The US Labor Movement Needs More of the UE’s “Them and Us” Unionism
The United Electrical Workers was once one of America’s mightiest unions. But because many leaders were leftists who challenged corporate power, UE was decimated by McCarthyism. The union managed to survive, though, and UE's model of militant, democratic unionism is exactly what we need to revive labor in the 21st century.
Cover of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America new booklet “Them and Us.”
The anti-communist fervor and McCarthyist repression that swept the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s drastically changed the course of labor history. These years witnessed the destruction of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) — the dynamic union movement that adopted militant shop floor tactics and a class-conscious vision to rapidly organize millions of previously unorganized workers in the 1930s.
Surrendering to Cold War red-baiting, CIO leaders orchestrated the raiding and expulsion of eleven national unions — not because these unions were corrupt or failing to win good contracts for their members, but because they were either led by Communists or deemed too tolerant toward the Left.
The first target was the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE), which was then the third-largest union in the CIO. Founded in 1936 by a few dozen industrial workers and leftist organizers in their twenties and early thirties, UE embodied the spirit of rank-and-file, class-struggle unionism that originally allowed the CIO to pose an unprecedented challenge to the power of capital.
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