Since UE's founding, its constitution has limited the pay of its officers to "a salary not to exceed the highest weekly wage paid in the industry."

[citation needed] From the local to the national level, UE has a strong ethic of accountability and transparency in all its financial practices, and opposes any trace of what it calls "petty corruption" among union officials.

UE routinely rejects management pleas for bargaining "blackouts," gag rules which prohibit open communication to rank-and-file union members during negotiations.

UE's approach to grievances includes careful investigation of the issue by the steward, being well-prepared for meetings with the employer, and strategies for organizing and mobilizing members to pressure management to resolve the problem.

The UE expanded greatly over the next decade, organizing workers of the major corporations in the electrical equipment, radio and machine tool industries.

The union won a contentious strike at RCA and organized additional plants of GE, Westinghouse, GM's electrical division and smaller companies in its base industries.

This appears, in fact, to be largely true: the incentive systems that management used were their loosest during World War II and represented an important, and generally popular, form of compensation for workers.

The brewing Cold War with the Soviet Union would provide the opportunity, and in October 1946 GE's Charles Wilson summarized the political program of big business when he declared that the problems of the United States could be summed up as "Russia abroad, labor at home."

Among its many anti-union provisions was a clause requiring officers of all unions to sign "non-communist affidavits," swearing that they were not members of the Communist Party.

Up-and-coming Republican politicians, such as Congressman Richard Nixon of California and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (who, according to Journalist Arnold Beichman, "was elected to his first term in the Senate with support from" UE, which preferred McCarthy to the anti-communist Robert M. La Follette),[23] built their careers by conducting witch-hunts for imagined "Communist subversion" within the federal government, and by red-baiting their election opponents.

The IUE won many of the locals in the radio assembly and light manufacturing industries; the UE held on to much of its base in machine building.

His grilling of UE members, in the guise of investigating "Communist subversion," made for sensationalist news headlines and helped the IUE eke out a narrow win.

The federal government tried unsuccessfully to take away James Matles's citizenship and deport him; the UE national organizing director had immigrated from Romania as a youth.

Other similar prosecutions, harassment by the FBI, vicious attacks in local newspapers, and denunciation by politicians, kept UE under siege for years.

The red-baiting attacks on UE during the McCarthy era did tremendous damage to the union, but were eventually shown, even in the prevailing atmosphere of anti-red hysteria, to have no legal merit.

It seems a miracle that UE survived the 1950s at all, with attacks coming at it from all directions: the federal administration, Congress, Republicans and Democrats, news media, "mainstream" unions of both CIO and AFL, and even some members of the clergy.

What helped UE to weather these storms was its own democratic structure and manner of operation, and its superior record of representing members (when contrasted with the IUE, for example) in collective bargaining and in fighting for shop grievances.

Both of these attributes engendered fierce loyalty to UE among many of its members, even as the union was being slandered by powerful forces as some sort of national security threat.

With all other strike issues resolved, UE held out on the picket lines until GE agreed that women would receive the same raises as men.

In the early 1950s, while the union was under attack from all directions, UE organized a series of district and national conferences on the problems of women workers.

In the midst of the Cold War assaults on UE, the union's newspaper reported such success stories as the promotion of a black worker at Johnson Machine to lathe operator.

[29] UE spoke out frequently against the racist government policies of the time, drawing attention to the injustices of "Jim Crow" racial segregation and denial of black voting rights.

The split of 1955-56 largely involved tactical disagreements over how to move the UE's progressive program and brand of unionism forward in the face of the AFL-CIO merger.

In the successful 103-day national strike in 1969–70, UE and IUE led an alliance of unions which broke the back of Boulwarism, GE's aggressive 20-year-long policy of "take-it-or-leave-it" bargaining.

[32] A North Carolina state law dating to the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, General Statute 95–98, prohibits public employees from bargaining labor contracts.

In March 2007 the ILO ruled in favor of UE, and called upon the United States and North Carolina to repeal GS 95-98 and begin discussions with unions to establish "a framework for collective bargaining."

The plight of North Carolina public employees was dramatized in September 2006 when sanitation workers for the City of Raleigh conducted a two-day strike over unfair treatment and working conditions.

Since the stoppage those workers, organized by UE Local 150, have won improvements and regular consultation of city officials with their elected union leaders.

On December 5, 2008, members of UE Local 1110 at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, when the plant closed with only three days' notice to the employees, occupied the plant in protest of the closing and company's failure to pay employees their accrued vacation pay, and payments required under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.

Despite its drastic diminution – Serious Materials had called back 75 of the plant's 250 employees, with only 38 employed by the closing's announcement – workers successfully negotiated an agreement with management by that night.