THE HISTORY OF THE IUOE

The First World War

Soon after the declaration of war, a statement was issued by the National Council of Defense, urging
no disturbance of the prevailing standards, established by law or custom, either by employer or
employee. It also asserted, regarding unionization, that capital had no more right to interfere with
unionizing efforts than labor had to interfere with capitalists organizing capital into corporations.
Engineers during this time were confronted with unfair methods by contractors in the construction
of cantonment and other government work, with threats of strikes. However, as a result, an
agreement signed by the Secretary of War and President Gompers which provided that the trade
union scale of wages and hours as of 1917 was to be the basic standard.

In 1917, the International Union of Steam and Operating Engineers took a firm stand prohibiting
members from working in breweries where the chief engineer was not a union man. This was a
means of creating many good positions for union members, positions that had previously been held
by anti-unionists.

After the war, the union’s growing importance was recognized in 1919 when its president was
elected to the Executive Council of the AFL Building Trades Department. The Council at the same
session ruled that the operation of electrically driven machinery in electrical generating stations and
sub-stations, as well as the operation of electric cranes, properly belonged to and came under the
charter of the International Union of Steam and Operating Engineers.
International Union of Steam and Operating Engineers’ delegates to the 1923 AFL convention joined
in endorsement of vigorous resolutions submitted to the convention. They passed resolutions
opposing Soviet tyranny and communist propaganda in the United States, the Ku Klux Klan and
fascists, demanded an amendment to the constitution to prohibit child labor, and defeated resolutions
calling for an independent labor political party.

<<BACK NEXT>>