ABSTRACT
As our story begins in 1960, the International Union of Operating Engineers was sixty-four years old. Its nature and status at that time were the products of all that had gone before. Hence the union’s modern history cannot be understood without some familiarity with preceding events and the forces and reactions of its officers and members to those precedent conditions. 1 It was a union of “engineers,” in the sense of those who operate machinery rather than those who design it, and the driving forces of its early history were the nature of the technology and the economics of the industries in which the engineers worked. However, the men and women who made up the union were not automatons; they had discretion in their responses to those technological and economic forces, and they exercised it in determining union policy. The four different titles the union has borne tell much of the story: the National Union of Steam Engineers, 1896; the International Union of Steam Engineers, 1897–1912; the International Union of Steam and Operating Engineers, 1912–28; and the International Union of Operating Engineers thereafter. This chapter summarizes the story of those periods, breaking up the last into the dreary years of the Great Depression and the exhilarating period of growth and prosperity during and after the Second World War and the Korean conflict.
