125 Years Strong – An IUOE History

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF OPERATING ENGINEERS
and I.U.O.E. Safety Director Alan Burch
was named one of three commissioners to
serve on the Review Commission of the new
Occupational Safety and Health program.
One of the highlights of the union’s
construction jobs that year was members’ use
of helicopters to help speed work on a new,
parallel span to the original Chesapeake Bay
Bridge, which connects Maryland’s Eastern
Shore region with its Western Shore. The
4.3-mile older span had opened in 1952 and
was still the world’s longest continuous, overwater
steel structure when the new bridge was
completed on June 28, 1973.
Sadly, however, seven I.U.O.E. members and
10 union laborers died on June 24, 1971, in
a fire and explosion in a large water tunnel in
which they were working near the Los Angeles
suburb of Sylmar. The disaster occurred at
1:05 a.m. as the night-shift crew was drilling
in a water tunnel for the Los Angeles supply
system 250 feet below ground and a pocket
of methane gas was ignited, after which the
heat, gas and lack of oxygen “made rescue
impossible,” according to a report in the July
1971 International Operating Engineer.
The operating engineers lost that day were
Los Angeles Local No. 12 brothers John
Drobot, Jose R. Carrasco, Alvin H. Streen,
William R. Snodgrass, Gary A. Nichols and
Robert W. Warner, and Brother William I.
Ashe of Local No. 3 in San Francisco.
The following year, during which the
union’s membership reached an increase of
100,000 more members than it had 10 years
earlier, the I.U.O.E. initiated its first National
Maintenance Agreement. A collectivebargaining
blueprint, the agreement was
developed to create, preserve, expand and
improve work opportunities for operators in
the maintenance industry; it would cover work
defined as maintenance, repair, replacement,
rehabilitation and renovation. Since 1972, the
union’s National Maintenance Agreements
Sister Candace “Candy” Martin, shown here working as a surveying “instrument
man” on construction of the John Hancock Tower in Boston in July 1971, was one
of the first female I.U.O.E. members when she became the first female member
of Local No. 4 of Boston during the late 1960s. (Boston Globe photos courtesy of
Northeastern Universities Libraries, Archives and Special Collections Department.)
450000
420000
390000
360000
330000
I.U.O.E. Membership
Throughout The Years
398,420
300000
270000
240000
210000
180000
150000
120000
90000
60000
30000
0
1897 788
1903
1908
1913
1918
1923
1928
1933
1938
1942
1947
1952
1957
1962
1967
1972
1975
1979
1983
1987
1992
1996
2000
2005
2010
2015
2020
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