125 Years Strong – An IUOE History

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF OPERATING ENGINEERS
Maloney Ushers in Gilded Era
More than 300 delegates gathered
for the 21 st I.U.O.E. Convention
beginning April 8, 1940, in
Washington, D.C., the first held by the union
since before the Great Depression. Among the
business they conducted, the delegates adopted
resolutions that placed them on record as
favoring a national license law for operating
engineers and continuation of the Public
Works Administration, the New Deal agency
designed to reduce unemployment through the
construction of highways and public buildings
that had been disbanded the previous year –
and would remain so despite I.U.O.E. appeals.
But with a legacy that included reviving
stationary-field organizing and implementing
the formation of state- and market-wide
hoisting and portable locals, General President
Possehl died on September 14, 1940. The
56-year-old had been serving on the General
Executive Board while it was in session in
Washington, D.C., when he became ill with a
heart ailment the day before he passed away.
The board on September 19 unanimously
elected Brother William E. Maloney, the
union’s fifth vice president, as its next general
president. A native of Chicago and a member
of the I.U.O.E. for 30 years, his ascendency
to the position marked the start of a period of
“spectacular growth” for the union over much
of the ensuing two decades, which coincided
with his presidency, as The Economic History of
a Trade Union asserts:
“By any measure, the years 1940-
1958 must be counted as the most
illustrious period of the union’s
history to that time.”
Up until 1940 and, essentially, the beginning
of General President Maloney’s term, the
engineers’ union since 1896 was basically two
organizations in one, consisting of a branch
of stationary engineers and a building trades
branch of operating engineers, The Economic
History of a Trade Union attests. Beginning in
1940, a “small but significant trend towards
organization” of semi-skilled operators and
employees in numerous other industries added
a third group to the union’s membership,
starting a trend in the union’s organizing
campaigns that reached well beyond its
traditional doctrine and corresponding efforts.
In particular, starting in the early 1940s, the
union placed a new focus on organizing the
dredging jurisdiction on the east coast, which
had essentially been neglected since the 1927
amalgamation with the steam-shovel workers’
and dredgemen’s union. (1)
“In the organizing campaigns of the 1940s
and 1950s, the union departed from its onetime
craft purity,” the book summarizes. As a
result, when the delegates of the union’s 21 st
Convention met in Washington, D.C., in April
1940, its membership stood at 58,240 – and by
1960, union affiliation by members employed
outside the construction industry would be
four times what it was in 1939.
But late that year, another world war that
would have unimagined consequences was
ignited in Europe and Asia. Canada entered
the conflict on September 10, 1939, alongside
the Allied countries led by England and France,
just nine days after the military forces of Nazi
Germany invaded Poland, setting off the
hostilities in which the I.U.O.E. would play a
prominent role.
Winning a Second Global War
With World War II raging across
much of the globe into 1940, in
July of that year the United States
inaugurated its National Defense Program. The
resulting construction needs for the nation’s
military buildup would require the manpower
of scores of I.U.O.E. members. Within
nine months after the Selective Service Act
became law on September 14, 1940, operating
A political cartoon by I.U.O.E. Local No. 57 of Rhode Island from May 1941
celebrating the long-awaited passage of a state hoisting engineer licensing bill.
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