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. Jackson joined Local 1202 for a march and rally against the closure and also expressed his support for the union’s proposal to keep their facility open as an “alternative energy center” in a meeting with GE CEO Jack Welch. 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.
In 2008, Rev. Jackson delivered food to the members of UE Local 1110 as they occupied the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago to demand just severance. He compared the Local 1110 members to Rosa Parks, saying that, like the civil rights pioneer, they “stood up by sitting down,” and expressed hope that their example would serve as “the beginning of a larger movement for mass action to resist economic violence.”
Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 campaigns for President, and his platform of multi-racial unity for economic justice, garnered significant support from UE and other union members across the country. The Political Action Committee of UE Local 1111 at the large Allen-Bradley plant in Milwaukee endorsed and campaigned for Jackson in 1988, and helped him win 28 percent in the Wisconsin primary that year; according to an NBC poll at the time, Jackson won a full half of the blue-collar vote in that state. In their report to the 1988 UE Convention, UE’s officers wrote that, “The candidacy of Rev. Jesse Jackson provides an inspiring example of a basis for unity around a labor-based people’s platform.” Jackson was only the second Black candidate to run for the nation’s highest office, and the most successful until Barack Obama’s victorious campaign in 2008.
This article was updated on February 27 to reflect Rev. Jackson’s role in supporting the Republic Windows and Doors occupation in 2008.