Organizing Report Demonstrates UE’s ‘Forward Momentum’

UE Director of Organization Mark Meinster began his Organizing Report on Monday afternoon by talking “about why we organize. Why does this small union with limited resources put so much of those resources into organizing?”

He told delegates that in 2003, then-Director of Organization Bob Kingsley reported to the 73rd UE Convention, “to a lot of boos in the audience,” that the top one percent of Americans owned more wealth than the bottom 52 percent. “But today,” Meinster continued, “one guy owns more wealth than 52 percent of America. Just think about that. The top one percent today own more wealth than the 93 percent at the bottom.

“At what point are we going to take action and stop this?” he asked. “When they own everything?”

He reviewed the actions of the Trump administration: “blatantly attacking the working class, throwing millions of people off of health insurance, massive tax breaks to billionaires, gutting OSHA, gutting the Department of Labor, gutting the EEOC. His judges in Texas just ruled that the NLRB is unconstitutional, all in the service of transferring wealth from our pockets to that of the ruling class.”

UE members “have seen this greed close up over the last two years.” The Post cereal plant in Lancaster, Ohio closed in 2024, putting 250 members of UE Locals 718 and 777 out of work. Greenfield Tap and Die in Greenfield, Massachusetts, a plant which had been part of UE Local 274 for over eight decades, closed its doors in early 2025. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services closed its California Service Center in November 2024, shuttering “one of our crown jewel locals,” UE Local 1008, and UE Locals 208 and 808 at the Vermont and Nebraska service centers are “hanging on by a thread.”

Working Class a Decisive Force

“We’ve got to organize to counter this greed and this move towards authoritarianism,” declared Meinster. “We’ve never really had full democracy in this country,” he said, but Trump and his billionaire cronies “want a dictatorship of capital, and they want that dictatorship to be even more intense.

“They started with immigrants and universities and trans people because they thought they were easy targets. Pretty quickly they declared war on black and brown folks,” trying to rewrite history to “erase the horrors of slavery” and “sending troops into cities run by black mayors to prey on immigrants and working people.

 “Next, they're coming after the unions,” he warned, citing the Trump administration’s decision to simply cancel union contracts for tens of thousands of federal workers.

When people like this take over, Meinster said, “there is one force that can be decisive in stopping them. That is the working class. Without us, they can’t make money, without us they can’t go to war. … As workers, we’ve got to take the reins of power.” He described the key role that union federations such as COSATU in South Africa, CCOO in Spain, the CUT in Brazil and the KCTU in South Korea played in resisting and defeating authoritarian regimes in their countries. “These are unions built on principles, just like our own union, with a fighting spirit. Militant unions. That's what's needed right now.”

First Contracts at Eight Universities Since Last Convention

He reminded delegates that “Last convention, on this stage, we had over 100 representatives of the 30,000 graduate workers that joined UE before the last convention,” and pointed out that in the two years since that convention the union had bargained first contracts at eight universities, covering 25,000 workers.

“The decisive role in these negotiations” he said, were “the membership and particularly their elected leadership, the bargaining committees and contract action teams. … In every single negotiations, they built the infrastructure and membership support to run majority strikes through painstaking work, one-on-one conversations, working people through fear, fear of deportation, fear of being blacklisted.”

He asked the graduate worker locals who bargained first contracts in the past two years to stand, and they received a standing ovation from their fellow delegates.

“Our mission is to fight. Our mission is to win.”

Meinster reminded the delegates that “Organizing is what has kept this union afloat,” pointing out that only about 3,000 UE members work in shops that were organized before the 1990s.

“What does that mean for us going forward? Well, it would be easy to relax a bit … maybe we could take a break. But our lot in life is not to take a break. Our lot in life is not to rest. Our mission is to fight. Our mission is to win.

“And to do that, we're going to have to build our organizational muscles. We're going to have to build our strike fund. We're gonna have to build our national union’s capacity to wage more effective and bigger fights.”

In order to do that, he emphasized, the union will have to be open to change, be willing to take risks, and make space for new leadership at all levels of the union, especially the leadership of women and people of color.

Meinster, who chose not to run for re-election, closed his remarks by thanking delegates “for giving me the opportunity to lead this organization. It's been the honor of a lifetime.”

Organizing the South, Building UE at Wabtec

Meinster then turned the podium over to guests from a variety of UE organizing campaigns and first-contract struggles. Each of the organizing guests was introduced by a rank-and-file member from an established local who had helped support their organizing.

Dominic Harris, Local 150, introduced Tangela Randall of Portsmouth, Virginia and Angerio Curtis of Norfolk, Virginia, municipal workers who are organizing to join UE. Randall said organizing among Portsmouth workers is “gaining momentum,” thanks to one-on-one conversations, small group meetings and public forums. Workers “have witnessed some positive changes” from their efforts, including the non-renewal of a lease on a city office that poses health concerns to workers and consumers, and a reduction in case managers' workload, with management announcing plans to hire additional caseworkers. Curtis spoke about the effect that being at the convention and meeting other UE members had on him. “I've talked to a lot of people since I've been here,” he said, “and they've given me enough tools that I'm ready to go back and get this thing started.”

Jeremy Burick, Local 506, then introduced Art Wilson, a worker from the Wabtec plant in Fort Worth, Texas — a sister shop to Local 506. As Burick pointed out, GE built the Fort Worth plant over a decade ago in order to move Local 506’s work there, but now, “we're trying to get them unionized, and in the long run, it's going to help everybody.”

Wilson described how workers in Fort Worth started organizing with UE last September, after a failed drive with another union. “We were able to start showing people the profit of the company versus what we get,” he said, and showing workers that while workers’ benefits are getting worse, “Wabtec executives and shareholders always came out on top.”

During the previous campaign, he said, “the company hit back hard with an anti-union campaign. They told lies and half truths. They threatened to move the plant to Mexico.” Now, he said, “we are trying to build up our strength and our organization, … to deal with more of our new employees and … hear from the younger generation.” He told the delegates that on Sunday, while at the Organizing Committee, he had received a text message from a formerly anti-union worker who had just joined the union, and is now “talking for the union” as eagerly as he was previously talking against it.

UE Gains in Higher Education Continue

Mounica Sreesai, the president of Local 1122-Northwestern University Graduate Workers then introduced Julia Fadjukov, and Ana Waltrick, postdoctoral workers from Northwestern University. Postdoctoral workers, or “postdocs,” and research associates do crucial research work at our nation’s universities, often for low wages and with little job security, and the 1,200 postdocs and research associates at Northwestern were, at that moment, in the first day of a two-day NLRB election to join UE.

“We are professional researchers producing work that drives medicine, technology, and society forward,” said Fadjukov. However, she said, “our work conditions are precarious and underappreciated. We have little control over our job security because we are essentially year-to-year contract workers, entirely dependent on external funding. And for a majority of us, the annual arrangement also means our immigration status is just as precarious. This is compounded by the fact that our salaries are nowhere near what's needed to keep pace with the cost of living in a city like Chicago.”

She described how Northwestern postdocs began their campaign in 2023 with a petition asking their employer to increase their base salary and make it more equitable across departments, which a majority of workers signed. When Northwestern refused to grant their request, they began signing UE cards in November of 2024. Although the Trump administration’s freezing of federal funds to the university in early 2025 “rattled an already uncertain future” for postdocs, “rather than shying away from this challenge and retreating to our offices and labs, we rose up to the moment and responded to the inaction of the university” by organizing with UE. She concluded her remarks by reporting that, “As we are meeting, hundreds of postdocs and research associates are casting their yes votes just across the street.”

(Two days later, a group of Northwestern postdocs returned to the convention hall to announce that they had won their election 515 to 13.)

Lauren Chua, the president of Local 256 (MIT Graduate Student Union), introduced Maia Cohen and Serena Conde, graduate workers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI). WHOI workers are, like Chua and the members of Local 256, enrolled as graduate students at MIT, but because they are employed by a separate institution through a joint program with MIT, they were unable to join Local 256 with the rest of their peers; they had to win recognition separately, and are currently negotiating a first contract.

Cohen reported that “we are almost a full year into bargaining now. And it has been a long and treacherous road.” She described how WHOI is insisting on excluding “fellows,” who do the same work as other graduate workers, from the bargaining unit, even though “if you go down the list of what does it mean to be an employee … we check all of those boxes. So this is something that we're very passionate about. And we’re going to die on this hill if we have to.

“Another thing that we’re very passionate about is trying to put in protections against abusive conduct.” She explained, “We spend a lot of time on boats in international waters, in cruises with a lot of different people … and there are a lot of times at which students can be taken advantage of.” When there are fewer people around, “more bad things can happen, and we are fighting to get those protections in place.”

Conde added that talking to other UE members had given her “new energy” to go back and continue the fight.

Bud Decker, the president of UE Local 329 in Elmira, New York, then introduced five members of UE Local 300-Cornell Graduate Students United: Gabe Sekeres, Ewa Nizalowska, Katrina Davis, Evan Dong, and Jared Farley. Nizalowska, who is president of the local, told delegates that “The last member of our delegation, Arnav Gupta, would have loved to be here and presenting with us. He's an incredible UE member. He's unfortunately currently stuck in India because this country's authoritarian federal government is withholding his visa,” which was greeted with loud boos.

“After a year of negotiations with our employer, we ratified our first contract in April 2025,” Nizalowsak continued. “Our contract includes a number of industry-first benefits and protections that have already changed the lives of workers in our shop.” She described one article, “the first case of academic due process in a grad union contract,” as “landscape-altering … Winning academic due process means that the boss can no longer push us out of our jobs, under the pretense that they are just disciplining us as students.

“We also had a long and bitter fight to secure our union shop article,” she said. “But our members understood the importance of union shop, and it became our number one strike issue. With the pressure of a majority of our members on our strike pledge, Cornell finally caved, and we secured a union shop.”

Dong, who serves as the chief steward at the Cornell Tech campus, then described how members have been mobilizing to enforce the contract, saying, “our contract has this industry-leading language, but without actual organized power, there's really nothing to it other than just being a piece of paper.”

Oregon Grocery Workers Affiliate with UE

The Organizing Report closed with Local 1186 President Michael Tomaloff introducing Ava Robins, the co-chair of the New Seasons Labor Union in Portland, Oregon, an independent union of almost 1,000 workers which had just voted to affiliate with UE. (New Seasons Market is a regional chain of grocery stores based in Portland.)

“Three years ago,” said Robins, “workers at a New Seasons filed for an election, as an independent union [because] we were tired of seeing our working conditions decline, and we were tired of seeing big unions failing to actually fight the bosses and stop that decline. And so we took matters into our own hands, unlike so many drives at our stores before this one won, and in quick succession won ten more.”

Robins suggested that the reason NSLU won was “because whether we knew it at the time or not, we were organizing in the most powerful way. And that way is worker to worker. It’s militant and it’s rank and file-led.”

In their three-year struggle for a first contract, “We’ve had rallies. We’ve done marches on the boss, we’ve gone on multiple strikes, but our friendly neighborhood grocery store employer stonewalled us at the bargaining table. … So we started looking for a union that could give us the power that it would take to really threaten their profits. And we wanted to do that without compromising on the principles that had got us this far. And for us, UE quickly became the obvious choice, a union that recognizes the power of worker-led militancy, a union that isn't afraid to take a stand and condemn the genocide in Palestine or to condemn a fascist billionaire takeover of our government.”

Following the conclusion of the Organizing Report, General President Carl Rosen told the convention, “We've got that forward momentum. We're going to keep it going all together. And this organizing report, I think, is a great reflection of it.”