UE NEWS Updates

Members of UE Local 208 in St. Albans, VT joined US Congressman Peter Welch on Wednesday in demanding that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reverse their plan to furlough workers — 1,100 in Vermont and over 13,000 nationwide — on August 3.

UE launched a new Instagram account today with a celebration of UE cartoonist Fred Wright, who was born on this day in 1907. He worked for UE from 1949 until his death in 1984. The UE NEWS asked retired managing editor Peter Gilmore, who worked with Wright, to write a recollection of Wright for this occasion.

In what is so far the largest NLRB election victory of the COVID-19 era, almost 400 workers employed by federal contractors at the Kentucky Consular Center (KCC) have voted overwhelmingly to join UE in a mail ballot election. When the ballots were counted on June 12, UE had won 84 percent of the vote.

“Homestead” is one of those place names in U.S. labor history – like Haymarket and Flint – that carries a lot of meaning. The courageous 1892 struggle by the workers of the Homestead mill and their community, against robber baron Andrew Carnegie, his union-busting lieutenant Henry Clay Frick, and the Pennsylvania National Guard, ended in defeat for the workers and killed the idea that craft unions could succeed at collective bargaining in mass production industries. But in Mike Stout’s memoir of his life as a worker and union leader in the Homestead mill’s final decade, he makes clear that something of the rebellious spirit of 1892 survived. “For me,” he writes, “1892 and 1982 are part of a whole, two points on the same pole of resistance and spirit of solidarity that sprang up, thrived, and was eventually suffocated at the great Homestead steel mill.”