125 Years Strong – An IUOE History

INTERNATIONAL UNION OF OPERATING ENGINEERS
previous decade and ushered in a renaissance
of sorts. Examining the union’s “primary years
of renewed growth in 1991 and 1992,” Union
Resilience in Troubled Times proclaims:
“That combination of local
initiative and Frank Hanley’s
administrative acumen and
aggressive organizational initiatives
have been the primary causes of
the union’s embryonic resurgence
during the early 1990s.”
An agreement signed February 24, 1994,
between the A.F.L.-C.I.O Building and
Construction Trades Department and the
United Steelworkers of America (U.S.W.A.)
to end a 15-year jurisdiction battle had
particular significance to the I.U.O.E. After
the steelworkers in 1980 unilaterally negated
an agreement that had been negotiated in 1977
to strictly limit activities of U.S.W.A. District
50 in the construction industry, intrusions by
the steelworkers had been a constant problem
and undermined hard-won, long-established
I.U.O.E. wages and benefits, costing its
members jobs.
Then in 1995, the union and General
President Hanley identified another
top priority: Construction Organizing
Membership and Education Training
(COMET). A two-step program to involve
the rank-and-file membership in efforts to
regain construction-market share by providing
them with the fundamentals of organizing on
jobsites, the union began to push all of its locals
to participate in COMET.
A Century of Skilled Craftsmen
“One-hundred years of progress
and advancement. One-hundred
years of providing significant
improvements in the work lives of
its members. That, in essence, is
the enviable history of simply the
very best trade union in the United
States and Canada ... or anywhere
else. It is the history of our union:
The I.U.O.E.”
– I.U.O.E. General President Frank Hanley
The International Operating Engineer,
February-March 1996
Members of I.U.O.E. Local No. 324 of Michigan place a piece of track
during construction of the Detroit People Mover, a 2.94-mile elevated train
encircling the city’s downtown area that was built from 1985 to July 1987.
Among the jobsites on which members were
working was the largest-ever public-works
project in the United States, Boston’s “Big Dig”
(formally the Central Artery/Tunnel Project),
which rerouted the elevated central artery
of Interstate-93 under the city’s downtown
through a 1.5-mile tunnel; built two bridges
totaling 14 lanes over the Charles River;
and extended the highway to Logan Airport
through the new, 1.6-mile Ted Williams Tunnel
under Boston Harbor. Started in 1992, the job
employed more than 900 operating engineers
from a dozen different I.U.O.E. locals, with
the majority from Boston’s Local No. 4, who
operated more than 150 cranes of various types
and sizes before it was completed in 2007.
By the end of 1993, the I.U.O.E. had
emerged from a difficult period in its history
and was in a stronger position. Its net worth
had almost doubled between 1987 and 1992
from $44.4 million $83.6 million, its three
pension plans were in solid financial condition
and the cooperative relationship between the
international and its locals was never better. (2)
The programs and other efforts undertaken
by the union in the early 1990s essentially
put an end to the decline it experienced the
Members of I.U.O.E. Local No. 3, which has jurisdiction over California, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah, take a
break on one of the dirt spreads in 1987 during work on the California Department of Transportation’s
Redwood National Park Bypass project through the Eureka area in Northern California.
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