Boris H. “Red” Block, UE Secretary-Treasurer from 1975 to 1985, died February 4 at age 82. The lifelong UE activist and organizer is remembered as a tough fighter for UE members at the bargaining table, and a diligent guardian of UE’s democratic principles and financial integrity.
Boris Block was born in 1924 in the Boston area. His parents were both immigrants who had fled Czarist Russia. In his retirement speech to the 1985 UE Convention, Block recalled that among his mother’s prized possessions was an old yellowed news clipping from the Boston American with a photo identifying her as the “youngest picket on the picket line” of striking shoe workers. “She was working in a shoe shop in Lynn at age 13,” Red recounted, “and took her place on the picket line when they went out on strike.”
Red credited his working class background, and the experience of growing up during the Depression in the midst of labor ferment, with teaching him early “the differences between bosses and workers.” After serving in World War II as a U.S. Army paratrooper, Red began his UE service in 1945 as a volunteer organizer going to unorganized plants in Massachusetts.
At the request of the UE national officers, he moved to Buffalo, NY and took a job at a Westinghouse plant to help build UE there. It was in Buffalo that he met Mildred Pilipovich, a coal miner’s daughter from Irwin, PA, later a Westinghouse worker in East Pittsburgh, and when she met Red, a UE field organizer. Millie and Red married in 1948, and were husband and wife for 55 years, until her death in 2003.
In the thirty years preceding his election to national office, Red served the union as a rank-and-file activist, local officer, field organizer and international representative in Massachusetts, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and in the national office in New York City, as Secretary of the UE-GE Conference Board.
Amy Newell succeeded Red Block as UE Secretary-Treasurer and served until 1994. “Red was an inspiration to me,” she told the UE NEWS. “We spent a lot of time together after I moved to New York and during the transition from him to me as Secretary-Treasurer. I learned that beneath his famously gruff exterior was a person of generosity and compassion. Yes, Red had kind of a ‘bulldog’ reputation, but sometimes being a bulldog in defense of important principles isn’t such a bad thing. Red was a bulldog when it came to defending the integrity of the union – both its financial practices and in our relations with the employers – and I tried my best to carry on in Red’s tradition.”
“Red was always crystal clear about the fact that workers and their employers have fundamentally different interests. I remember during the early 1980’s, when all the unions were getting involved in ‘jointness’ programs with their corporate employers, someone from GE or Westinghouse was taunting Red about the UE being "out of step" for refusing to participate in company-sponsored trips to Japan and other so-called cooperation schemes. Red’s response? ‘UE isn’t out of step – we’re marching in a different parade.’ That was Red, razor wit and all. He was an amazing working class intellectual and something to behold during national bargaining with GE. He’d be going hammer-and-tong with the company and hurling quotes from Enlightenment philosophers at them to buttress his case, leaving the company team speechless.”
“Let’s face it,” Newell concluded, “Jim Matles would have been a tough act for anyone to follow. In my opinion, Red Block pulled it off in style.”
UE President John Hovis was first elected a national officer – Director of Organization – while Red was still Secretary-Treasurer. John recalls that “Red could be pretty brash and highly critical, but he did recognize and appreciate people’s contributions to the union. When I told him I was planning to run for Director of Organization in 1984, he told me I wasn’t tough enough for the job. Then about six months after I took office,” John added with a chuckle, “he told me I was being ‘too rough’ on the staff.”
Ed Bloch (no relation) is a retired UE organizer whose friendship with Red stretched over many years, and he worked with Red several times. “I first came on the staff in ’53. I went to Lynn for a big election. Red was there, and he and Don Tormey (another legendary UE organizer) showed me a lot.” Years later Ed was sent to the Albany area to replace Red in the staff assignment there. “Red had done a magnificent job with Local 332 during the ’69 GE strike. He was a very good teacher. We didn’t always agree on everything, but that’s alright. He was a very hard, dedicated worker.”
Boris “Red” Block is survived by two daughters, two sons, and 11 grandchildren.