Union of Communication Workers
British trade union, 1919-1995
The Union of Communication Workers (UCW) was a trade union in the United Kingdom for workers in the post office and telecommunications industries.
History
The union was founded in 1919 as the Union of Post Office Workers (UPW) by the merger of the Postmen's Federation, Postal and Telegraph Clerks' Association and the Fawcett Association. It achieved official recognition, and as a result, in 1920 the London Postal Porters' Association, Central London Postmen's Association, Tracers' Association, Tube Staff Association, Messengers' Association and Sorters' Association all merged with it. It was banned legally from TUC membership from 1927 to 1946. Its longest strike was for 7 weeks in 1971.
It changed its name in 1980, and merged with the National Communications Union in 1995 to form the Communication Workers' Union.
Election results
The union sponsored Labour Party candidates in each Parliamentary election. From 1927 until the end of World War II, the union was legally barred from affiliating to the party, so its candidates in that period are omitted from many sources.
The public source identifies “Union of Communication Workers” as british trade union, 1919-1995. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Union, Communication and Workers.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7886545. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1919, 1920, 1927 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Union of Communication Workers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.