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.