United Public Workers of America
| Founded | May 1946 |
|---|---|
| Date dissolved | February 1953 |
| Members | 100,000 in 1946 (claimed; at its height) |
| Head union | Abram Flaxer |
| Affiliation |
Congress of Industrial Organizations (until February 1950); None (February 1950-February 1953) |
| Office location | 13 Astor Place, New York City, New York |
| Country | United States |
The United Public Workers of America (1946–1952) was an American labor union representing federal, state, county, and local government employees. The union challenged the constitutionality of the Hatch Act of 1939, which prohibited federal executive branch employees from engaging in politics. In United Public Workers of America v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75 (1947), the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Hatch Act, finding that its infringement on the Constitutional rights was outweighed by the need to end political corruption. The union's leadership was Communist, and in a famous purge the union was ejected from its parent trade union federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, in 1950.
The union is sometimes confused with the United Federal Workers of America (a predecessor union) and the United Office Professional Workers of America (a union of white-collar, private-sector office workers which also belonged to the Congress of Industrial Organizations).
Workers in federal agencies had formed craft-based unions on the local level beginning in the early 1880s. The growing power of these and other unions in the federal government led President Theodore Roosevelt to issue two Executive Orders (in 1902 and 1906) essentially banning unions in the federal civil service. Under Congressional pressure, President William H. Taft made the Executive Orders less onerous in 1912. Unhappy with Taft's refusal to rescind the orders entirely, Congress passed the Lloyd-La Follette Act (§6, 37 Stat. 555, 5 U.S.C. § 7511) on August 24, 1912, declaring establishing the right of federal employees to join unions (albeit not the right for them to bargain collectively). Five years later, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) acted to bring the various local unions together to form a single national union, the National Federation of Federal Employees, in September 1917.
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