This article was originally published as a four-part series in the Bulletin newspaper, in the editions of July 9, 16, 23, and August 13, 1973.

The United Electrical Workers: A case history of Stalinism

The role played by the Stalinists in collaborating with the trade union bureaucracy has been vividly exposed by the recent settlements with General Electric and Westinghouse. In this year’s critical contract battle, the United Electrical Workers (UE)—expelled from the CIO in 1949 during the right-wing purge of Stalinist-dominated unions—collaborated with the leadership of the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE)—the rump union which emerged from that split—in imposing a settlement upon over 150,000 electrical workers that rigidly adheres to Nixon’s Phase Three guidelines.

While the Daily World trumpets the “moderate advantages” achieved through the unity of the UE and IUE, the fact of the matter is that the leadership of the UE served as a cover for the right-wingers in the IUE. Though the IUE held most of the weight in the bargaining, it was the leaders of the UE—particularly James J. Matles—who sought to give the impression that they would fight for major gains.

But when the IUE agreed to negotiate on a day-to-day basis with GE without a strike after the May 26 deadline, the UE followed suit. And when the IUE negotiating committee accepted a 3.7 percent wage increase along with work rule changes that threaten speedups and unemployment, the UE took the same settlement back to its members.

When the contract was put to a vote, workers across the country expressed their disgust by virtually boycotting the membership meetings or leaving the union hall while the leadership read the terms of the settlement.

It is now reported that the reunification of the UE and IUE is being prepared. While this development would strengthen the electrical workers against the employers and is to be supported, it does not represent—as the Stalinists claim—a victory for any “progressive” section of the trade union bureaucracy. In no way does it make any less urgent the building of a new leadership in a united electrical workers’ union to throw out the right-wingers like Paul Jennings of the IUE, the progressives like Albert Fitzgerald and Matles of the UE, and the Stalinists who back them all.

The urgency of this fight for a Marxist leadership is made clear by the history of the electrical workers’ unions, which provides a particularly important case history of Stalinism in the trade unions. It was the betrayals of the Stalinists in the UE which contributed mightily to the success of the right-wingers who split the union and introduced rabid anti-communism into the trade union movement, which held back the political development of American workers for a whole period.

Established as a CIO union in 1937, the UE was led by a coalition of Stalinists and non-Stalinists whose principal conflicts were caused by shifts in the foreign policy of the Kremlin. As long as Stalinist diplomacy did not require any opposition to Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, let alone militant trade union struggles, both factions could coexist in relative harmony.

It was not until the Stalin-Hitler Pact of August 1939 that the factions went to war with each other. The Stalinists suddenly’ adopted a position of opposition to Roosevelt’s preparation for entrance into the war which led them to line up with John L. Lewis and more militant sections of the CIO leadership. UE President James B. Carey, a virulent anti-communist, pressed for the expulsion of the Stalinists. As the August 1941 CIO convention approached, it appeared that an all-out struggle between the factions was inevitable.

The position of the UE leadership on maintaining neutrality during the war between Hitler and Churchill was identical to that of the CP’s Daily Worker, which quoted its Secretary, Earl Browder, on June 4, 1941:

“What reason is there to believe that an allied victory will bring anything better to the world than a German victory...They display nothing but an abyss of incapacity, ineptitude and corruption… There is nothing to choose between the imperialist camps, for any support given to either means surrender of the whole struggle for peace and a better world.”

Less than three weeks later, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the Stalinists became the most ferocious advocates of Roosevelt’s pro-war policy. Needing the Stalinists to discipline the working class for war and to diminish the influence of Lewis, CIO elders like Sidney Hillman intervened to call a truce in the UE. Carey was removed from the presidency and replaced by Albert Fitzgerald, who was not a member of the Communist Party but quite willing to work with the Stalinists, now in control of the union. Carey did not have to worry about going hungry; he became CIO secretary-treasurer.

With 450,000 members, the UE could have rallied the militant ranks of the CIO in opposition to the war which was to devastate the living conditions of American workers and cost thousands their lives. Instead, the Stalinists turned the UE into the trade union most subservient to the dictates of Roosevelt and the capitalist class. It is impossible to read the UE News of the period without feeling revulsion over the crimes committed by the Stalinists against the American working class.

Roosevelt’s wage freeze received rabid support of the UE leadership which also was the most ardent sponsor of the “no-strike” pledge. Fitzgerald, Secretary-Treasurer Julius Emspak, and Organizing Director James Matles insisted that ail wage increases be strictly regulated by the big business agencies set up by Roosevelt. Reveling in the martial spirit of the imperialist war, they boasted of the “patriotic sacrifices” which the UE accepted for its members. An official union statement of the UE declared on February 7,1942:

“We are consequently requesting wage increases which, although they will neither raise workers’ standards nor give workers a fair share of the results of their own labor, will nevertheless help keep their living standards from falling to levels at which our productive efficiency and morale is seriously impaired.”

In other words, the policy of the Stalinist UE was: work them to the bone but don’t let them drop!

Taking the lead in opposition to a general wage increase that was being demanded by workers who saw their wages ripped apart by inflation, the UE explained its position on the upcoming negotiations with the companies in a statement published January 16, 1943:

“Labor’s attitude toward present day wage problems is based upon win the war considerations. This union is aware, as it has always been, that the major responsibility for production rests upon labor’s shoulders, and that labor programs and policies, to be successful, must be those that will contribute the most to the national production effort.

“This union also knows that the general standard of labor cannot be raised during a period of all-out war, but it must inevitably suffer from shortages in consumer goods.”

The statement was signed by Fitzgerald, Matles and Emspak.

It must be said that virtually entire trade union bureaucracies, with the notable exception of Lewis, took positions no different than that of Fitzgerald and Matles. This fact does not lessen the magnitude of the Stalinists’ betrayal, but it exposes the hypocrisy of the right-wing leaders of the CIO who led the anti-communist witch-hunt five years later on the phony pretense of defending the independence of the trade unions.

Guided by the Communist Party, the UE went on the warpath against the United Mine Workers when Lewis defied the “no strike” pledge and called 500,000 miners out in 1943. Branding Lewis a “traitor” and “Quisling,” the UE declared on May 8: “The miners cannot solve their problems by striking, nor by seeking to dodge the government agencies in whose power lies the solution.”

The denunciations of Lewis grew more vituperative each day as the UE carried out the Stalinist policy of ensuring the submission of the working class to the needs of the Kremlin’s alliance with Churchill and Roosevelt. The UE News of May 16 attacked miners who follow “the lead of John L. Lewis in treating labor’s no strike policy as if it were a lousy bargain with our country...”

When Lewis called out the miners for the second time in 1943, Julius Emspak sent a telegram to Roosevelt which began: “Urge you to direct John L. Lewis to call off coal strike at once, and that if he refuses you act immediately to make it impossible for him and his henchmen to continue to organize disruption of coal production.” So, the Stalinists wanted nothing less than the destruction of the UMW.

By 1944, there were signs that the “no-strike” pledge was on the verge of disintegrating as a strike wave began, particularly that of Montgomery Ward workers which won broad support—though condemned by the Stalinists. The CIO leadership did not want to break with Roosevelt but the open strikebreaking of the Administration made it impossible for CIO President Philip Murray to come out with an early endorsement of a fourth term.

But the Stalinists went ahead with an endorsement. With the growing disillusionment with Roosevelt creating the conditions for a movement toward the establishment of a labor party, the Stalinists acted quickly to affirm their support for the Democratic Party. As early as September 1943, the first business of the UE Convention was to call for a fourth term for Roosevelt.

The UE Convention rendered an invaluable service to the CIO leadership which did not know how to broach the subject of the fourth term. But the signal for further collaboration with Roosevelt—who at that time was threatening to draft strikers into the army and who felt that the infamous Smith-Connolly antiunion law was not strong enough—was the UE Convention. Philip Murray was invited to attend a rally of 15,000 on the first night of the Convention to hear Fitzgerald praise Roosevelt. Upon beginning his own speech, Murray turned to Fitzgerald and Matles (who now sported a military uniform) and extended his “personal confidence to the officers of this mighty organization.”

Greetings were also sent by Roosevelt, who acknowledged the sterling services of the UE to the war effort; so great was the government’s confidence in the Stalinists that it welcomed the organization of thousands of armament workers into the UE.

Together with the Murrays, the Hillmans and the Careys, the Stalinists did everything they could to tie the working class to the needs of big business and the capitalist war parties. But as the war’s end approached, the Stalinists had already earned the hatred of many workers—not because of anti-communism but because of the accumulated betrayals.

Their own actions in unions like UE facilitated the witch-hunt that began after the war when the trade union bureaucrats and Stalinists could no longer collaborate as American capitalism turned the tables on Stalin and prepared an offensive against the Soviet Union and international working class.

The post-war witch-hunt begins

It was through its historic betrayals of the American working class during World War Two that the Communist Party helped to create the conditions for the hysterical red-baiting initiated by the Truman Administration with the support of the CIO bureaucracy that split the labor movement.

Had it not been for the fact that the Stalinists had discredited themselves by ruthlessly suppressing militants within the unions they controlled, by vigorously policing the “no-strike” pledge for Roosevelt and suggesting that it remain in force after the war, and by vilifying workers who did fight the Government—like the miners. and the ran k s of Montgomery Ward—the right wingers in the CIO could never have launched the witch-hunt of the late 1940s.

In fact, the first big movement against the Stalinists came not in the form of a witch-hunt but m the wake of the postwar strike wave, as entrenched Stalinist leaderships were challenged by insurgents who were fed up with the cynicism and treachery of the apparatus. The CIO bureaucracy, led by Philip Murray, defended the Stalinist leadership against the movement of the rank and file.

When Walter Reuther temporarily moved to the left and led the great UAW strike of 1945-1946 in order to regain the popularity he had lost through his notorious role as a wartime speedup expert, he came into conflict with the Stalinist Thomas-Addes faction that still controlled the union. In the first battles between Reuther and Thomas-Addes, Murray participated in a smear campaign against Reuther.

Murray also collaborated with the Stalinists of the UE to strangle the auto strike. When 225,000 GM workers shut down 92 plants on November 21, 1945, the UAW assumed that the UE would at least call out the 30,000 members of its union working in the electrical appliances division of GM. This did not happen.

Instead, the UE and Murray tried to pressure Reuther to relinquish the bargaining authority of the elected GM Committee and to move the negotiations out of Detroit in order to arrange a quick settlement.

Even after the UAW publicly called on the UE to shut down the electrical appliances division of GM, no action was taken. Not until January 15, 1946, did the UE begin strike action of its entire membership against General Electric, Westinghouse and the GM electrical appliances division.

But, in what has gone down in American trade union history as a vicious stab in the back, the UE settled with GM on February 9 for terms that the UAW had rejected. The UAW was left to fight GM alone.

As the role of Murray makes clear, the drive against the Stalinists which was initiated by the CIO leadership in 1946 had nothing to do with the fight by the ranks for militant leadership. On the question of betraying the working class and tying it to the political parties of big business, neither faction had any major disagreements. They had presided over the wartime speedup and wage freeze cheek-to-cheek.

But with the end of the wartime alliance of Roosevelt and Stalin and the drive of American imperialism against the working class internationally as well as in this country, the CIO bureaucracy would no longer work with the Stalinists. As Truman pushed the Marshall Plan, the CIO bureaucracy began the witch-hunt in order to discipline the working class and throw out the CP, which was tied to the foreign policy of the Kremlin.

It was out of this witch-hunt that the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Union emerged. In fact, the men who first led the IUE and who are still in the leadership of many of its locals were the original witch-hunters.

James B. Carey had been a virulent red-baiter during the 1930s, and the CIO leadership had found it necessary to remove him from the leadership of the UE in 1941 in order to facilitate the wartime collaboration with the Stalinists.

The UE had been the bastion of the Stalinists in the CIO. When the witch-hunts began, it was not possible for Murray to simply drive a number of Stalinists out of the UE and take it over.

Instead, he had to engineer a split; and for this purpose he used the old red-baiting factionalist, Carey. While he capitalized on the dissatisfaction of the UE ranks with the Fitzgerald leadership, the only plank that Carey ever had on his program was anti-communism.

Because the Stalinists sought to maintain their alliance with the CIO bureaucracy as long as possible, they actually facilitated the work of Carey and elements like him throughout the labor movement. The Communist Party originally supported the famous “Declaration of Policy” issued by Murray in November of 1946 which stated: “We resent and reject efforts of the Communist Party or other political parties and their adherents to interfere in the affairs of the CIO.” Welcoming this resolution, which received unanimous support at the CIO Convention, George Morris wrote in the Daily Worker that the CP “always favored a statement telling the world the CIO isn’t communist.” As late as September 1946, Murray was still appearing at the annual conventions of the UE and praising the Fitzgerald-Matles-Emspak leadership. But once he had the “resent and reject” resolution under his belt, Murray proceeded to give more open support to the Carey faction which circulated a smear sheet called The Real UE.

The first setbacks suffered by the Stalinists occurred in January 1947, when the Carey faction was able to win the leadership of the General Electric UE Local 203 in Bridgeport and the Westinghouse Local 601 in Pittsburgh.

Twenty-five years later, the President of what is now IUE Local 203, Louis Santoianni, recalls with pride that he threw Matles out of the local’s union hall after the election.

Tensions between the CIO and the UE were further exacerbated by the decision of the Communist Party to support the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in order to pressure Truman to pursue a more moderate policy toward the Kremlin, and at the same time to prevent the development of a break by the working class with the capitalist parties that could lead to the emergence of a labor party.

This was yet another betrayal of the working class which was in direct conflict with the government over the attempts to legislate union-busting laws such as Taft-Hartley' Even under conditions of vicious attacks on the trade union movement and preparations for war which were endorsed by Democrats and Republicans, the Stalinists remained opposed to the independent political mobilization of the working class in a labor party.

Instead, the CP organized a fraudulent diversion around Henry Wallace—Roosevelt’s third-term vice president—whose credentials were nothing more than a belief that the State Department should try more wheeling and dealing with Stalin. He said that he favored “peace” with the Soviet Union unless the US decided to go to war. Under those conditions, Wallace promised, he would call off his campaign and loyally support Truman. “I am not a communist, I am not a socialist, I am only an American capitalist—or as I told the House of Parliament in London—I am a progressive Tory who believes it is absolutely essential to have peace and understanding with Russia.” Invited to the Twelfth Convention of the UE, Wallace declared that he believed in capitalism “but not in reactionary capitalism.” Albert Fitzgerald became the co-chairman of the National Wallace for President Committee.

While the Stalinists campaigned for Wallace, the CIO bureaucracy threw its resources into the Truman campaign—ignoring the fact that Truman made free and frequent use of the Taft-Hartley law to break strikes.

Union bureaucrats split the UE

Following the re-election of Truman, the CIO began a concerted effort to redbait the leadership of the UE out of the labor movement and into jail if possible. In UE plants throughout the country, representatives of the Carey faction beat up supporters of the UE—including militant trade unionists who did not like Fitzgerald but who wanted to prevent the destruction of a union in the electrical industry.

One older worker in what is now IUE Local 255 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, told the Bulletin: “I was for keeping the UE here and supported it in the elections. But all one heard all day was communism this and communism that—and a lot of men didn’t really know what to make of it. It didn’t help the union at all.”

The UE put up virtually no defense against the campaign except to expel from the union those it believed to be working with Carey. As the 1949 CIO Convention approached, the UE sought to avoid a struggle with the right wing by threatening to withhold its per capita tax to the CIO if the IUE raiding operation continued.

Had the Stalinists been willing to fight it out in the CIO on the basis of a program to mobilize the American working class against Truman and in that way expose the real position of Murray, the CIO never could have carried out the expulsions.

Murray himself had very little support within the working class.

As Art Preis explained in Labor’s Giant Step, “Murray might have faced the roughest time of his career at this CIO convention. His position was very shaky because of his timid, feeble leadership in the steel struggle. More than 80 percent of the steelworkers were in the fifth week of their strike. Murray had given away their major demands and had committed them to Truman’s fact-finding recommendation of a miserable fringe benefit.” But the UE walked out of the Convention rather than fight the anti-communist amendment introduced by their former crony, Mike Quill. This amendment barred from membership on the CIO Executive Board anyone who was either a member or supporter of the Communist Party.

The debate which followed the departure of the UE was very revealing. While Reuther sought to give the witch-hunt a left cover by listing the betrayals of the CP and UE, Murray was more frank in exposing the real motives.

Reuther accused the UE of betraying “every basic concept which is associated with the Left,” but the actual resolution expelling the UE from the CIO made the following points: “1. The CIO along with the American people support the Marshall Plan as a humane policy of physical and human rehabilitation and reconstruction to stop the spread of totalitarianism and strengthen the forms of democracy. “2. The CIO along with the American people support the Atlantic Pact to prevent any further expansion of the Soviet Union’s rule by force and terror.”

In short, the CIO bureaucracy was guided only by the interests of American capitalism and was willing to split the labor movement to break down all opposition within the labor movement to the war policies of the Democrats and Republicans.

The gratitude of the administration to the CIO for having gone ahead with the expulsion of the CP was expressed at the first convention of the IUE, held later that November. Greetings were sent to James Carey from Truman and among those invited as special honored guests were Averell Harriman, Stuart Symington—a former president of electrical companies with close connections to the military—and Labor Secretary Maurice Tobin.

Never in the history of the labor movement was any convention-even that of the trade union bureaucracy—so totally dominated by witch-hunting and red-baiting. The Convention even opened with an invocation from one Rev. William Gordon that concluded: “I feel very honored to again associate myself with the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, the Daily Worker notwithstanding. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

Carey, installed as the first President of the IUE, strutted to the podium and declared: “You know every Communist in the world worships what they call the October Revolution. We have reason to believe that they will have concern about the November counter-revolution.” Philip Murray worked himself into a frenzy: “The old UE was a Communist nest, an inferno.

They brought into the union every notorious communistic renegade they could employ...So far as I am concerned, those boys are through. Yes, I say to you, my friends, they’re through and you are going to see to it that they are through in your industry. “The issue is purely and un- adulteratedly communism…”

The convention voted to organize an all-out drive to capture the UE locals through NLRB elections that were scheduled for December, 1949. For this purpose, the IUE circulated leaflets that added anti-semitism to the usual dosage of anti-communism.

Headlined “10 Long Years of Communist Rule,” one IUE leaflet asked: “Look who runs the union (UE),” and then listed: “James J. Matles—or Matles Friedman or Matles Freedman or whatever other name he has been known by is a naturalized citizen of the US, coming originally from Romania...He is a Romanian-born alien Communist and as such in his union capacity he exercises a dominant influence in the lives of 2,000,000 Americans.”

However, the red-baiting boomeranged in the faces of the Carey forces. In many locals where the IUE had expected a large plurality, it either won by very small margins or lost.

Although a prominent UE leader, Julius Emspak was under a federal investigation that was to lead to an indictment on the basis of witch-hunt laws. The UE maintained a strong base within the electrical industry. The IUE captured 47,486 votes with a majority in 49 GE plants while the UE held 40 plants with 36,683 votes.

But the IUE became the main electrical workers union after the Schenectady local went over.

It is important to note that the IUE scored its biggest success in the Cleveland Local 707, where there was absolutely no redbaiting and the Stalinists lost on the basis of their misleadership, to a group of insurgents.

Behind Fitzgerald’s ‘left’ talk

Twenty-five years after the most vicious witch-hunt ever conducted in the American labor movement, it is reported that the IUE and UE are preparing reunification. While the IUE bureaucracy—from the local to the international level—still engages in the most open red-baiting in order to intimidate militants, it finds no difficulty in collaborating with the UE. Especially since 1969, the time of the last great electrical workers’ strike, the role of the UE has been to act as the left cover of the IUE and the entire right-wing AFL-CIO leadership.

The most treacherous expression of this collaboration cam e during the recent contract negotiations with General Electric and Westinghouse.

As we will point out shortly, every major demand of the ranks was abandoned by their leaders who had only one thing in mind—avoiding a confrontation with Nixon over wage controls and with the companies over the defense of jobs and the struggle against speedup.

However, the background of this collaboration in the contract fight was the earlier political bloc between the UE and IUE during the last Presidential election. Carrying out the policies of Stalinism in the trade union movement, Fitzgerald led the opposition of the so-called “progressive” section of the bureaucracy to the “neutrality” position of AFL-CIO President George Meany, who withheld an endorsement of either Nixon or McGovern. Fitzgerald fought in his own union and throughout the labor movement for the McGovern campaign.

The policies of Fitzgerald became closely linked to those of his former enemies in the IUE as Paul Jennings was one of three members of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee to vote against Meany’s position of neutrality and in support of McGovern. In spite of all the bitter differences of the past, the IUE and the UE began their discussions of reunification on the basis of their mutual hostility to any political development among electrical workers.

In order to maintain his unearned reputation as a leading “labor left.” Fitzgerald habitually speaks of the need for a labor party. But, when the task of fighting for a break with the Democrats is directly posed, Fitzgerald cynically maintains that the labor party is only a good idea that cannot be realized in the foreseeable future.

In June of 1972, speaking before his home local in Lynn, Massachusetts, at the North Shore Labor Solidarity Conference, Fitzgerald declared: “The salvation of the working class under the present political system is a myth. There are a few good Democrats, but they ought to be in a labor party in this country.”

He continued: “Forming a labor party is no different from forming a union. On the industrialized North Shore, we could raise money, and field our own candidates, this could spread throughout the country.” But by the time the annual convention of the UE was convened that September, in the midst of the McGovern campaign, Fitzgerald personally intervened to rally his forces against a delegate from a UE local in Oakland who spoke in behalf of a resolution calling for the union to break with the Democrats and Republicans and construct a labor party. This resolution had been overwhelmingly approved by the membership of Local 1412.

The delegate from Oakland urged the Convention to repudiate McGovern. He said that “the myth of non-class politics is assiduously preserved” when in reality the election of either party only decides “which millionaires should rule the roost.” “We fight the bosses day in and day out but we deliver our votes to the politicians they control.” The 400 delegates gave the speaker a strong ovation as he called on the UE to “organize our own ranks in a party of labor.” In the course of the next two hours, delegate after delegate registered their agreement on the need for a labor party, and said that they supported McGovern only because they did not know how to organize a labor party in time for the November election.

Disturbed by the development within the Convention, Fitzgerald took the floor to deliver a 45-minute diatribe against the labor party, summoning all the skills he had developed over a period of 30 years of collaboration with the Stalinists, to swing an endorsement for McGovern. Throwing out everything he had said about the labor party just two months before, Fitzgerald declared: “The primary job of a union is organizing the unorganized. But there are millions of workers who are not ripe enough to join a labor party. They aren’t even ripe enough to join a union. The idea we can build a labor party overnight is a mistake.” Fitzgerald has been against building a labor party “overnight” since the late 1930s and now he tries to blame the working class for his long history of betrayals.

Every struggle over contracts is a political struggle today in that trade unionists cannot talk about wage increases and defending their standard of living without coming into conflict with the government which has imposed controls on w ages. It is under these conditions that the UE and IUE began their negotiations with the major electrical companies this past spring. From the start, the outcome of the struggle in the electrical industry was viewed as the critical test of Nixon’s Phase Three. If the so-called “voluntary” guidelines were defied by the electrical unions, the controls could be broken down and would lead to an all-out offensive by nearly four million other workers still up for contracts over the issue of wages.

Furthermore, with the Nixon Administration paralyzed by the eruption over the Watergate scandal, this type of movement by labor against Nixon’s wage controls would definitely pose the disintegration of the government and raise the political task of preparing the alternative to Nixon—the labor party pledged to socialist policies—before the working class.

It is for this reason that the lengthy negotiations were a carefully staged fraud perpetrated by the UE and IUE leadership upon the ranks. Jennings and Fitzgerald were determined, at all costs, to avoid a strike and to reach a settlement within the guidelines.

The settlement which has been reached meets none of the demands that were originally outlined by the UE and IUE. The first demand advanced by both unions concerned the area of wages. Earlier in the year, Jennings had stated that acceptance of the 5.5 percent guidelines would be the equivalent of suicide. Both the IUE and UE calculated that inflation had eaten into 29 cents of the expiring contract.

Donning the cloak of trade union militancy, Fitzgerald said in the midst of the negotiations: “Forget about the Cost of Living Council for now… get every penny we can and after that we’ll have plenty of time to worry about the government going along with us.” But all along, Fitzgerald was determined to avoid the confrontation with the government and went along with the IUE’s wage settlement of a 3.7 percent wage increase for the first year with 10 cents cost of living now and another 5 cents in November.

Although the leadership still attempts to keep the members in the dark about the contract language, it is clear that they have also been sold out on the important issue of continuous operations.

Continuous operations means the operation of particular departments or steps in the production process on a round-the-clock basis for either six or seven days a week. This creates the conditions for the tr a n s formation of work patterns along the line of speedup and forced overtime, and also eliminates jobs. As GE is threatened with a curtailment of its foreign operations due to the development of the trade war and with profits driven down by the wild inflation stimulated by the dollar crisis, the company cannot tolerate the continuation of working conditions as they have been. Continuous operations is at the center of GE’s strategy for breaking the electrical unions and the living conditions of its members.

The UE had singled out continuous operations as a major point of contention with GE, but signed the contract which leaves the door wide open for the company to introduce the device of speedups and layoffs throughout the country. The new position of both unions is that continuous operations must be fought on the local level. What this means is that electrical workers will be left to fight it out in each local against the company while the international leadership seeks to isolate the struggle,

GE workers are already beginning to feel the effect of this contract. Six thousand workers at the Elmwood GE plant in Philadelphia face layoffs as the plant prepares to move South.

The Lester plant of Westinghouse, in Philadelphia, is also being phased out as a new facility in Texas is developed. At Allentown, GE line speeds are increasing and new equipment placed on continuous operation means the beginning of the end of working conditions as the ranks have known them.

This contract was ratified in the face of enormous opposition.

The leadership of the IUE and UE did everything it could to discourage a large turnout for the vote, scheduling membership meetings on the contract on Father’s Day in a number of important plants. But even with its maneuvering, the contract passed only because the ranks, while disgusted with the sell-out, did not see a clear alternative to

their current leadership. Having experienced the betrayal of the 1969-1970 strike, when they were sold out after nearly four months on the picket line, the ranks had no faith in the willingness of the bureaucracy to conduct a serious struggle against the very contract they had signed.

However, the determination of the ranks to fight to defend their living conditions was shown by the series of wildcat strikes before and after the settlement.

At the important Pittsfield plant, an entire department wildcatted against the layoff of 150 workers only two days before the ratification vote.

The contract signed last June by the leadership of the UE and IUE exposes the ranks to an all-out attack on their standard of living. The fight of the ranks to defend what they have won through bitter struggles must be taken forward in a fight against both Jennings and Fitzgerald in the struggle to construct a new leadership.

This fight must be organized around a program which meets the needs of electrical workers and faces up to the political tasks confronting the entire labor movement. It is on the basis of such a program that all the electrical unions, UE, IUE and the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) can be united to defend th e ir members’ living conditions and basic rights.

The Trade Union Alliance for a Labor Party calls on all electrical workers to demand that the contract be reopened in the light of Phase Four and the vicious attacks on living conditions as prices skyrocket.

Workers must build a new leadership fighting for the following program:

• Wages: Smash the guidelines! For a 20 percent increase in the first year of the contract with full cost of living.
• Working conditions: No continuous operation, no speedups. National strike action to defeat the introduction of continuous operations in any plant.
• 30 hour week at 40 hours pay to stop the layoffs.
• Full pension at $600 a month with cost of living after 30 years.
• The UE, IUE and IBEW must break with the Democrats and prepare for the struggle to force Nixon out by calling a Congress of Labor to establish a labor party as the political arm of the working class against the government. This labor party must be pledged to the nationalization of all basic industry—including electric—under workers control, which alone guarantees the defense of decent living conditions.