The United Mine Workers of America as an Exemplar of Union Activity

Acquiring Membership

The first priority of a union is to have members, and as such, a union must have policies and procedures in place for acquiring members, determining who can and cannot be members, and keeping records of who is a member. In the process of permitting members, most unions established qualifications that members must meet, and these qualifications often included work experience and lack of known moral or legal issues in the past. The membership was often discussed as a fraternity, including members calling each other "brother" and using "fraternally yours" as the valediction of letters (Van Tine 34-35; examples of this can be seen in most letters in the Hearl Maxwell collection). These and other aspects of fraternity life adopted by unions somewhat acted to promote the democratic nature of the union.

One aspect of the control of membership beyond simply acquiring them is handling the transfer of members from one local union to another. The UMWA utilized transfer cards --an example of which is shown to the below-- to provide proof to their members who moved to new areas that they were members of the union in good standing to the leadership of the union in the area to which they are moving. This allowed the new union to acquire the holder of the card without a great deal of additional paperwork or identity checking, because there was already an official document from within the organization verifying his identity and standing within the organization. However, even this transfer card meant to make things simple does not act quite so simply. Another document in the collection outlines certain stipulations of transferring, one  being that a worker must pay the difference in initiation fees if the local union he is transferring into had higher initiation fees. In this sense, the organization spent time and energy regulating the flow of workers around the region and even country. Other documents that display the control of membership by the organization include official notices of initiating members and documents detailing someone losing their status as a member.

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