William Winpisinger: Union Leader and Peace Advocate
It’s been over two decades since labor leader and social activist William Winpisinger ended his journey on this earth.
In today’s environment of rising international tensions and exploding defense budgets, his life sets an example of unwavering activism. Winpisinger led the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers as president from 1977 until his retirement in 1989. He passed away in 1997.
Winpisinger was born in 1924 in Cleveland and later went to work as a printer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He served in the Navy in World War II and after the war started working as a mechanic fixing automobile transmissions. While working at a Buick dealership in Cleveland, Winpisinger joined the IAM and within a year he was elected shop steward by his follow union members. He held a number of positions before rising to the office of IAM president.
Winpisinger certainly wasn’t shy about his political beliefs. He called himself a “seat-of-the- pants socialist.” The union leader served as co-chair of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, a forerunner of today’s Democratic Socialists of America.
The IAM president also worked for the conversion of our economy from a war economy to a peace economy, despite being president of a union that represented defense workers. Winpisinger served as co-chair of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, an organization that was dedicated to arms control and disarmament. He also endorsed the early 1980’s Soviet Union-United States nuclear weapons freeze petition circulated by the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. SANE and the NWFC eventually merged to form Peace Action.
But Winpisinger’s advocacy of a peace economy went beyond serving on the boards of peace groups. He openly talked about converting the segment of our economy dedicated to military production to civilian production. Our country didn’t follow his advice and members of the IAM, United Auto Workers, and the International Union of Electronic, Electrical, Machine and Furniture Workers, and the Communications Workers of America cling to some remaining unionized employment in factories dependent on Pentagon contracts like General Electric’s aircraft engine factory in Lynn, Mass.
The socialist union leader talked about the “delusion that defense spending creates secure jobs,” an idea rarely talked about by anyone in the union movement today. When he received an angry letter in 1983 from a McDonnell Douglas machinist who was critical of his membership in SANE, the IAM president argued against the worker’s idea that “without defense work, we would not have jobs for our families.” He supplied facts and figures about the relative job-creating impact of various types of federal spending and argued, in his return letter, that a “peacetime economy” was far more desirable than one organized around endless preparations for war. “The continuing build-up of more and more and evermore implements of mass destruction is suicidal, and I intend to go on saying so,” he said.
As our country engages in a defense buildup and a diplomacy that alienates our country from the rest of the world under President Donald Trump, who will step forward to fill William Winpisinger’s shoes?
