IAM Celebrates 134 years of strength and solidarity
Nineteen machinists working for the East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia Railroad gather in a locomotive pit to decide what to do about a wage cut. They vote to form a union, which later became the International Association of Machinists (1888).The union was originally called the Order of United Machinists and Mechanical Engineers and later changed to the National Association of Machinists. Thomas Talbot, the union’s founder, believed that a union