Campaigns at large factories in Virginia, Wisconsin and New Hampshire stalled out in the face of large layoffs, company attacks, or both. A winter election at a small factory in the Pittsburgh area failed to produce a union majority, the same result we experienced when we attempted to reorganize a former UE plant in northern New Jersey this summer. A special staff seminar was held in January to review and refine our industrial organizing strategies. UE s continuing work to affiliate independent local unions led to contacts with dozens of independents this year, most of these in the industrial sector as well. Our most advanced campaigns were among factory workers in Ohio and bus drivers in Michigan.
Work continues on both.
At home we worked in alliance with a nurses union to organize hospital workers while abroad we worked with unions and union groups in Europe, Japan, Mexico and Canada to defend the right to organize. As this report was written, UE organizers were preparing to launch a card drive involving some 300 ancillary staff at a hospital where CNA recently achieved a first contract for the registered nurses. Among key developments on the international front were plans to test a new Global Agreement on workers rights secured from the German-based Freudenberg Corporation by European labor unions. UE plans to test the agreement in an Indiana organizing drive. Overall, this year was another year, like so many others over the past decade, in which UE found itself swimming against a tide which produced membership losses for most U.S. unions.