From UE News | Photo Courtesy of ueunion.org | UE News Reuse Policy
On November 20, 1975, 730 workers at the General Electric turbine plant just outside Charleston, South Carolina voted to join UE, forming Local 1202. It was the second large electrical manufacturing plant in the South to organize with UE in the 1970s, following the Tampa Westinghouse plant, where workers formed UE Local 1201 in 1972.
Charleston GE workers first contacted UE in 1971, shortly after the plant opened, seeking seniority protections, better wages, and improved working conditions. But organizing in the South was not an easy task — as the UE NEWS noted, in the local media, “Unions are presented in the image of Satan.”
Still, workers built an in-plant organizing committee, slowly but surely, and petitioned for a National Labor Relations Board election in August 1974. They lost by 70 votes, but “a group of determined workers” remained undeterred.
They launched a plant-wide petition drive for a 75 cent wage increase. In November 1974 they presented over 700 signatures to the plant manager at a “75¢ now” demonstration of over 300 workers — and within a week the company had granted wage increases of up to 36 cents. The campaign “taught us how strong we really are when everyone sticks together,” pipe welder Willie Middleton told the UE NEWS, but as machine operator Reuben Gadsden noted, “we also learned that we had no say over who got how much.”
GE Charleston workers demonstrate for 75 cent raises, November 1974.
Layoffs in March with no respect for plant-wide seniority, and the shortcomings of a company-run grievance procedure implemented after the 1974 NLRB election, further convinced workers of the importance of real union protections.
In early June, fabrication shop welder Carnell Gathers was fired for handing a union leaflet to another worker. “I figured I was gone,” Gathers said, but as first shift worker Jack Whack related, “When Carnell got fired we didn’t sit back and take it; we organized and signed petitions and filed grievances and protested to our foremen. When Carnell got reinstated we really could see what unity can accomplish.”
Although workers won their second NLRB election in November 1975, it took 14 months to get certified. The company filed objections with the NLRB and carried out an ongoing campaign against the union. As the UE NEWS reported, during this time, “Every pay envelope had an anti-union blurb imprinted on it.” In January 1977 Local 1202 members finally came under the national UE-GE contract.
The members of Local 1202 made components for the nuclear industry, which began to collapse in the wake of the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. On June 1, 1984 GE announced plans to close the Charleston plant the following year. Local 1202 launched an ambitious campaign to keep their facility open as an “alternative energy center,” which won high-profile support from Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Catholic Church, as well as bipartisan support from local politicians. Although the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, the attention it brought to the issue of plant closings and layoffs helped win passage of a measure in the South Carolina legislature to allow workers to receive more generous unemployment benefits in the wake of plant closings.
Several Local 1202 leaders went on to join the UE staff, including Gadsden and Marion Washington, who worked as a Field Organizer and then International Representative in Pittsburgh and retired in 2017. Two Field Organizers who worked on the campaign later served UE as national officers: John Hovis (Director of Organization from 1984-87 and General President from 1987-2011) and Amy Newell (Secretary-Treasurer from 1985-1994).
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