125 Years Strong – An IUOE History

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF OPERATING ENGINEERS
President Turner stated in a letter to the
membership in the January 1976 International
Operating Engineer, “is a stepped-up emphasis
on organization.”
However, the economic consequences of
the politics of U.S. President Gerald R. Ford’s
administration, which ended the promise of
wage stabilization, were a major setback for
the I.U.O.E., which opened the door for the
non-union sector of the industry. (2) “Following
Ford’s veto of the Economic Rights of Labor
legislation and John Dunlop’s resignation as
secretary of labor, construction labor costs rose
until there were incentives and opportunities
for a successful open-shop incursion into the
organized sectors of the construction industry
that caused substantial membership declines
in the 1970s and 1980s,” Union Resilience in
Troubled Times explains. As a result, between
1975 and 1988, the union suffered a loss of
54,108 members, although during that same
period, stationary membership increased by
nearly 10,000 to almost 100,000.
The union had been increasing its use of
maintenance agreements to secure that work
for members over the first half of the 1970s,
although by that time, unionized maintenance
was often being performed in facilities in which
the operating personnel were non-union. (2)
By 1976, the international office had settled
such agreements with 57 contractors and 117
projects, up from 41 contracts covering 103
locations in the United States and Canada
in 1968. Similar agreements were settled
with commercial and industrial maintenance
contractors, onshore and offshore oil drillers,
and railroad maintenance and construction
(and later, nuclear power, bridge, and stack and
chimney construction) contractors. (2)
Members of I.U.O.E. Local No. 30, which covers parts of New York and Connecticut, strike against the Rheingold Brewery in Brooklyn in June 1973.
Members of I.U.O.E. Local No. 318 in Marion, Illinois, work on construction of the Smithland
Locks and Dam, the first structure of its size built on the Ohio River, during the early 1970s.
The I.U.O.E. in 1976 was involved in “one
of the most significant dual-shop decisions
rendered by the National Labor Relations Board
(N.L.R.B.),” according to Union Resilience in
Troubled Times, when the U.S. Supreme Court
upheld a decision by a lower court overruling
the N.L.R.B. in a case concerning Local No.
627 of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In reversing the
board’s decision, the courts defined the “singleemployer”
concept by establishing the criteria
by which a subsidiary can be independent of the
parent corporation, a necessity in determining
the relationship between the employer and the
employees in collective-bargaining agreements.
The case stemmed from a 1972 complaint
filed with the N.L.R.B. by the local in which
it alleged that the South Prairie Construction
Company had violated the National Labor
Relations Act by refusing to apply the
collective-bargaining agreement the union
had with Peter Kiewit Sons’ Company (now
Kiewit), which operated South Prairie, to its
LABOR OMNIA VINCIT
employees. Local No. 627 contended that
because both companies had a common owner,
they constituted a “single” employer under
the act. Since the N.L.R.B. considered both
subsidiaries separate entities, it erroneously
ruled that the employees of South Prairie, a
highway contractor, were not covered by the
collective-bargaining agreement the union had
with Kiewit, also a highway contractor.
“This happens all over the country,” Local
No. 627 Business Manager Gerald Ellis
stated after the Supreme Court decision.
“Companies set up one non-union subsidiary
to compete with their union subsidiary. Now
these non-union subsidiaries have to abide by
the union agreement.”
Two years later in 1978, the I.U.O.E. and
seven other building trades unions signed
the National Industrial Construction
Agreement with the National Constructors’
Association. The pact, which initially
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