Organize the Unorganized: The UE National Organizing Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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