Over the years the UTW locals have come to prize the direct affiliation, the local autonomy which was given them by the 1944 and 1946 conventions. The UTW has always viewed the TWUA joint board structure as an outgrowth of the federation system. The joint board collected dues, paid local expenses, paid per capita to the International, and rebated a small sum to the locals. “Now this is all the local unions had. They had no autonomy. They were dictated to by the joint boards. And this is one of the reasons that we could never come to a merger agreement because we always insisted...that we had to be freed of the joint board concept.” In the last merger meeting, the TWUA made a token gesture to permit UTW locals not to affiliate with joint boards, but the UTW viewed that as a system which would cause further divisions.
