UE operates on the basic principles of rank-and-file control and aggressive struggle. Our slogan is “The Members Run This Union,” and in the union's more than 100 autonomous locals around the country, that's exactly what happens.

UE carefully avoids the top-down, top-heavy, bureaucratic style of many unions by promoting membership control. The salary of the union's three top elected officers is limited by the UE Constitution [3] to the top wage paid in the industry (currently set at less than $71,000.) It's hard to think (or act) like a big shot on a worker's wage. More importantly, this policy keeps UE leaders in touch with the lives of our members — we believe it's too easy for labor leaders to develop "boss-like" points of view if they've become comfortable with "boss-size" salaries.

Since membership control is critically important to UE, we hold national conventions every two years. Elected local union representatives meet each year to set UE policy [4] by debating and approving resolutions submitted by local unions from around the country. To hold conventions less frequently would only reduce the voice of the membership in running the union.

UE was the first union to win paid vacations and holidays, seniority rights and other rights on the job for hundreds of thousands of workers in basic industry. UE stresses strong workplace organization and militant shop floor action over legal maneuvering. In the 1980s, UE was the first union to resist the employers’ drive for concessions and the first union to sound a warning about “quality circles” and other phony “labor-management” cooperation schemes.

UE gained an early reputation as a fighter for the rights of women workers and as an opponent of racial discrimination. In the 1950s, UE mounted public campaigns to force major electrical manufacturing corporations to agree to non-discrimination clauses. UE was among the first to organize undocumented workers and speak out on behalf of immigrants. As an early critic of the Vietnam War, the union campaigned for redirecting the federal budget toward job-creating, socially-useful production.

In the 1990s, UE was one of the founding unions of the Labor Party, the first serious attempt in generations to create an independent political party for working people. In the early 2000s, UE helped found US Labor Against the War to mobilize labor opposition to the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Since the 1970s, UE has pointed out that workers have an interest in a clean environment and a livable planet, and in recent years we have fought for an approach to climate change that creates good, union “green” jobs.

UE devotes more of its resources to organizing, on a per capita basis, than most other national unions. UE’s creative approaches to organizing have become a model for the entire labor movement. UE’s stubborn, relentless, militant rank-and-file approach has won union rights and union contracts in the face of opposition by lawbreaking corporations. The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which we organized in partnership with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, has helped thousands of non-union workers understand their rights to organize for safety and fair compensation on the job.

UE is proud of our history of independent political action [7], and we do not have ties to any political party. Independent political action is the organized effort of working people to make our voices heard by our elected public officials in order to win government policies and programs which benefit working-class people. We do this by organizing opportunities for our members to communicate with their elected officials directly, like political action days at state capitals and in Washington, DC, protests in the streets, and civil disobedience. UE does not give large sums of money to candidates in hopes that they will represent our interests when in office. In fact, we don’t even maintain a political action fund.

In the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries, UE was one of the few national unions to defy the Democratic Party establishment and endorse Bernie Sanders, the most pro-labor candidate for president in generations.

​UE works to give new meaning to international solidarity [8] through our Strategic Organizing Alliance with Mexico’s independent Authentic Labor Front (FAT), our North American Solidarity Project, launched by UE and the Canadian union Unifor in 2017, and our close relationships with unions in Japan (ZENROREN), Italy (FIOM), Quebec (CSN), and elsewhere. The UE-FAT Strategic Organizing Alliance, a first-of-its-kind cross-border approach to organizing, developed out of the two organizations’ opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). UE understands that building international solidarity, including practical steps to improve living standards and working conditions across borders, represents the best long-term defense of our members’ jobs.

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The union began as a coalition of autonomous local unions and militant workers’ committees based in electrical manufacturing and radio assembly plants. When their request for a charter as a union for the unorganized electrical manufacturing industry was rejected by the American Federation of Labor, shop leaders chose to go it alone, launching their new national union in March 1936. UE became the first union chartered by the newly-established Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

UE grew rapidly, bringing better conditions and rights on the job to workers employed by industrial giants like General Electric, Westinghouse and RCA, as well as many other electrical manufacturing and machine companies. By the end of World War II, UE was the third largest CIO union, with a membership of 500,000.

Following the war, disagreements with the CIO leadership over the direction of the labor movement led to UE’s withdrawal from the CIO in 1949; within months, a CIO convention “expelled” UE and, eventually, 10 other militant unions with a total membership of one million workers. The CIO joined big business, the press and politicians in smearing UE as “communist-dominated” and the CIO chartered a new union (IUE) to take the union’s place.

UE came under ferocious attack as the anti-communist hysteria intensified in the early 1950s. Attempts were made to officially brand the union as a “subversive organization” and to deport UE leader James Matles. UE shop leaders were fired and blacklisted, even jailed. Politicians, big business and the CIO worked closely together to destabilize UE; the union lost more than half its members.

Steady organizing rebuilt the union in the 1960s and 1970s, but heavy losses followed in the 1980s due to mass layoffs and plant closings. Too often, profitable plants were closed by corporate giants eager for the super-profits to be gained through super-exploitation abroad. UE led the labor movement in resistance to plant closings and attempts by employers to wring concessions from unions by use of the plant-closing threat.

UE enjoyed real growth in the 1990s as a result of aggressive organizing, and many independent unions affiliated with UE. The affiliation of independent public-sector unions paved the way for a dramatic diversification of the union membership by economic sector and job, and UE now represents a wide variety of state, county, municipal and school workers across the country. We also represent graduate workers at universities in multiple states and workers at private social service agencies and healthcare facilities.

UE returned to organizing in the South with the 1999 affiliation of the North Carolina Public Sector Workers Union, now UE Local 150, and for over two decades has organized public-sector workers in North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia who are denied the right to collective bargaining.

Workers at two food co-ops in Vermont organized with UE in 2003; food co-op workers in Pittsburgh and Madison, Wisconsin joined UE in 2015 and 2019 respectively. In 2008, federal contract workers in Vermont and California joined UE, and they have since been joined by federal contract workers in Chicago, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Kentucky.

In December 2008, members of UE Local 1110 in Chicago made history by occupying their workplace, Republic Windows and Doors. Their militancy and unwillingness to simply accept the closure of their factory captured the imagination of a nation reeling from financial collapse, won an endorsement of their cause from the president-elect, and forced one of the nation’s most powerful banks to come to the table and negotiate. UE members won a $1.75 million settlement — and eventually, a reopening of their factory.

Since 2011, UE has aggressively organized rail crew drivers who work for contractors hired by the railroads, starting with a group of drivers in the greater Chicago area. UE now has a national collective bargaining agreement with rail crew contractor Hallcon, covering over 2,000 drivers in 16 states who are members of six UE locals.

UE’s three national officers are elected at the union’s national convention every two years. To ensure that the needs of the members would always come first and to avoid the creation of a leadership that thought of itself as more important than the membership, the founders of UE provided for the democratic election of officers and for officers’ salaries that would be in keeping with those of the members. It would be far too easy, they reasoned, to develop a “boss-like” point of view on a “boss-size” salary. Only if the officers lived like the members would they be able to truly understand the needs of the members.

We’ve remained true to those principles since the union’s founding in 1936.

Read about UE's current officers [11] »