UNITED ELECTRICAL, RADIO, AND MACHINE WORKERS OF AMERICA LOCAL 243

100 Sargent Drive
New Haven, CT 06511

267 Chapel Street
New Haven, CT 06513
203-562-9220
Fax: 203-562-1127

“The year was 1940. The great depression of the ‘30s was over. World War II had begun. The Sargent and Co. plant here had 1500 employees. The average wage was 50 cents an hour for those on piecework, lower for hourly workers—women started at 21 cents. There were no paid vacations, holidays, or sick days—and no such thing as a pension plan.” – UE NEWS, July 14, 1975

UE Local 243 began organizing at Sargent and Company, a hardware factory then located on Water Street in New Haven, in 1939. Prior to this, the factory, which employed primarily Italian and Irish workers, was not unionized. The Local faced opposition from many sources: the company itself, a “coalition” of “red-baiting CIO elements”, and the American Federation of Labor. (See Mackenzie Barris, THE COLD WAR COMES TO NEW HAVEN: A Case Study of the Raids Against United Electrical Workers Local 243, 1947-1955, Senior Essay in History, April 11, 2001.) Despite the many forces arrayed against it, the Local won a National Labor Relations Board election 927-260 in December of 1941, and has continued to represent Sargent workers ever since.

According to Ray Pompano, who has been the President of Local 243 since 1984, the Local currently represents 478 out of the 625 employees at Sargent, which has been owned by Assa Abloy, “the largest lock company in the world,” since 1995. The most important events in the Local’s history were its initial victory in 1941, and its success in getting Martin Luther King Day as a holiday in the late 1980s. (According to President Pompano, it was one of the first companies to do so.) Its greatest success is that “we turned one of the lowest wage shops in New Haven into one of the highest." Sargent, he notes, is the largest manufacturing company left in New Haven, and the Local has continued to make gains in wages and benefits throughout the years. Its most pressing current concerns are the “double digit increases in the cost of health care,” and the “future of manufacturing…which is dying all over the country (because) the trade agreements are undercutting us.”

THE RECORDS

Local 243 has retained many records of historical importance. Many of the most important ones are currently located at the union office at Sargent, but they will be transferred to the Local office at 267 Chapel Street this summer for processing and preservation by the Greater New Haven Labor History Association.

At the Sargent office, there are three filing cabinets containing records of all types, dating back to the Local’s earliest years and continuing through the present, although there is a gap of time between 1954 and 1960 when records are missing. The types of records include: contracts; contract proposals; memoranda and correspondence (between the company and Local officials, as well as between the Local and the national) regarding contract negotiations, arbitrations, and grievances; informal notes and formal minutes of contract negotiation meetings; verbatim transcripts of telephone conversations between company officials and union leaders; copies of UE news; copies of leaflets distributed by the company, by Local 243, and by would-be raiders; seniority lists, employee records, and all types of retiree and member records; minutes of Executive Board and monthly membership meetings; copies of press releases sent by the Local to the New Haven REGISTER; and multiple copies of the UE Local 243 Constitution and By-Laws.

A particularly interesting and useful set of records contained in this office concerns the Local’s dispute with the War Labor Board which continued from 1943 until 1945. These records include copies of the litigation itself; press releases by all sides (Local 243, the company, and the WLB); correspondence and directives from the WLB; and copies of handbills distributed by Local 243 regarding company attempts to “smash the union” in 1943.

Another set of records sheds light on the dispute between the United Electrical Workers and the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, a union put in place by the C.I.O as a rival to UE. The bulk of these are concentrated in 1949, and include: correspondence between the National Industrial Conference Board and Stan Cullen, director of Industrial Relations at Sargent, regarding the Board’s survey about the impact of the UE-IUE conflict; the survey results themselves; many reports from Cullen to the Local regarding incidents and grievances resulting from the conflict; and literature distributed by both unions to the workers at Sargent.

One file drawer contains a series of photographs and photograph albums. The albums include: the 40th anniversary party of the Local in 1979; an album of photos taken at the 1980 retirement dinner of Harry Kaplan, who was a field organizer for the national union for 26 years; and an album of photos of a retirees dinner in 1988. There is also a framed photograph of the 1989 negotiating committee, and boxes of loose photographs of employees, identified by department and name, but not dated.

The records held at 267 Chapel Street include some duplicates of the materials at Sargent. They also include background materials on various legislative efforts expected to have an impact on the union; newspaper clippings and newspapers; financial records, including dues receipts and bank statements; and notebooks containing notes of meetings. It should be noted that these files are much less organized than the ones held at Sargent.

Recently transferred from the Sargent office to the office at Chapel Street is an archival box containing a book of handwritten minutes of Local 243 meetings from 1941-1946; three member card books from the 1950s; a member handbook, n.d., and the current contract between Local 243 and Sargent and Company, valid through 2004.

The original charter of the Local (dated April 1, 1939) is also held at the Chapel Street office.

For permission to access the records, contact Raymond F. Pompano, President, 203-562-9220 (available between 11:15 a.m. and 12:15 a.m., or leave a message on his voice mail.) Once access is granted, contact Joan Cavanagh, Project Archivist at the Greater New Haven Labor History Association, at 203-776-4098 or labor_history@hotmail.com, for a more detailed inventory.