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.
Determined to Fight Discrimination
Clark was born in 1952, and grew up in Brownville, Tennessee. Writing about his experiences for a special UE NEWS Feature on the Civil Rights Movement in 2001, Clark recalled that “The black community, my parents and the public schools unequivocally accepted this segregated system as natural, until the early Sixties.” As a teenager, Clark participated enthusiastically in the burgeoning civil rights movement, picketing the local segregated swimming pool weekly and, in one instance, deciding to integrate it by jumping into the pool. “Things got rough and nasty,” he wrote. “We were beaten quite bad that day. But we returned to the picket line the next Wednesday as scheduled.”
After moving to Milwaukee in 1971, “determined to continue the fight against discrimination,” he was hired as a lab worker at the Allen-Bradley plant in 1972. He helped to organize that previously non-union department into UE Local 1111, and served Local 1111 as a steward, committee member and vice president. He was elected secretary-treasurer of UE District 11 in 1983, bringing him onto the General Executive Board, and in 1990, was elected president of District 11. In 1994, he succeeded Amy Newell as secretary-treasurer of the National Union.
Summing up his experiences, Clark wrote, “Working within the trade union movement has taught me that the best and most effective way to fight all types of discrimination is to make sure we articulate and define class warfare at all times. And to continue to remind our class [of] this simple fact: An injury to one is an injury to all.”
“Pulled no punches about the nature of the economic system”
As Secretary-Treasurer, Clark oversaw the union’s political action and international solidarity programs. During his time in office, UE’s largest political priority was building an independent political vehicle for working people, efforts which culminated in the founding of the Labor Party in 1996. Clark served as one of three co-chairs of the party’s founding convention, along with Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers President Bob Wages and Farm Labor Organizing Committee President Baldemar Velasquez. (The Labor Party experiment of the 1990s will be the subject of a forthcoming UE NEWS Feature.)
In 2000, Clark helped lead a large UE delegation to a massive rally in Washington, DC. at the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), institutions that promote the “globalization” and “free trade” that led to so many plant closings during his term. Clark was one of the featured speakers at the rally; the UE NEWS reported, “The UE general secretary-treasurer called for an end to all U.S. support for the World Bank and IMF in a hard-hitting speech that pulled no punches about the nature of the economic system.”
Following his decision not to run for re-election in 2001, Clark served the union as an International Representative in Milwaukee before moving on to serve the working class of Milwaukee in other capacities.
“I served and worked with more than a dozen national officers, all of whom were great people and great advocates for the working class, but Bobby Clark was easily the most fun of the bunch,” said retired UE Director of Organization Bob Kingsley. “His sense of humor helped us endure during troubled times as we struggled against plant closings, union busting and the continuing erosion of workers' rights. It also endeared him to the members and paired well with the shop-floor toughness he brought with him from hard-fighting UE Local 1111 in Milwaukee.”