The UE Western Regional Council Meeting Theme Was Unity

In 2023 UE organized more new members than any other union in the country. The following is taken from the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America great website:

APRIL 16, 2024

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Representatives of locals from Ohio to California gathered for the first-ever UE regional council meeting in New Mexico, “The Land of Enchantment,” from April 13-14. Unity of workers and of the working class was a recurring theme as delegates, guests, and regional and national UE leaders discussed the victories and struggles in the union’s Western Region over the past half a year.

In his president’s report, Western Region President Bryan Martindale said that the only answer to racism, gender discrimination, corporate greed, and massive income and wealth inequality is to unite the working class to fight for an economy and a government that works for everyone.

“If we’re going to get anything, if we’re going to get ahead in this life, we need to fight,” he said. “The only way we have ever got anything done is this country is by getting out in the streets.”

Martindale decried the “damned if we do, damned if we don’t choice for our nation’s highest office” and suggested that the way to deal with “a corrupt political system” is by forming a labor party. He also condemned the “new McCarthyism” being directed at critics of Israel’s war against the Palestinian people, and of the U.S. government’s support of that war. “If ... you speak out at all against the genocide, you’re labelled anti-Semitic. The same way Joe McCarthy and his cronies labelled people as ‘communist’ if they didn’t agree with the propaganda of that time.”

The council meeting also heard from Eastern Region President George Waksmunski and Vice President Antwon Gibson, who were visiting their sister region as guests. (Martindale and Western Region Vice President Larry Hopkins will visit the Eastern Region’s council meeting in North Carolina later this month.)

In his remarks, Waksmunski urged delegates to take to heart the emphasis on uniting all workers in the preamble to the UE Constitution. “Capitalists, who own everything, are trying to divide us,” he said, and in order to maintain a decent life, “we have to stay united as workers.” Gibson praised the exchange between regions as an opportunity to “learn from one another, educate one another, [because] that’s how we grow.”

“Our power lies with unity with the rest of the working class”

In the Organizing Report, Director of Organization Mark Meinster also made reference to the preamble of the UE Constitution and UE’s core principles, one of which is that “our core mission is to organize the unorganized, that our power lies with unity with the rest of the working class.”

However, he said, “we have to constantly renew” the union’s commitment to that mission through democratic debate and decision-making. He pointed out that if UE had not maintained that commitment, and made the decision to organize in sectors outside of the union’s traditional base in manufacturing, there would be far fewer delegates in the room. “That’s the reality under this system,” he said, “that if we stand still, we lose members until we die.”

However, “at every turn” in UE history, “the decision was made to lean into that principle, organize the unorganized,” and as a result in 2023 UE organized more new members than any other union in the country. Those new members were overwhelmingly graduate workers who “did the heavy lifting themselves.”

“Member-run unionism is how this is happening,” Meinster said as he introduced Local 728 President Kevin White, whose local took the initiative to organize a group of workers at their facility.

“Maintenance workers at our facility, after taking a look at our second contract, decided they would like to have a union for themselves,” White said, and after discussion on the local executive board, “we decided that we had no business of standing in the way of anyone who wanted a union in their shop.” White is now leading bargaining for a first contract for the nine workers, which he reported is going well.

Read more here.

Officers, executive board members, and trustees of the Western Region are sworn in.