recognized unions at Oak Ridge, and participating officers complied with the same requirements applied to their members. In the review of the situation at AEC installations other than Oak Ridge, however, a serious question was found to exist in respect to alleged Communist affiliation or association of various officers of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. This union, under its over-all contract with General Electric, has acted as representative of certain atomic energy workers in Schenectady and its officers, therefore, have been in a position to exercise administrative, negotiating, and disciplinary authority over such workers. Because of the existence of this serious question, we directed the General Electric Co. not to extend recognition to UE for any employees at the new Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory which is about to be put into operation. The Commission took the position that if the officers of UE are to exercise administrative, negotiating, and disciplinary authority over workers employed on the atomic energy work at Schenectady, these officers should be subject to the same scrutiny as other union officers who are participating in the program. In my letter of October 6, the Commission proffered to the officers of UE an opportunity to participate in a resolution of this matter. Such participation, as indicated in that letter, would necessitate the furnishing by the officers of UE of the same personal data as has been furnished by all employees engaged in atomic energy work and by various officers of other unions, including full and complete statements as to their associations and affiliations. The Commission requests that it be informed by you whether in view of the lapse of time (about 2 weeks) since the Commission's letter of October 6, it should be assumed that the officers of UE do not desire to avail themselves of the offer proffered to them in that letter. The Commission wishes to emphasize that it intends to move promptly on this matter. In the event that the serious question that exists is not satisfactorily answered in the manner indicated above, the Atomic Energy Commission intends to direct the General Electric Company to withdraw and withhold recognition from the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America as the bargaining representative of any employees engaged on work at AEC-owned or AEC-leased installations in the Schenectady area or engaged on atomic work which is defined as classified by the AEC and being performed by the General Electric Co. This action would be in effect unless and until the union's officers did submit personal data, as has been done by other union officers at other establishments, and the questions concerning such officers had been resolved. The Commission's action is in furtherance of its clear duty to the country, imposed by law, to safeguard the Nation's atomic energy undertaking. In this we have heretofore received the full cooperation of the officers of other unions under similar circumstances. We shall either receive cooperation from the present officers of UE, in the manner indicated in this letter and our previous letter of October 6, or we shall very promptly take action in the absence of that cooperation. In order that the employees who will be affected by this action may be fully advised of the facts and of the consideration given to this matter by the Commission, we are directing the General Electric Co. to place a copy of this letter in the hands of every employee engaged in classified atomic energy work at Schenectady. Sincerely yours, UNITED STATES ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION, 1TEM 10 UNITED ELECTRICAL, RADIO & MACHINE WORKERS OF AMERICA, Mr. DAVID E. LILIENTHAL, Washington 25, D. C. DEAR SIR: This is in reply to your communication of October 22. We wish to point out with respect to your complaint that approximately 2 weeks have passed since your first letter to this union, that the question you have raised is of such consequence that we have felt it proper to give the most careful consideration to our reply. You must recall that while you and the offi cials of the General Electric Co. have been in consultation for months on how to use the Atomic Energy Commission to violate a legally constituted, long established collective bargaining contract, you raised the question with us for the first time in your letter dated October 6, and then only after this union had challenged the basis of the publicity attack upon the UE made jointly by you and the General Electric Co. under date of September 27 and released for the use of the radio and newspapers on September 29. Stripped of their camouflage, the claims that you and the General Electric Co. make on behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission are as follows: 1. That the AEC shall now extend its privilege of passing upon workers directly employed on atomic energy projects—a privilege on which this union has raised no question--to the right to exercise political control over the union of which such employees may be members. 2. That as a means of establishing such political control, the Atomic Energy Commission may arbitrarily and unlawfully set aside established collective bargaining contracts, without regard for the actual record of operation of such union and such contract on atomic energy and other classified work over a period of several years. These two claims of GE and the AEC comprise the substance of your letter of October 22. The position of this union on your claimed right to exercise political control can be stated briefly as follows: 1. Our membership has built our union since its beginning upon democratic, rank-and-file principles which are embodied in our constitution and which guar antee to all of our members without exception equal rights and privileges of mem bership. By barring discrimination against any UE member regardless of skill, age, sex, nationality, color, religious or political belief or affiliation, we have built a union which cannot be taken out of the hands of the membership and which has achieved an outstanding record of service to its members and to its country. We do not intend to alter our principles upon your demand or the demands of the General Electric Co. With respect to your threat to our contract we say: 2. This union has always abided by its contractual obligations, and has always insisted upon maintaining the contract rights that our members have won. We will take all steps that appear necessary and advisable to protect our members' rights under the national contract with the General Electric Co. In seeking to justify your claim to exercise political control over the UE and to help the General Electric Co. escape its contract obligations you offer in your letter dated October 22 what purports to be a review of the facts in the case. Your review evades most of the facts pertinent to the issues between us and to the situation as it exists. Permit us to recall some of these facts to your mind. The Atomic Energy Commission and the War Department before it have always barred bona fide collective bargaining in new atomic plants, with the partial exception which you have noted at Oak Ridge and with the new, partial, qualified exception that you announced for the first time in your letter of Octo ber 22. In the summer of 1946, when the Hanford, Wash., atomic plant was turned over to GE from du Pont, this union upon its own initiative consulted directly with Secretary of War Patterson to determine whether or not any union would be permitted to give real grievance service and collective-bargaining protection to workers in Hanford. We learned directly from Secretary Patterson that real union service to membership would not be permitted and we therefore decided against attempting any organization of the Hanford plant, and so advised the War Department. When atomic work was introduced in the General Electric plant at Schenec tady, whose employees have been under the protection of a UE contract for more than 10 years, members of this union were employed on atomic work. As you know, this work has been carried on at GE for a period of years under the terms of the national UE-GE contract, both at the Schenectady GE laboratory and in the Peek Street plant. You have now raised with us the question of the “administrative, negotiating. and disciplinary authority" which you conceive that the officers of this union exercise over its membership, and pretend to see some vague menace to the national security in that pretended relationship. Leaving aside the fact that in the UE authority lies in the hands of the membership and not in the hands of the officers, what is there in the record of this union, in its actual relationship to atomic work, a record now covering a number of years, which could give the slightest shadow of justification for your pretended fears? You know that there is nothing. You know that the actual record of this union on atomic work gives the lie to your insinuations. More than that, you know, or should know, that for the major period of its existence this union's membership has been engaged in classified armaments work, including the most secret, before the war, during the war, and since the war, continuously, over a period of some 10 years. You know that in contrast to the two or three hundred UE members employed on atomic work, hundreds of thousands of members under UE contract have been engaged on classified work over a period of many years. You also know that in this entire period not one instance can be cited from the actual record of the work of this union and its membership that could provide the slightest basis for your pretended worries. This is a record, remember, which covers hundreds of thousands of workers in plants throughout the country over a 10-year period. You know that, far from being a menace to the security of this country, our union has established a record of loyalty and service to this country that cer tainly cannot be matched by the General Electric Co., or by the majority of your associates within the Atomic Energy Commission. It is because you know this that you seek to obscure the actual record, and seek to excuse the program you have evolved, in collaboration with GE upon the basis of newspaper gossip, the lies of self-seekers and degenerate professional witnesses, and the politically motivated antics of a pair of Taft-Hartley Congress men. You have yielded to the solicitations of GE, ignored the clear record of facts, and joined in an attack against this union far more cowardly, false, and malignant than the one that was made in similar terms against yourself in the United States Senate when you were appointed to your present position. You should have no hope that you will be able to appease the ill will of your political enemies by demonstrating your ability to use against others the same smear technique that they have used against you. These are the facts you would like to hide, but which we shall not allow to be hidden. You are also fully aware of the fact, which we quote from your letter of September 27 to C. E. Wilson, president of the General Electric Co., that "General Electric employees working on atomic energy projects, with access to restricted data are, as you know, all fully investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation with respect to character, association and loyalty, and such ind!viduals have been subject to the usual security clearances by Commission representatives." Yet you are now parrotting to us the "security" arguments of the General Electric Co. as an excuse for your obvious desire to help the company break its union contract. If security were your concern, you come to us under strange auspices and in strange company. You have turned over the secrets of the atom developed at a cost of billions of the people's money to a corporation whose record of convictions, civil and criminal, under the antitrust laws of the United States can hardly be matched in our country-a corporation which has no loyalty save to its own private profit a corporation whose latest criminal conviction under Federal law has been for conspiracy with Krupp, the Nazi armaments firm, to the detriment of the defense and security of the United States. This corporation, the General Electric Co., which is now engaged in a merciless, company-wide speed-up campaign against its employees, which is seeking on every hand to violate contract seniority provisions, which discriminates with respect to pay and jobs against women and Negroes, which systematically seeks to evade its contract responsibility to settle grievances-this company has just one purpose in using you to help it violate its contract with this union. That purpose is to squeeze more profit out of the work of its employees, wherever they are employed. You are now presenting as your own the demand of this corporation to pass upon the qualifications of this union's leadership, with a threat to sponsor wholesale contract violation if the demand is resisted. Your letter of October 22 bases itself in part upon the incredibly flimsy pretext that the employment of a few hundred union members on atomic work constitutes "participation" in the atomic energy program by national union leadership. You are well aware that no such participation exists or would be permitted. However, to bolster a specious argument, you have seen fit to cite to us the example of a few union leaders who have consented to place themselves under your sponsorship as to their fitness for union office. If they have done so under the delusion that they have thereby become fuller "participants" in the atomic energy program, they and their members will soon learn that they will be per93039-52-pt. 2-4 mitted participation only in the role of policemen to enforce the greater exploitation of their membership by the private corporations which you have placed in charge of atomic work. We of the UE have never regarded this as a proper role of union leadership and certainly do not intend to enter it on behalf of the General Electric Co. You have seen fit to raise with us the question of our associations as leaders of the UE. Our principal association, of course, is with our own members, with whom we deal and who deal with us, as we have informed you, without difference or distinction as to skill, age, sex, nationality, color, religious or political belief or affiliation. In our union, we follow the American principle of judging each other upon our work, our deeds, and our records and upon no other basis. We associ ate, where in our judgment the interests of the union require it, with people in every walk in life, regardless of their various shades of political opinion, in the labor movement and out of it, in industry and outside it, in Government and outside of it. We deny to you and to the General Electric Co. any right to meddle in this or in any other aspect of the union's work. You come to us in strange company to raise with us a question of politics or association. Your chief associate in this attempt to violate a union contract is the many-times-convicted General Electric Co. Your associates within the apparatus of the Atomic Energy Commission are no more savory. To illustrate: The Personnel Security Review Board of the AEC, which you desire to establish as supreme judge over the qualifications of UE members for leadership, contains among its five members the former president of the National Association of Manufacturers, H. W. Prentiss, notorious for his connections with the Fascist Franco dictatorship in Spain and noted for his hatred of the American labor movement. During the last war your associate Prentiss told the National Industrial Conference Board that employers should work for "legislation to remove the wage hour law, the Wagner Act, the Norris-LaGuardia Act, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and other laws affecting labor-management relations." In 1938 this same member of your Personnel Security Review Board expressed these same motives in political terms, declaring, "American business might be forced to turn to some form of disguised fascistic dictatorship." It was on the basis of this record that Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jack son, when Attorney General, listed your associate Prentiss in an address before the Massachusetts Law Society as one of the "leading enemies of democracy," "underminers of morale," and "economic exploiters," classing him with such individuals and groups as Gen. Van Horne Moseley, Merwin K. Hart, and Frank Gannett's League for Constitutional Government. It is perfectly clear to us, and should be to you, why the General Electric Co. hopes to force this union to submit to the dictates of such men. If we were to receive the approval of such men as proper leaders of the UE we should rightly lose the trust of our membership. The UE has been built, and its rank-and-file control maintained, upon the principle that no one but the membership has any right to determine what the leadership of the union shall be. Your demand, on behalf of GE, that the leaders of this union submit themselves to the approval of corporation officials disguised as servants of Government is subversive of the American principle of free and independent trade-unionism. To agree to such a course would mean that Amer ican unions must submit to the censorship and regulation of officials acting on behalf of the corporations. It would take from the hands of the membership the right to choose their own leadership, to adopt their own constitution, to decide how that constitution should be applied and interpreted, and as a final conse quence would take away from them the right to decide what activity their own union should undertake. We will fight this attempt to establish in the United States Government-domi nated company unionism modeled after the Nazi labor front. While it is obvious that you and your associates have already formed a pre judgment of our case, and are proceeding according to a plan you have worked out in collaboration with the General Electric Co., we nevertheless call upon you to rescind your previous order to the General Electric Co. and restrain yourself from further unwarranted interference in our affairs at the company's behest. We regard this case as so flagrant an example of Government-corporation cou spiracy for the unlawful violation of a contract, and so serious an attempt to destroy the independence of our union that we are taking the case to the courts of the United States. There we shall attempt to apply the standards of justice and rules of evidence which you profess to admire, but fail to practice, in an ef NT fort to substitute consideration of the actual and incontrovertible record of this union for the hearsay trash upon which you have based your present course of action. We shall also attempt under the same rules and procedures to expose your conspiracy with the General Electric Co. against this union. We hope also that out of this action the people of the United States may come to learn how it has happened that the secrets of atomic power have been turned over to a corporation with the record of the General Electric Co. United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 11 East Fifty-first Street, New York 22, N. Y. DEAR MR. FITZGERALD: This is in further reference to the Commission's letters to you dated October 6 and October 22, 1948, and your reply dated October 26, 1948. Attached is a copy of a letter which the Commission is today sending to Mr. Charles E. Wilson, president of the General Electric Co. 570 Lexington Avenue at Fifty-first Street, New York 22, N. Y. DEAR MR. WILSON: Under date of September 27, 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission directed that the General Electric Co. not recognize the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, CIO (UE), as the bargaining representative of any persons to be employed by it at the new Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, Schenectady, N. Y. This direction was based upon information concerning alleged Communist affiliation or association of various officers of UE. The positions occupied within UE by these officers are such that they exercise administrative, negotiating, or disciplinary authority within the union over General Electric Co. employees engaged at other atomic energy facilities at Schenectady where UE is the recognized bargaining agent. This information when taken together with the failure of these officers to file non-Communist affidavits under the Labor Management Relations Act, led the Commission to conclude that there is a very serious question as to whether representation of atomic energy workers at Schenectady by a union in which such officers occupied important positions is consistent with that full and unqualified adherence and loyalty to the interests of the United States that the security of the Nation and the policy of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 require. Under dates of October 6 and October 22, 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission wrote Mr. Albert J. Fitzgerald, general president of the UE, in connection with the Commission's direction to the General Electric Co. The Commission concluded, however, that unless this very serious question should be cleared up satisfactorily the Commission intended to take such further steps as may be necessary to assure that these officers do not exercise administrative, negotiating, or disciplinary authority over General Electric Co. employees engaged in atomic energy work, at Schenectady. The Commission offered the officers of UE every opportunity to participate in a fuller exploration of this issue. On October 26, 1948, Mr. Fitzgerald replied to the Commission's letters of October 6 and October 22, 1948. From this reply it appears that the officers of UE do not intend to avail themselves of this proffered opportunity to participate |