What is the CBC? How and Why Was It Built?
The CBC – the Coordinated Bargaining Committee of GE Unions – is a bargaining coalition of 11 unions that have members who work for GE. Two of the unions – UE and the IUE-CWA – have national contracts that cover all their locals in GE, while the other unions have local contracts. The contracts have common expiration dates, and the unions send negotiators to New York City, where the UE and IUE contracts are negotiated at the same time. For the first two or three weeks in each bargaining round, there are two bargaining tables, where the UE and IUE-CWA each face GE, and the bargaining concludes at one table, referred to as “the small table.” The understanding is that the UE and IUE-CWA contracts then serve as “pattern agreements” for the local contracts of the other unions, and the economic changes and many of the language changes negotiated into the two national contracts are included in each of the local contracts.
THE 1969 STRIKE
The CBC was formed in 1966, but really made an impact when, in the 1969 negotiations, the unions went on strike. The goal of the 1969-70 national strike was an end to Boulwarism, the take-it-or-leave-it bargaining strategy devised by Lemuel Boulware, GE’s vice president of industrial relations, and in force since 1950.
What coordinated bargaining looked like at the bargaining table in 1969, and still looks like today, is representatives of different unions sitting together across from the country. So as contract expiration drew near in 1969, representatives of the IUE, UAW and Teamsters sat at the UE bargaining table. The company hated it, but they could not prevent it. Representatives of UE and other unions also joined the IUE at its bargaining table.
In October 1969 over 150,000 GE workers in several unions joined forces in a coordinated strike. Locals of different national unions visited each other’s picket lines to bolster unity. They mobilized support in their communities and on college campuses. After 102 days the strike succeeded in defeating Boulwarism and brought substantial gains, including wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments, paid sick and personal days and improvements in pension and healthcare. More importantly, the strike and the new unity forced GE to engage in real collective bargaining, and workers made significant gains in contract negotiations in the years that followed.
OVERCOMING DISUNITY
To understand how GE got away with almost 20 years of Boulwarism, and why the unity of 1969 was such a breakthrough, we need to go back to how GE workers became disunited. UE began organizing GE workers in the 1930s, and by World War II UE represented the vast majority of GE workers. The highpoint of union strength was the 1946 national strike, part of a big coordinated wave of strikes mainly by unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Workers in 1946 demanded big wage increases to make up their losses during the war, when wages had been frozen but corporate profits soared. UE members simultaneously struck the two giants of the electrical equipment industry, GE and Westinghouse, while UAW members struck GM, the United Steelworkers shut down the basic steel industry, and many other unions struck their employers. The GE strike lasted nine weeks and ended in unqualified success. UE members won a wage increase of 18.5 cents an hour, in percentage terms the biggest wage increase ever at GE, and auto and steel workers won the same raise.
But big business soon counterattacked. GE Chairman Charles E. Wilson declared a few months after the strike, “The problems of the United States can be… summed up in two words: Russia abroad, labor at home.” The program of Corporate America was to use global Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union to split and weaken the labor movement at home, and it succeeded.
In the 1946 election Republicans won control of Congress with a negative campaign that labeled the CIO “communist.” The GOP Congress passed the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which outlawed many forms of labor solidarity, gave employers “free speech rights” to bust unions, and required union leaders to sign affidavits swearing they weren’t “communists.”
In response to these attacks, some labor leaders tried to “prove” their “respectability” by red-baiting more militant unions, and UE soon became the target of “raids” by other unions trying to steal our members. The raiding unions included affiliates of both the AFL and CIO. (The AFL and CIO were then separate federations.) Since UE was a CIO affiliate, UE’s officers demanded that the CIO stop the UAW and other CIO unions from raiding UE. But the CIO refused to enforce the no-raiding clause in its own constitution, so UE withdrew from the CIO. The CIO then chartered a new union, the IUE, for the purpose of raiding, destroying, and replacing UE.
Throughout the 1950s, UE was under constant attack by the government, media, and employers who aided the IUE and other unions as they raided UE’s locals and membership. UE lost thousands of members during this period. GE workers, who had been united in one strong union in 1946, were soon split into more than a dozen feuding unions. GE also began its effort to escape all unions, building new plants and keeping them non-union through aggressive union busting.
This was the disunity that enabled GE to largely dictate contract terms through its policy of Boulwarism. This was the division that workers sought to overcome through the 1969 strike and by building the CBC.