The United Public Workers of America (1946–1952) was an American labor union representing federal, state, county, and local government employees. The union challenged the constitutionality of the Hatch Act of 1939, which prohibited federal executive branch employees from engaging in politics. In United Public Workers of America v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75 (1947), the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Hatch Act, finding that its infringement on the Constitutional rights was outweighed by the need to end political corruption. The union's leadership was Communist, and in a famous purge the union was ejected from its parent trade union federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, in 1950.
The union is sometimes confused with the United Federal Workers of America (a predecessor union) and the United Office and Professional Workers of America (UOPWA) (a union of white-collar, private-sector office workers which also belonged to the Congress of Industrial Organizations).
Status of unions in the U.S. federal government Workers in federal agencies had formed craft-based unions on the local level beginning in the early 1880s. The growing power of these and other unions in the federal government led President Theodore Roosevelt to issue two Executive Orders (in 1902 and 1906) essentially banning unions in the federal civil service.Mayers, The Federal Service, 1922, p. 548-549. Under Congressional pressure, President William H. Taft made the Executive Orders less onerous in 1912. Unhappy with Taft's refusal to rescind the orders entirely, Congress passed the Lloyd-La Follette Act (§6, 37 Stat. 555, 5 U.S.C. § 7511) on August 24, 1912, declaring establishing the right of federal employees to join unions (albeit not the right for them to bargain collectively).Faulkner, The Decline of Laissez Faire, 1897–1917, 1951, p. 284. Five years later, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) acted to bring the various local unions together to form a single national union, the National Federation of Federal Employees, in September 1917.Mayers, The Federal Service, 1922, p. 552-556.
In December 1931, NFFE disaffiliated from the AFL, its national trade union center.Lowenberg and Moskow, Collective Bargaining in Government: Readings and Cases, 1972, p. 57. The break occurred over the AFL's refusal to abandon its support for craft unionism and cease its attacks on industrial unions.Hanlan and Weir, Historical Encyclopedia of American Labor, 2004, p. 14. The AFL responded by chartering a new federal employees union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), in October 1932 from several units of the NFFE which did not wish to leave the labor federation.DuPre, Your Career in Federal Civil Service, 1981, p. 224.
In 1936, the AFL chartered the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to represent non-federal government workers in the United States.Billings and Greenya, Power to the Public Worker, 1974, p. 23-24.
In the early 1930s, a fundamental dispute occurred within the U.S. labor movement over whether to organize workers by craft or on an industry-wide basis.Horowitz, Political Ideologies of Organized Labor, 1977, p. 133-134. After a contentious AFL convention in October 1935 (during which union leaders came to blows), eight unions engaged in industrial union organizing formed the Committee for Industrial Organizing.Horowitz, Political Ideologies of Organized Labor, 1977, p. 134. The AFL accused them of engaging in dual unionism, and on September 10, 1936, suspended them from the national labor federation.Phelan, William Green: Biography of a Labor Leader, 1989, p. 141-150. Efforts to reunify the two groups failed, and the Committee reconstituted itself as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) on November 9, 1936.Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955, 1995, p. 29. The CIO quickly began forming unions to compete with their counterpart unions in the AFL.
The UFWA and SCMWA In 1937, a number of AFSCME local unions, composed primarily of caseworkers, disaffiliated from that union and joined the CIO.Billings and Greenya, Power to the Public Worker, 1974, p. 29. The CIO allowed these local unions to form the State, County, and Municipal Workers of America (SCMWA), and charged the new organization with competing with AFSCME at the state and local levels for membership. Most of the leaders and many of the members of these local unions were strongly sympathetic to the beliefs and goals of the Communist Party USA.Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1960, p. 60. Former AFSCME executive board member Abram Flaxer was appointed the new union's president, and former AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer David Kanes held the same post in SCMWA. SCMWA membership grew quickly: It more than doubled the number of local unions (from 12 to 28) in a year,National Association of Social Workers, Social Work Year Book, 1939, p. 437. and its members rose from 25,000 in 1937 to more than 48,000 in 1946.Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1960, p. 32.One source puts the number of SCMWA members in 1937 at only 5,000, which would make the union's growth that much more surprising. See: Billings and Greenya, Power to the Public Worker, 1974, p. 29. In comparison, AFSCME's membership grew from 13,259 in 1947 to more than 73,000 in 1946.Billings and Greenya, Power to the Public Worker, 1974, p. 32.
In 1937, the CIO formed a new union for U.S. government employees, the United Federal Workers of America (UFWA), from elements of the AFGE.Slater, Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, the Law, and the State, 1900–1962, 2004, p. 126. The UFWA's membership, however, remained static (as did the membership of nearly all federal government unions in the 1930s). Like SCMWA, the UFWA leadership was leftist. The leadership was militant in its advocacy of the rights of its members and most of the national and local union leadership advocated leftist ideals; associated with left-wing intellectuals, activists, and political people; and supported left-wing organizations.Arnesen, "United Federal Workers of America/United Public Workers of America," in Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History, 2006, p. 1445. This led many politicians and others to believe the organization was Communist-controlled.
The political leanings of the UWFA led to passage of two pieces of legislation intended to restrict its political activities. In June 1938, Congress passed a rider to appropriations legislation with prevented the federal government from making payments (such as salaries) to any person or organization which advocated the overthrow of the federal government (as many communist organizations at the time proposed).Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to 1976, 2001, p. 244. In 1939, Congress passed the Hatch Act of 1939, which restricted political campaign activities by federal employees. A provision of the Hatch Act made it illegal for the federal government to employ anyone who advocated the overthrow of the federal government. The UFWA immediately hired lawyer Lee Pressman to challenge the constitutionality of the Hatch Act.Gall, Pursuing Justice: Lee Pressman, the New Deal, and the CIO, 1999, p. 216.
Formation of the UPWA and its CIO history On April 25, 1946, SCMWA merged with the UFWA to form the United Public Workers of America.Lyons, Teachers and Reform: Chicago Public Education, 1929–1970, 2008, p. 104.Spero and Blum, Government As Employer, 1972, p. 214."New Union Urges Wider Labor Law," New York Times, April 26, 1946. Joining the new organization were several local unions which had been expelled from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) for being communist-dominated. The impetus for the merger was the relative failure of the UFWA to attract new members, and SCMWA essentially absorbed the smaller federal union.Spero, Government As Employer, 1948, p. 198; Fink, Labor Unions, 1977, p. 305. The new union said its mission was to organize new members as well as raid the AFGE (the AFL affiliate) and the NFFE (now independent) for members.Raskin, "New Union Urges AFL Units Join CIO," New York Times, April 27, 1946. With a membership of more than 100,000 (out of six million public-sector workers at all levels nationwide), UPWA claimed to be the largest public employee union in the nation.Opdycke, No One Was Turned Away: The Role of Public Hospitals in New York City Since 1900, 2000, p. 95. About 7,000 of UPWA's members were welfare caseworkers. while the rest worked in private nonprofit hospitals, public utilities (such as water companies), and local government.Coleman, Managing Labor Relations in the Public Sector, 1990, p. 44. The hospital workers numbered in the several thousand, and were primarily located in New York City.Fink and Greenberg, Upheaval in the Quiet Zone: A History of Hospital Workers' Union, Local 1199, 1989, p. 17. The union hired Elliot Godoff as a hospital organizer; after the collapse of UPWA, Godoff became a key organizer and leader for Local 1199 of the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union.
The new union's president was Abram Flaxer,McColloch, White Collar Workers in Transition: The Boom Years, 1940–1970, 1983, p. 52. and its secretary-treasurer was Panamanian immigrant and scholar Ewart Guinier.Fraser, "Ewart Guinier, 79, Who Headed Afro-American Studies at Harvard," New York Times, February 7, 1990.Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City, 2006, p. 149. The new union also began publishing a 16-page, tabloid-sized membership magazine, The Public Record. The UPWA formed a teachers division,Weber, Personnel Problems of School Administrators, 1954, p. 317. and affiliated several local teachers unions which had been expelled from the American Federation of Teachers during an anti-communist purge in 1941. Among these were the Los Angeles Federation of Teachers, Local 430;Eaton, The American Federation of Teachers, 1916–1961: A History of the Movement, 1975, p. 132.Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, Ninth Report: Un-American Activities in California, 1952, 1953, p. 125; Illson, "Ousted Unit Fights Teachers' Council," New York Times, August 23, 1949; Selden, The Teacher Rebellion, 1985, p. 206. the Philadelphia Teachers Union, Local 192;Jenkins, The Cold War At Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945–1960, 1999, p. 120-121; Friedman, Philadelphia Jewish life, 1940–2000, 2003, p. 32.Eaton, The American Federation of Teachers, 1916–1961: A History of the Movement, 1975, p. 119.Martin, "Origins of the American Federation of Teachers: Issues and Trends Between the Two Great World Wars," American Educational History Journal, 2001, p. 4. New York City Teachers Union, Local 5Eaton, The American Federation of Teachers, 1916–1961: A History of the Movement, 1975, p. 116; Taft, United They Teach: The Story of the United Federation of Teachers, 1974, p. 39-49; Selden, The Teacher Rebellion, 1985, p. 18-19. (then the largest local union in the AFT);Eaton, The American Federation of Teachers, 1916–1961: A History of the Movement, 1975, p. 93. New York City College Teachers, Local 537; University of Washington, Local 401 (expelled in 1948, not 1941).Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade, 1984, p. 254. Its teacher organizing efforts were particularly strong in New York City.Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City, 2006, p. 29.