UE Local 1135 members ratified a new three-year agreement on November 15, 2025. Local 1135 members manufacture lead-acid car and marine batteries and have seen their schedule and hours impacted by Trump’s tariff chaos over the past year.
Coming together under the theme of “Organizing for a Just Future,” more than 1,000 delegates and guests from around the world attended the IndustriALL Global Union 4th Congress from November 4–7. UE, which is an affiliate, was represented by Local 618 Business Agent Janet Gray and Staff Coordinator John Thompson. IndustriALL Global Union has its Congress every four years.
UE Local 279 members unanimously ratified a new four-year contract with Trillium Valves in mid-November that includes a 16 percent raise over the life of the contract.
Each year, the members will receive a four percent raise. The contract ensures that members will not see any increases to their insurance premiums and the members fought hard to keep their strong medical plan the same.
Members of UE Local 234 who manufacture precision scales in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom ratified a strong contract in early November after six weeks of intense bargaining. The local secured four percent wage increases in the first and second year of the contract and a 3.5 percent raise in the third year. The members also won on-call, second shift, and lead person pay increases.
On November 3, 2025, following two months of coordinated bargaining, members of UE Locals 228 and 728 ratified new 11-month agreements. The locals collectively represent more than 850 workers who process visa petitions and provide petitioner support at the Department of State’s National Visa Center in Portsmouth, NH and the Kentucky Consular Center in Williamsburg, KY, respectively. They are sister locations whose members are employed by federal contractor LDRM under the State Department’s Visa Support Services contract.
Members of Local 1421 who work at the Stepan Company ratified a new three year contract on November 3. The local won a wage increase of 10.5 percent over the life of the contract, with a four percent raise in the first year, 3.5 percent in the second, and three percent in the third.
UE Local 1466-United Grad Workers (UGW) at the University of New Mexico ratified their second contract on October 27 after seven months at the negotiation table. Graduate workers at the University of New Mexico fought long and hard to secure six percent raises to minimums and across the board for their bargaining unit, the highest wages won across university union negotiations this year.
Robert L. Clark, who served as UE’s general secretary-treasurer from 1994 to 2001 and was generally known as “Bobby,” passed away on October 10. He was UE’s first Black national officer.
As secretary-treasurer, Clark strongly supported UE’s commitment to independent political action. He was also a strong supporter of the union’s international program, seeing international working-class solidarity as the only solution to the deluge of plant closings which decimated the union’s ranks during his time in office.
General President Carl Rosen, who will retire in November after over four decades in UE, walked his first picket line at age five, when his father joined his fellow members of UE Local 1114 in a four-month strike at Goodman Manufacturing on Chicago’s south side. In college, Rosen spent his summers working at factory and warehouse jobs represented by the Steelworkers union and his time on campus helping organize the student movement against apartheid in South Africa.
Negotiating a wage increase with an employer is one of the most common things that most union locals do. But since an anti-union law went into effect eight years ago, UE Local 896-Campaign to Organize Graduate Students, which represents 2,000 graduate workers at the University of Iowa, has been forced to simply accept the maximum arbitration award mandated by that law — as has every other union which bargains with the state’s Board of Regents, which governs the Iowa’s higher education system.
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