UE NEWS Updates

In his final President’s Report, at the Western Region council meeting on April 11 and 12, retiring President Bryan Martindale recounted his decades of leadership in UE, “a community that would shape my life entirely” from the moment he began working at the Stepan Chemical Company in Anaheim, California in 1980, at the age of 19. He recalled being recruited to run for chief steward when he was 20 years old, and the exhilaration of “discover[ing] at a young age that you possess a certain power when you gain the respect of the boss.”

UE Local 265 (MIT-GSU) President Lauren Chua joined other labor leaders at a “No Kings to May Day” virtual press conference on April 2 to speak about the importance of May Day and the next steps unions are taking to turn out working people for the action. Speakers placed emphasis on not only showing up on the streets on May Day but organizing in the days leading up to the event.

A new exhibit at the Woody Guthrie Center will include a reproduction of a UE NEWS Feature written by UE Digital Organizer Samantha Cooney. “The Peekskill Riots: Where Everyday Union Members Stood Up to Racism, Anti-Semitism, and Hate&rdquo was written in 2024 to mark the 75th anniversary of the riots.

On March 6, members of UE Local 667 joined BDS Pittsburgh and the Howmet Accountability Project at a rally outside of Howmet’s corporate headquarters on the city’s North Shore. The union and community members were demanding that the company, which produces specialty titanium parts, cancel its contract with Lockheed-Martin, the aerospace company which makes the F-35 fighter jets used by the Israeli military in Gaza and both the U.S. and Israel in their current illegal war on Iran.