American Communications Association

As CIO Secretary-Treasurer, Carey maintained files on the American Communications Association (ACA), the principal CIO union having jurisdiction within the radio telegraphic field and allied divisions--telegraph, marine and maritime communications, point to point broadcast, and Western Union and Postal Telegraph Company employees. Later, the union expanded its jurisdiction to include scattered telephone workers' locals. The ACA's reputation as a communist-dominated union ultimately led to its expulsion from the CIO in 1950. The ACA files, originally forming part of Carey's CIO files, were incorporated into the IUE President's Office files by Finnegan and used to trace the ACA's relationship with the UE.

Items include correspondence, ACA Executive Board Minutes, convention proceedings, reports, resolutions, and strike bulletins. This series documents the rise of the ACA from its predecessor organization, the American Radio Telegraphers Association, to its affiliation with the CIO (1937), and its drive in the late 1930s to supplant the Western Union company union as a prelude to initiating a national organizing drive. The UE, along with other CIO affiliates, helped to establish the Western Union Organizing Committee following an NLRB order that dismantled the Association [of] Western Union Employees--a notorious company union. Major subjects highlighted are: the 1939 Western Union Strike in San Francisco; ACA legislative lobbying efforts to thwart wage cuts and the proposed merger of Western Union and Postal Telegraph; defense-related issues in the communications industry (early 1940s); formation of the Telephone Workers Organizing Committee and the ACA's affiliation agreement with TWOC-CIO in 1948; and CIO efforts to affect an affiliation agreement between TWOC and the Communication Workers of America (1949). Detailed minutes of TWOC-CIO Executive Board meetings for the period 1947-1948 provide a comprehensive picture of the CIO's aggressive organization and affiliation drive in the telephone and communications industries. Principal correspondents include Mervyn Rathborne and Joseph Selly (ACA Presidents), John Brophy, Allan Who'd, John L. Lewis, Ted Silvey (Secretary-Treasurer, TWOC) and J.A. Beirne (President, CWA).