UE NEWS Updates

When UE sold the historic District 11 hall in Chicago in early 2024, the union worked with the Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) to raise funds to preserve the “Solidarity” mural on the interior walls. Enough money was raised to remove and preserve the most important parts of the mural, which were successfully removed from the hall. They are now almost ready to travel to their new homes in the Chicago Teachers Union building in Chicago and the UE Hall in Erie, PA.

UE Local 613, which has represented teachers, nurses, speech pathologists and other professionals at the Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children since 1998, has won voluntary recognition from their employer for an additional group of workers at their school.

Delegates to the Eastern Region council’s spring meeting, which met on March 21, were welcomed to Philadelphia by Mark Hinkel, past president of UE Local 155. Local 155, one of the union’s oldest locals, was chartered in June of 1937 to organize tool and die workers in the City of Brotherly Love. Like its parent union, the amalgamated local’s membership has diversified in recent decades, with manufacturing workers at Portescap, Tinius Olsen and Stepan joined by railcrew drivers at two Hallcon yards and librarians in Passaic, New Jersey.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a prominent figure in American politics for many decades who supported several UE campaigns, has died. Rev. Jackson’s most significant support for UE was helping to bring national public attention to UE Local 1202’s 1984 fight to stop General Electric from closing their turbine plant in Charleston, South Carolina. Seven years later, in 1991, Jackson’s 54-mile Connecticut March to Rebuild America stopped across the street from the Circuit-Wise plant in North Haven to support UE Local 299 in the midst of their multi-year struggle for a first contract.