Newell, Charles J.

Charles Newell was Business Agent of United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America [UE] Local 601 (Westinghouse Electric Corporation, East Pittsburgh) in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He was born in Ireland circa 1906. After emigrating to America, he attended and was graduated from the University of Washington. He also trained and worked as a machinist and toolmaker. Newell's connection with the UE went back to the union's earliest days. He was an organizer for UE in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1937, and was assigned to East Pittsburgh in the late 1930s. As part of the UE National Westinghouse Conference Board, he served on the negotiating committee which brought about wage increases in 1940 for UE members in the Westinghouse chain. In the early 1940s, Charles Newell came under fire from critics of the union, in particular from Father Charles Owen Rice, a Catholic labor priest in Pittsburgh, and James McDowell, editor of the Wilkinsburg Gazette, both of whom accused Newell of communist connections as part of an effort to change the electrical workers union's leadership. In the 1940s Newell married Ruth Allen, a UE organizer working in Western Pennsylvania. Their daughter, Amy Newell, later joined the union staff and rose to become General Secretary-Treasurer of UE, possibly the only woman up to that time to head a major American industrial union. Charles Newell continued on staff with the UE until the mid-1950s when he retired and moved with his family to California.

From the description of Papers of Charles Newell, 1940-1959. (University of Pittsburgh). WorldCat record id: 60811639