125 Years Strong – An IUOE History

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF OPERATING ENGINEERS
substations, as well as the operation of electric
cranes, properly belonged to and came under
the charter of the I.U.S.O.E.
The union also kept up its ongoing crusade
to improve the wages of all its members, and
in one particular effort demanded in early
1919 that engineers employed by the country’s
railroads – most of which had been nationalized
under the U.S. Railroad Administration in
December 1917 – should receive 90 cents per
hour, at which the administration balked. At
the same time, engineers in the Pacific Coast
shipyards obtained an agreement calling for
better wages, overtime pay on holidays and
eight-hour workdays.
Toward the end of 1919, the engineers’
union again joined with all of labor to combat
brutal attacks by anti-union forces, especially
the antistrike provisions of a national railroad
bill before the U.S. Congress. Ultimately,
organized labor’s united front blocked passage
of the legislation.
Rise of Central Plants, Strikes
The number of hoisting and portable
engineers within the I.U.S.O.E. rose
steadily throughout the 1920s as
construction work increasingly employed more
steam shovels, internal combustion engines,
electric motors and hydraulic machinery.
Regardless, stationary engineers remained the
majority within the union into the latter half
of the decade.
But the role of the stationary engineer as
someone who had sole responsibility for
interior power of a building was diminishing.
During the decade, isolated power plants in
single facilities were all but completely replaced
by central power plants, where the skills of
engineers became more specialized.
Not all changes were so dramatic, however, and
at the 1920 I.U.S.O.E. convention, delegates
again discussed disagreements with the Steam
Shovel and Dredgemen, who had submitted to
the A.F.L. a plan of amalgamation, which the
engineers union had already rejected. Ultimately,
the proposal resulted in the suspension of the
Steam Shovel and Dredgemen’s charter with the
national federation.
Away from those administrative disruptions,
union engineers beginning in 1920 were put to
work on several landmark federal construction
projects. Among those were the Wilson Dam
on the Tennessee River at Florence, Alabama,
which was the first of nine Tennessee Valley
Authority dams built on the river when it
was completed in 1924; and the new, 27-mile
Welland Ship Canal connecting Lake Ontario
and Lake Erie in Ontario, Canada, that would
allow ships to sail around Niagara Falls when
opened in August 1932.
I.U.S.O.E. members were also at work
in the early 1920s expanding the one-timerevolutionary
Schoellkopf Power Plant, whose
first station was built in 1874, on the Niagara
River in Niagara Falls, New York, near the
famous American Falls. The project involved
adding multiple new generators to the plant’s
third power station, which had originally
been completed in 1914, and building a new
hydraulic tunnel to supply it with water from
the upper river. At the same time just to the
north on the Canadian banks of the river,
fellow members were constructing the new
Queenston-Chippawa Hydroelectric Plant
(now the Sir Adam Beck Generating Station I),
for which operating engineers of Local No. 232
in Niagara Falls, Ontario, operated the largest
shovel ever constructed at the time, weighing
400 tons with booms up to 110-feet long, before
the facility first produced power in 1922.
In late 1920, the I.U.S.O.E. won a milestone
victory over the Associated General Contractors
of America in a jurisdictional dispute involving
operation of temporary elevators to be used for
conveying building materials on construction
sites. The contractors association’s attempt to
A member of I.U.O.E. Local No. 4 in Boston displays the
local’s banner he carried in a parade during the late 1920s.
take over operation of the elevators was duly
rejected in a decision rendered by the National
Board for Jurisdictional Awards.
But growing employer opposition to
organized labor struck the engineers hard the
following two years, and coupled with effects
of The Depression of 1920-1921, membership
in the I.U.S.O.E. declined by one-fourth across
that period. What’s more, in 1921 and 1922,
more members were on strike or locked out of
jobs than at any one time in the union’s history,
while the international office paid out $30,911
in strike benefits for 62 strikes between its 1920
and 1922 conventions, leaving its Defense
Fund depleted.
The union suffered another blow during that
time with the sudden death of General President
Snellings on June 9, 1921, while he was serving
as a delegate to the A.F.L. convention in Denver.
Brother Snellings, who was 52 years old, was
succeeded by the union’s first vice president,
Brother Arthur M. Huddell.
The new general president was able to
announce in September 1921 that a decadelong
controversy with the United Brick and
Clay Workers of America was settled with
the signing of an agreement that provided an
amicable jurisdictional set-up in the Chicago
area. Over the next two months, President
Huddell also reached similar agreements with
the United Brotherhood of Maintenance of
Way Employees and Railway Shop Laborers,
whose members were responsible for the
physical condition of operational railway
rights of way, and the International Union of
Quarry Workers, which agreed to relinquish
jurisdiction of engineers to the I.U.S.O.E.
While in the summer of 1922 the I.U.S.O.E.
won another national victory in obtaining
jurisdiction over the operation of electrically
driven machinery, conditions for the country’s
organized labor had reached a low point as
legislative attacks from an unfriendly national
administration persisted. As such, The
International Steam Engineer in its June 1922
issue ran a letter from the A.F.L. Executive
Council that declared, “All hope of remedial
legislation by the present Congress was lost
months ago.”
By the time the union’s Eighth Biennial
Convention commenced in September 1922,
not only were a record number of its hoisting
and portable locals striking, but other
industries in which stationary engineers were
employed were also affected. For instance, an
International Paper Company strike involved
the entire membership of local unions in Glens
Falls and Fort Edward, New York, and the
granite industry strike in the eastern portion
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