CWA Convention Delegates Welcome IUE Members

A resolution welcoming IUE’s 113,000 members into the CWA family got hearty approval from delegates, on Aug. 29, at the 62nd annual convention.

“This is an outstanding union with a strong labor history,” CWA President Morton Bahr said before the vote. “We see this merger as a perfect match.”

Bahr said IUE is a financially sound union that was courted by the Steelworkers, Auto Workers, Machinists and Mine Workers. “After careful consideration of all the unions, their board voted unanimously to join with us,” he said.

The merger, which was formally approved three weeks later by IUE members at their convention, brings CWA’s membership to nearly three-quarters of a million workers.

IUE is the International Union of Electronic, Electrical, Salaried, Machine and Furniture Workers — or, as IUE President Ed Fire joked in his speech to CWA members, “The International Union of Everything.”

Fire called CWA “one of the country’s truly, truly great unions” and spoke of the IUE’s shared history with CWA.

“Our unions span the same era of American labor history,” he said. “We share roots in the upheaval that gave birth to the CIO in the 1930s. Both unions were born of the belief in wall-to-wall industrial unionism in which everyone, every worker, is treated as equals.”

Fire praised CWA for being “blessed with great leadership.” He hailed Verizon strikers for winning a “tremendous contract” and called special attention to triumph in the area of card-check recognition to organize workers in the wireless sector.

“This is a profound and significant achievement,” Fire said. “It will resonate throughout the entire American labor movement.”

IUE and CWA were once roughly the same size, about 300,000 members each. “You, my brothers and sisters, are to be highly commended for building your union into a strong and effective force for good in all of our society,” Fire said, calling for the unions to work together to make life better for people around the world.

“The rich should get no more. They have plenty,” he said. “But the workers of the world need more, they deserve more. IUE and CWA together are going to fight and we are going to win more for all the workers of the world — more fairness, more equity, more justice, more compassion, more dignity, more decency, more humanity, more caring.”