Top Five UE NEWS Stories of 2023
The last week of 2023 we counted down the Top Five UE NEWS Stories of that year on social media. Click here to read them!
The last week of 2023 we counted down the Top Five UE NEWS Stories of that year on social media. Click here to read them!
In his new book Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism, labor historian Shelton Stromquist describes how, following a “global strike wave” in the late nineteenth century, workers turned to municipal politics in an effort to improve their lives. Cities were the places where workers and their families worked, lived, and suffered from low wages and long hours, poor and crowded housing conditions, adulterated and expensive food, and other indignities. They were also the places where workers experienced social solidarity, and could imagine using their greater numbers to transform their lives by participating in the political process.
Eight-five years ago today, the founding convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) opened in Pittsburgh. For years, new types of workers — workers in the mass-production industries long deemed “unorganizable” by many in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) — had been organizing new unions, often independently of the conservative craft unions that dominated the AFL. Like today, many of these struggles were led by young workers.
UE’s 78th Convention was held in Pittsburgh, a city that is not only home to the union’s national office but also to a rich history of worker organizing and strikes. From the 1840s to today, the women and men whose labor built this city struggled — and often struck — to reclaim a share of the wealth their labor produced.
Monday marked the 60th anniversary of the NLRB election that brought Local 123, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, into UE. UE Director of Organization Robert Kirkwood called it “one of [UE’s] most significant organizational victories since the Union was split in 1949.”
Today marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most violent attacks on a UE picket line in history. On August 3, 1948, 1,500 national guards, armed with tear gas, machine guns, and tanks, arrived in Dayton, Ohio to suppress a strike by 600 UE members at the Univis Lens plant. The workers voted to strike after their employer refused to offer even a single cent in wage increases during contract negotiations.
Between January and April, over 14,000 graduate workers on five campuses across the country voted to join UE — all by margins of over 80 percent.
Graduate workers work in labs and offices and classrooms, performing the labor that makes universities run. They do research, teach, and grade papers. Their wages are rarely sufficient to live on. Many are subjected to harassment by their supervisors, who are often also their academic advisors. All of them need a union.
Following ratification of first contracts by members of UE Local 1466-United Graduate Workers at the University of New Mexico and UE Local 1498-Graduate Workers United at New Mexico State University, thousands of graduate workers in the state are now covered by collective bargaining agreements. Both locals joined UE in historic “card check” drives at the beginning of the pandemic and have overwhelmingly ratified first contracts in mid-December, earning 7.12 percent and 6.8 percent raises, respectively, for their members.
The last week of 2022 we counted down the Top Five UE NEWS Stories of that year on social media. Click here to read them!
Ralph Fasanella, a former UE organizer who became recognized as one of America’s greatest painters of working-class life and struggle, passed away twenty-five years ago, on December 16, 1997. His paintings — which he intended to be viewed in union halls, not private homes — depict a working class that is diverse, politically engaged yet exuberant in their leisure, and, most importantly, organized and willing to engage in struggle.
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