Carl Rosen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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