Private collection, member of Teamsters Local 952, Orange, California.
Do a Google search for “Union Dues Pin,” and you’ll see colorful results, most of them pictures of actual pins for sale on Ebay, collector sites, Pinterest, and more. Until they went out of style about thirty years ago, union dues-paying members would wear their pins proudly to show off their allegiance to their local union. “I paid my dues … you?” Now, they are largely collectors items, mostly just found in glass display cases in loyal members’ houses, or in shoeboxes when Grandpa or Grandma moves into the nursing home. The rise and fall of the pins tells a story about the trajectory of unions. Might the pins be seeing a resurgence?
United Steelworkers Dues Checkoff pin, 1951.
In some union shops, dues were automatically deducted. Known as “Dues Checkoff,” the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (a.k.a. Wagner Act) and its sister legislation, the Railway Labor Act, made the practice largely mainstream until 1947, when under the Taft-Hartley Act paying dues became no longer mandatory. It changed union-only shops to “you may object to dues but still be represented by the union” shops. (Union folks call those people “freeloaders.”)
More than half of all states are now so-called “right-to-work,” which means members don’t have to pay dues but receive the same service from the union — by law. Depriving fully union shops of the dues of some members is hitting organized labor in the pocketbook. At the same time, there is a concerted effort by conservatives to attack state and federal public unions and cut off their monthly automatic dues deductions—meaning, members will have to send or bring dues in on their own, rather than have them deducted from their paychecks. This will undoubtedly mean lower dues revenue for local and national unions. Union supporters say their weakening of will mean an even greater increase in wage inequality.
Teamsters Local 696, Topeka, Kansas pin from 1920 and Teamsters Local 249, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania pin from 1916. These are the earliest examples of pins I can find, but some likely existed in the late 1800s.
Still, for years, most unions negotiated closed shops into collective bargaining agreements with employers, and the mainstreaming of automatic dues checkoff was maintained for decades.
Some shops used cards or “receipts” instead of pins. Working Card, 1929 for a dues paying member of the New York Typographical Union #6, 1929, which is now part of CWA Local 14156.
In some shops—notably Teamsters, Steelworkers, Longshoremen, and many UAW shops—you couldn’t work if you didn’t have proof of your dues being paid. Business Agents or other officers from the local union would hit the job sites, and if a member lacked the current month’s button and couldn’t proven that their dues were paid up … off the job they went.
Longshoreman Branch 1 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) dues pin, 1920 (l). An early UAW dues pin from 1938, about three years after the union was first created.
In many shops, the pins were an act of good old-fashioned solidarity, especially important for new members. The goal of shop stewards was to get as many people as possible to both pay up, and to wear the pins.
Ornate pins embellished with the member’s name from the American Railway Union, founded in 1893 and soon to be the largest union of its time under the leadership of Eugene V. Debs. Image from the private collection of Davey McBain.
State, County, and Municipal Employees dues pin, 1952 (l). The union is known today as AFSCME, and it’s one of the unions being challenged by so called “Right-to-work” legislation regarding dues checkoffs. Waitress Union dues pin, 1972. It eventually merged into the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Union, which then merged with clothing and textile unions to form UNITE-HERE.
Recently, some unions have resurrected the practice of handing out union pins. Peter Sierra, Organizer at Teamsters Local 1932 in San Bernardino, CA, explains, “We’re just trying to bring back something that was done back in the day. Our members are proud to pay dues and it gives them a cool collector’s item as well. We’re not just going to a meeting when we visit a location, we’re spending some time there talking with the members while handing out some dues pins. It’s a great interaction.”
From Teamsters Local 1932, San Bernardino, CA.
Perhaps it’s time for more unions to resurrect the practice of handing out dues pins. Building better person-to-person relationships in workplaces can only help build solidarity, perhaps even making unions step back from the precipice of “business unionism,” where members never see their representatives and the reasons for even having a union aren’t clear. Union pins might be tiny, but they could be part of a larger effort to reinvigorate unions and push back against right-wing efforts to gut them.
Images were gathered from Pinterest, eBay, and Etsy, as well as Teamsters Local 1932.
Brandon Weber writes on economics, labor union history, and working people. He has a new book coming out in March: Class War, USA: Dispatches From Workers’ Struggles in American History, available at Powell's and Amazon.