike in the U.S. after President Ronald Reagan had busted the PATCO strike by firing over 11,000 air traffic controllers. Reagan had also decreed that strikers were no longer eligible for food stamps. Elk was one of several staff assigned to the strike.

The Wabco strike was the first major strike against concessions in an era when most large industrial unions were accepting them. Elk worked with Local 610 and other staff to feed 3,700 people on a regular basis, through food pantries and strike kitchens, and keep morale up during the six-month strike. Ultimately, the strike was successful in rejecting concessions.

After the strike, Elk worked with Local 610 into the later half of the 1980s, when newly-elected Director of Organization Ed Bruno asked him to work in the national office on a new effort to organize General Electric workers.

The new organizing work focused mostly on GE’s plastics division, and led to an organizing campaign at the big GE plastics plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Although UE lost both labor board elections held in Parkersburg, the union did successfully organize GE service shops in New Mexico, Washington, and Illinois — organizing work for which Elk was primarily responsible, and which were the only GE shops that UE, or any other union, had been able to organize since our 1975 victory at the GE turbine plant in Charleston, South Carolina.

In the 1990s, Elk was asked by Director of Organization Bob Kingsley to help coordinate UE’s growing organizing work in the public sector. In 1996, he served as the lead negotiator for UE’s first graduate worker contract, as members of UE Local 896/COGS won a $2,000 increase in the base salary for graduate teaching and research assistants at the University of Iowa and a new healthcare plan, UI GradCare, which Local 896 has maintained to this day.

Over the next decade and a half, Elk continued to bargain contracts and do arbitrations for UE’s growing public-sector membership in Iowa, Ohio and Connecticut. In 2011, Elk became Secretary of UE’s GE Conference Board, and he led UE’s 2015 GE negotiations along with UE President Bruce Klipple. The 2015 negotiations turned out to be UE’s last negotiations with GE, as GE sold its last remaining UE-represented plant, the Erie locomotive plant represented by UE Locals 506 and 618, near the end of the four-year contract.

Elk was elected Director of Organization at UE’s 2015 convention, following Kingsley’s retirement. During his tenure as Director of Organization, UE ramped up our organizing so we now have dedicated field staff who focus entirely on organizing. Elk also worked to reinstitute UE’s traditional staffing structure, where every field organizer has an international representative to help guide their work and talk with them about their assignments.

As a national officer, Elk continued his long-term commitment to servicing Local 329 in Elmira, New York, where he built strong relationships with local leadership over more than a decade and a half.

In his four decades on UE staff, he was guided by a solid understanding of the role of staff in a rank-and-file union. He both preached and practiced the importance of empowering members to run their own union.

The delegates to this 77^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.

The Policy Action Committee of the 77th National Convention moves the following plan of action in the period up to the next national convention.

UE Leadership and Staff Development Program

1. All locals are called upon to take part in the membership surveys that the national union will be launching in order to better assess the diversity of the workers that we represent. The national union shall work with the locals in providing the materials in the appropriate languages for the surveys. All locals are expected to return the completed surveys within the deadline provided.

Independent Rank-and-File Political Action

1. Locals should provide information on voter registration to all of their members and their families, and encourage participation in the upcoming 2022 elections;
2. Locals should educate their members on the issues and candidates in their area, particularly to their impact on workers and their unions. Locals should also invite candidates to local membership meetings;
3. The national union should provide written materials (both physical and electronic) to support the work of the locals as appropriate;
4. Locals should encourage members to involve themselves in local political action in support of working-class issues and candidates, including political action and community events;
5. Locals should make use of newsletters, fliers, texts, videos and social media;
6. Locals and regions are encouraged to actively engage in local independent political action to ensure that all people are able to exercise the right to vote, including contacting their elected officials to oppose any voter suppression efforts.

Medicare for All

1. Calls on locals to educate their members on Medicare for All, including using the UE’s “How to Fix Healthcare” workshop and the UE Healthcare Cost Calculator;
2. Calls on locals to mobilize their members to demand their elected officials enact legislation at the state and federal level for Medicare for All, and expand and improve Medicare and VA benefits;
3. Locals and regions should join local coalitions to carry out public actions in person and online for Medicare for All;
4. Locals should encourage their members to support the National Nurses United campaign for Medicare for All;
5. Locals should demand their employers support Medicare for All, including at contract negotiations;
6. Calls on locals to educate their members who are veterans to best make use of VA benefits, including communicating where veterans can go for assistance.