The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. Originally created in 1935 as a committee within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) by John L. Lewis, a leader of the United Mine Workers (UMW), and called the Committee for Industrial Organization. Its name was changed in 1938 when it broke away from the AFL.[1] It focused on organizing unskilled workers, who had been ignored by most of the AFL unions.[2]
Both the CIO and its rival the AFL grew rapidly during the Great Depression. The rivalry for dominance was bitter and sometimes it was violent.
In its statement of purpose, the CIO said that it had formed to encourage the AFL to organize workers in mass production industries along industrial union lines. The CIO failed to change AFL policy from within. On September 10, 1936, the AFL suspended all 10 CIO unions (two more CIO unions had joined the AFL during the previous year). In 1938, these unions formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a rival labor federation.
The CIO's second headquarters was an office on the third floor of this building, the United Mine Workers' headquarters, at 900 15th Street NW, Washington, DC.
The CIO was born out of a fundamental dispute within the United States labor movement over whether and how to organize industrial workers. The eight union chiefs who founded the CIO were not happy with how the AFL was unwilling to work with America's manufacturing combines.[5] Those who favored craft unionism believed the most effective way to represent workers was to defend the advantages they had secured through their skills. They focused on the hiring of skilled workers, such as carpenters, lithographers, and railroad engineers in an attempt to maintain as much control as possible over the work their members did by enforcement of work rules, zealous defense of their jurisdiction to certain types of work, control over apprenticeship programs, and exclusion of less-skilled workers from membership.
Craft unionists were opposed to organizing workers on an industrial basis, into unions which represented all of the production workers in a particular enterprise, rather than in separate units divided along craft lines.
The proponents of industrial unionism, on the other hand, generally believed that craft distinctions may have been appropriate in those industries in which craft unions had flourished, such as construction or printing, but they were unworkable in industries such as steel or auto production. In their view, dividing workers in a single plant into a number of different crafts represented by separate organizations, each with its own agenda, would weaken the workers' bargaining power and leave the majority, who had few traditional craft skills, completely unrepresented.
While the AFL had always included a number of industrial unions, such as the United Mine Workers and the Brewery Workers, the most dogmatic craft unionists had a stronghold on power within the federation by the 1930s. They used that power to quash any drive toward industrial organizing.[1]
Industrial unionism became even more fierce in the 1930s, when the Great Depression in the United States caused large membership drops in some unions, such as the United Mine Workers and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. A number of labor leaders, particularly John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, came to the conclusion that their own unions would not survive while the great majority of workers in basic industry remained nonunion. They started to press the AFL to change its policies in this area.
The AFL, in fact, responded and added even more new members than the CIO. The AFL had long permitted the formation of "federal" unions, which were affiliated directly with the AFL; in 1933, it proposed to use them to organize workers on an industrial basis. The AFL did not, however, promise to allow the unions to maintain a separate identity indefinitely. That meant the unions might be broken up later to distribute their members among the craft unions that claimed jurisdiction over their work. The AFL, in fact, dissolved hundreds of federal unions in late 1934 and early 1935.
The AFL authorized organizing drives in the automobile, rubber, and steel industries at its convention in 1934 but gave little financial support or effective leadership to those unions. The AFL's timidity succeeded only in making it less credible among the workers that it was supposedly trying to organize. That was especially significant in those industries, such as auto and rubber, in which workers had already achieved some organizing success, at great personal risk.
The dispute came to a head at the AFL's convention in Atlantic City in 1935. On October 19, the closing day of the convention, William Hutcheson, the President of the United Carpenters, made a slighting comment about a rubber worker who was delivering an organizing report. Lewis responded that Hutcheson's comment was "small potatoes," and the 6-foot-3-inch (1.91m) Hutcheson replied, "I was raised on small potatoes, that is why I am so small." After some more words, during which Hutcheson called Lewis a "vile name", Lewis punched Hutcheson. The two men collapsed a table and fell on the floor, throwing punches.[6] The incident helped cement Lewis's image in the public eye as someone willing to fight for workers' right to organize.
History
The standard scholarly history by Robert Ziegler provides the historical details.[7]
Whether Lewis then intended to split the AFL over this issue is debatable; at the outset, the CIO presented itself as only a group of unions within the AFL gathered to support industrial unionism, rather than a group opposed to the AFL itself.
The AFL leadership, however, treated the CIO as an enemy from the outset by refusing to deal with it and demanding that it dissolve. The AFL's opposition to the CIO, however, only increased the stature of the CIO and Lewis in the eyes of the industrial workers who were keen on organizing and were disillusioned with the AFL's ineffective performance. Lewis continued to denounce the AFL's policies, and the CIO offered organizing support to workers in the rubber industry who went on strike and formed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in defiance of all of the craft divisions that the AFL had required in past organizing efforts. In 1936, Lee Pressman, affiliated with the far left, became the union's general counsel until 1948.
The subsequent explosive growth of the UE was instrumental for the survival in the early days of the CIO. By the end of 1936, the UE had organized the General Electric plant at Schenectady, New York, and the UE went on to organize 358 more local unions with contracts covering over 600,000 workers, at 1375 plants.
The CIO's initial strategy was to focus its efforts in the steel industry and then build from there. The UAW, however, did not wait for the CIO to lead it. Instead, having built up a membership of roughly 25,000 workers by gathering in federal unions and some locals from rival unions in the industry, the union decided to go after GM, the largest carmaker of them all, by shutting down its nerve center, the production complex in Flint, Michigan.
The Flint Sit-Down Strike was a risky and illegal enterprise from the outset: the union was able to share its plans with only a few workers because of the danger that spies employed by GM would alert management in time to stop it, yet needed to be able to mobilize enough to seize physical control of GM's factories. The union, in fact, not only took over several GM factories in Flint, including one that made the dies necessary to stamp automotive body parts and a companion facility in Cleveland, Ohio, but held on to those sites despite repeated attempts by the police and National Guard to retake them and court orders threatening the union with ruinous fines if it did not call off the strike.
While Lewis played a key role in negotiating the one-page agreement that ended the strike with GM's promise to recognize the UAW as the exclusive bargaining representative of its employees for a six months period, UAW activists, rather than CIO staff, led the strike.
The organizing campaign in the steel industry, by contrast, was a top-down affair. Lewis, who had a particular interest in organizing the steel industry because of its important role in the coal industry where UMW members worked, dispatched hundreds of organizers - many of whom were his past political opponents or radicals drawn from the Communist-led unions that had attempted to organize the industry earlier in the 1930s - to sign up members. Lewis was not particularly concerned with the political beliefs of his organizers, so long as he controlled the organization; as he once famously remarked, when asked about the "reds" on the SWOC staff, "Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?".
The SWOC signed up thousands of members and absorbed a number of company unions at U.S. Steel and elsewhere, but did not attempt the sort of daring strike that the UAW had pulled off against GM. Instead, Lewis was able to extract a collective bargaining agreement from U.S. Steel, which had previously been an implacable enemy of unions, by pointing to the chaos and loss of business that GM had suffered by fighting the UAW. The agreement provided for union recognition, a modest wage increase and a grievance process. CIO unions signed multiyear contracts, often complicated and long, with GM, U.S. Steel, and other corporations in order to minimize strikes and also make sure employers took care of the work process.[10]
The CIO also won several significant legal battles. Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization 307 U.S. 496 (1939), arose out of events late in 1937. Jersey City, New JerseyMayorFrank "Boss" Hague had used a city ordinance to prevent labor meetings in public places and stop the distribution of literature pertaining to the CIO's cause. District and circuit courts ruled in favor of the CIO. Hague appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which held in 1939 that Hague's ban on political meetings violated the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly.
Early setbacks and successes
The UAW was able to capitalize on its stunning victory over GM by winning recognition at Chrysler and smaller manufacturers. It then focused its organizing efforts on Ford, sometimes battling company security forces as at the Battle of the Overpass on May 26, 1937. At the same time, the UAW was in danger of being torn apart by internal political rivalries. Homer Martin, the first president of the UAW, expelled a number of the union organizers who had led the Flint sit-down strike and other early drives on charges that they were communists. In some cases, such as Wyndham Mortimer, Bob Travis and Henry Kraus, those charges may have been true; in other cases, such as Victor Reuther and Roy Reuther, they were probably not. Those expulsions were reversed at the next convention of the UAW in 1939, which expelled Martin instead. He took approximately 20,000 UAW members with him to form a rival union, known for a time as the UAW-AFL. The SWOC encountered equally serious problems: after winning union recognition after a strike against Jones & Laughlin Steel, SWOC's strikes against the rest of "Little Steel", i.e., Bethlehem Steel Corporation, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, National Steel, Inland SteelAmerican Rolling Mills and Republic Steel failed, in spite of support from organizations like the Catholic Radical Alliance. The steelmakers offered workers the same wage increases that U.S. Steel had offered. In the Memorial Day Massacre on May 30, 1937, Chicago police opened fire on a group of strikers who had attempted to picket at Republic Steel, killing ten and seriously wounding dozens. A month and a half later police in Massillon, Ohio fired on a crowd of unionists, resulting in three deaths.
The CIO became more comfortable with the Democratic Party. It rejected proposals for the creation of an independent labor party, apart from the small left-wing American Labor Party in New York.[11]
The CIO began its own newspaper. It featured articles that were written by big journalists, cartoons, and other political stories. The newspaper had spread to 40% of the CIO's members and had different stories for different areas.[1]
The CIO found organizing textile workers in the South very difficult. As in steel, these workers had abundant recent first-hand experience of failed organizing drives and defeated strikes, which resulted in unionists being blacklisted or worse. In addition, the intense antagonism of white workers toward black workers and the conservative political and religious milieu made organizing even harder.
Adding to the uncertainties for the CIO was its own internal disarray. The CIO formally established itself as a rival to the AFL on April 13, 1938,[12] renaming itself as the Congress of Industrial Organizations on November 16, 1938.[13] The ILGWU and the Millinery Workers left the CIO to return to the AFL. Lewis feuded with Hillman and Philip Murray, his long-time assistant and head of the SWOC, over both the CIO's own activities and its relations with the President Roosevelt's administration. He broke with Roosevelt over foreign policy and endorsed Wendell Willkie for president in 1940. Lewis promised to drop his CIO role if Roosevelt was reelected. Murray was elected to replace him shortly after Roosevelt won the election.[14]
Roosevelt won reelection in a landslide in 1936, and by a closer margin in 1940. Labor unions gave strong support in 1940, compared to very strong support in 1936. The Gallup Poll showed CIO voters declined from 85% in 1935 to 79% in 1940. AFL voters went from 80% to 71%. Other union members went from 74% to 57%. Blue collar workers who were not union members went 72% to 64%.[15]
The Roosevelt administration launched a massive rearmament program after Germany defeated France in spring 1940, and factory employment soared. The UAW finally organized Ford in 1941. The SWOC, now known as the United Steel Workers of America, won recognition in Little Steel in 1941 through a combination of strikes and National Labor Relations Board elections in the same year.
The AFL continued to fight the CIO, forcing the NLRB to allow skilled trades employees in large industrial facilities the option to choose, in what came to be called "Globe elections," between representation by the CIO or separate representation by AFL craft unions. The CIO now also faced competition, moreover, from a number of AFL affiliates who now sought to organize industrial workers. The competition was particularly sharp in the aircraft industry, where the UAW went head-to-head against the International Association of Machinists, originally a craft union of railroad workers and skilled trade employees. The AFL organizing drives proved even more successful, and they gained new members as fast or faster than the CIO.
Growth during World War II
718 Jackson Place NW, Washington, D.C., the fourth and final headquarters for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. As of 2008, the building is owned by the federal government and houses small units attached to the Executive Office of the President.
The unemployment problem ended in the United States with the beginning of World War II, as stepped-up wartime production created millions of new jobs, and the draft pulled young men out. The war mobilization also changed the CIO's relationship with both employers and the national government.
Having failed to ally with capitalist countries against fascism in the eves of the World War II, in August 1939 the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which would later be broken by the Nazis. Many Communists in Western parties repudiated this action and resigned their party membership in protest. American Communists took the public position of being opposed to the war against Germany. The Mine Workers led by Lewis, with a strong pro-Soviet presence, opposed Roosevelt's reelection in 1940 and left the CIO in 1942. After June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Communists became fervent supporters of the war and sought to end wildcat strikes that might hurt war production. The CIO, and in particular the UAW, supported a wartime no-strike pledge that aimed to eliminate not only major strikes for new contracts, but also the innumerable small strikes called by shop stewards and local union leadership to protest particular grievances.
That pledge did not, however, actually eliminate all wartime strikes; in fact, there were nearly as many strikes in 1944 as there had been in 1937. But those strikes tended to be far shorter and far less tumultuous than the earlier ones, usually involving small groups of workers over working conditions and other local concerns.
The CIO did not, on the other hand, strike over wages during the war. In return for labor's no-strike pledge, the government offered arbitration to determine the wages and other terms of new contracts. Those procedures produced modest wage increases during the first few years of the war, but, over time, not enough to keep up with inflation, particularly when combined with the slowness of the arbitration machinery.
Yet even though the complaints from union members about the no-strike pledge became louder and more bitter, the CIO did not abandon it.[17] The Mine Workers, by contrast, who did not belong to either the AFL or the CIO for much of the war, engaged in a successful twelve-day strike in 1943.
But the CIO unions on the whole grew stronger during the war. The government put pressure on employers to recognize unions to avoid the sort of turbulent struggles over union recognition of the 1930s, while unions were generally able to obtain maintenance of membership clauses, a form of union security, through arbitration and negotiation. Workers also won benefits, such as vacation pay, that had been available only to a few in the past while wage gaps between higher skilled and less skilled workers narrowed.
The experience of bargaining on a national basis, while restraining local unions from striking, also tended to accelerate the trend toward bureaucracy within the larger CIO unions. Some, such as the Steelworkers, had always been centralized organizations in which authority for major decisions resided at the top. The UAW, by contrast, had always been a more grassroots organization, but it also started to try to rein in its maverick local leadership during these years.
The CIO also had to confront deep racial divides in its own membership, particularly in the UAW plants in Detroit where white workers sometimes struck to protest the promotion of black workers to production jobs. It also worked on this issue in shipyards in Alabama, mass transit in Philadelphia, and steel plants in Baltimore. The CIO leadership, particularly those in more left unions such as the Packinghouse Workers, the UAW, the NMU, and the Transport Workers, undertook serious efforts to suppress hate strikes, to educate their membership, and to support the Roosevelt Administration's tentative efforts to remedy racial discrimination in war industries through the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Those unions contrasted their relatively bold attack on the problem with the timidity and racism of the AFL.
The CIO unions were less progressive in dealing with sex discrimination in wartime industry, which now employed many more women workers in nontraditional jobs. Some unions who had represented large numbers of women workers before the war, such as the UE and the Food and Tobacco Workers, had fairly good records of fighting discrimination against women; others often saw them as merely wartime replacements for the men in the armed forces.
Postwar era
The end of the war meant the end of the no-strike pledge and a wave of strikes as workers sought to make up the ground they had lost, particularly in wages, during the war. The UAW went on strike against GM in November 1945; the Steelworkers, UE, and Packinghouse Workers struck in January 1946.
Murray, as head of both the CIO and the Steelworkers, wanted to avoid a wave of mass strikes in favor of high-level negotiations with employers, with government intervention to balance wage demands with price controls. That project failed when employers showed that they were not willing to accept the wartime status quo, but instead demanded broad management rights clauses to reassert their workplace authority, while the new Truman administration proved unwilling to intervene on labor's side.
The UAW took a different tack: rather than involve the federal government, it wanted to bargain directly with GM over management issues, such as the prices it charged for its cars, and went on strike for 113 days over these and other issues. The union eventually settled for the same wage increase that the Steelworkers and the UE had gotten in their negotiations; GM not only did not concede any of its managerial authority, but never even bargained over the UAW's proposals over its pricing policies.
These strikes were qualitatively different from those waged over union recognition in the 1930s: employers did not try to hire strikebreakers to replace their employees, while the unions kept a tight lid on picketers to maintain order and decorum even as they completely shut down some of the largest enterprises in the United States.
The CIO's major organizing drive of this era, Operation Dixie, aimed at the textile workers of the American South, was a complete failure. The CIO was reluctant to confront Jim Crowsegregation laws. Although the Steelworkers' Southern outpost in the steel industry remained intact, the CIO and the union movement as a whole remained marginalized in the Deep South and surrounding states.
In July 1943, the CIO formed the first-ever political action committee in the United States, the CIO-PAC, to help elect Roosevelt.
In 1946, the Republican Party took control of both the House and Senate. That Congress passed the Taft–Hartley Act, which made organizing more difficult, gave the states the authority to pass right to work laws, and outlawed certain types of strikes and secondary boycotts. It also required all union officers to sign an affidavit that they were not Communist Party members in order for the union to bring a case before the NLRB. This affidavit requirement, later declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, was the first sign of serious trouble ahead for a number of Communists in the CIO.
The Taft–Hartley Act of 1947 penalized unions whose officers failed to sign statements that they were not members of the Communist Party. Many Communists held power in the CIO unions (few did so in the AFL). The most affected unions were the ILWU, UE, TWU, United Public Workers, and Fur and Leather Workers. Other Communists held senior staff positions in a number of other unions.[19][20]
The leftists had an uneasy relationship with Murray while he headed the CIO. He mistrusted the radicalism of some of their positions and was innately far more sympathetic to anti-Communist organizations such as the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. He also believed, however, that making anti-Communism a crusade would only strengthen labor's enemies and the rival AFL at a time when labor unity was most important.
Murray might have let the status quo continue, even while Walter Reuther and others within the CIO attacked Communists in their unions, if the CPUSA had not chosen to back Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party campaign for president in 1948. That, and an increasingly bitter division over whether the CIO should support the Marshall Plan, brought Murray to the conclusion that peaceful co-existence with Communists within the CIO was impossible.
Murray began by removing Bridges from his position as the California Regional Director for the CIO and firing Lee Pressman as General Counsel of both the Steelworkers and the CIO. Anti-communist unionists then took the battle to the City and State Councils where they ousted Communist leaders who did not support the CIO's position favoring the Marshall Plan and opposing Wallace.[21]
Reuther succeeded Murray, who died in 1952, as head of the CIO. William Green, who had headed the AFL since the 1920s, died the same month. Reuther began discussing the merger of the two organizations with George Meany, Green's successor as head of the AFL, the next year.[24]
Most of the critical differences that once separated the two organizations had faded since the 1930s. The AFL had not only embraced industrial organizing, but also included industrial unions, such as the International Association of Machinists, that had become as large as the UAW or the Steelworkers.
The AFL had a number of advantages in those negotiations. It was, for one thing, twice as large as the CIO. The CIO was, for its part, once again facing internal rivalries that threatened to seriously weaken it.
Reuther was spurred toward merger by the threats from David J. McDonald, Murray's successor as President of the Steelworkers, who disliked Reuther intensely, insulted him publicly and flirted with disaffiliation from the CIO. While Reuther set out a number of conditions for merger with the AFL, such as constitutional provisions supporting industrial unionism, guarantees against racial discrimination, and internal procedures to clean up corrupt unions, his weak bargaining position forced him to compromise most of these demands. Although the unions that made up the CIO survived, and in some cases thrived, as members of the newly created AFL-CIO, the CIO as an organization was folded into the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Department.
Now, the AFL-CIO is made up of 56 national and international labor unions with 12.5 million members.[25]
Geography
The CIO had a very particular geography in its formative years, one that set the new federation apart from the AFL. The member unions of the new CIO were very largely based in the heartland of American big industry- the states from New York and Pennsylvania in the east through the Great Lakes states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.[26] These regions formed the industrial base for the three largest unions to emerge from the federation as well as its largest founding member. Of these, the UAW was most strongly established in the major auto plants of Michigan, followed by the smaller, independent plants of Ohio and Indiana.[27] It would push outward to West Coast and the South during World War II as its membership ballooned to over a million members due to the conversion of auto plants to wartime production. UE found particular success in the Northeastern manufacturing corridor of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York.[28] More than any other union in the CIO, its peak was defined by its largest individual locals; nearly a fifth of its total membership was concentrated in the Lynn and Schenectady GE plants, the Essington and CamdenRCA plants, and the Westinghouse plant in East Pittsburgh. The SWOC/USW and the UMW shared a somewhat overlapping base even if their time together in the CIO was brief. Both amassed the majority of their membership in the mines and factories surrounding the Ohio and Monongahela Rivers and the industrial cities of Lake Erie.
While the majority of membership was indeed constituted by workers in the major industries of the East Coast and Midwest, the CIO also had strong representation on the West Coast thanks to the rapid expansion of the ILWU,[29]International Woodworkers of America (IWA),[30] Mine-Mill, and the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). Some established holdovers from the AFL, like the ITU, pulled members in their industry from across the entire country.[31] Short-lived, but meaningful incursions were also made into the South during Operation Dixie. Though the campaign was a failure, unions like the ACWA,[32] the ILGWU,[33] and the UAW were able to maintain small footholds in the region.
↑ Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, Public Opinion, 1935-1946 (1951) p. 628.
↑ Dubofsky, Warren and Van Tine, Warren. John L. Lewis: A Biography. Reprint ed. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1992. ISBN0-8129-0673-X; Zieger, Robert H. The CIO: 1935-1955. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. ISBN0-8078-2182-9
↑ Stuart Eimer, "The CIO and Third Party Politics in New York: The Rise and Fall of the CIO-ALP, " Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 18, (2007) 133-171 online
↑ Stark, Louis (April 14, 1938). "C.I.O. Chiefs Decide on Permanent Body". The New York Times. pp.1, 2.
↑ Stark, Louis (November 16, 1938). "C.I.O. Links Unity to Its Integrity". The New York Times. p.19.
↑ Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (1997) pp 107-110.
↑ Irving Bernstein, "John L. Lewis and the Voting Behavior of the C.I.O." Public Opinion Quarterly , (1941) 5#2 (1941), pp. 233-249 at p. 241. online
Bernstein, Irving. The Turbulent Years A History of the American Worker, 1933-1940 (1970) online, a standard scholarly history of labor in the entire era.
Calkins, Fay. The CIO and the Democratic Party (University of Chicago Press, 1975) scholarly study of CIO pressure in the 1950 elections. online
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN0-521-42838-6online
Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth. "Promoting a labor perspective in the American mass media: Unions and radio in the CIO era, 1936-56." Media, Culture & Society 22.3 (2000): 285-307.
Foster, James. The union politic: the CIO Political Action Committee (1975) online
Fraser, Steven. Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. (1991; reprint ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. ISBN0-8014-8126-0online
Galenson, Walter. The CIO challenge to the AFL: a history of the American labor movement, 1935-1941 (Harvard University Press, 1960) online.
Gall, Gilbert J. Pursuing Justice: Lee Pressman, the New Deal, and the CIO (
Griffith, Barbara S. The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1988. ISBN0-87722-503-6
Jones, William P. "Black Workers and the CIO's Turn Toward Racial Liberalism: Operation Dixie and the North Carolina Lumber Industry, 1946–1953." Labor History 41.3 (2000): 279-306. online
Josephson, Matthew. Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor (1952) online
Lichtenstein, Nelson. Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II. (Cambridge University Press, 1987). ISBN0-521-33573-6online
Lichtenstein, Nelson. Walter Reuther: the most dangerous man in Detroit (1997) online
Lipsitz, George. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1994. ISBN0-252-06394-5
Preis, Art. Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55. Rev. ed. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1964. ISBN0-87348-263-8online
Verzuh, Ron (2022). Smelter Wars: A Rebellious Red Trade Union Fights for Its Life in Wartime Western Canada. University of Toronto Press. ISBN978-1-4875-4113-2.
Voss, Kim. "Same as it ever was? New Labor, the CIO organizing model, and the future of American unions." Politics & Society 43.3 (2015): 453-457.
White, Ahmed. The Last Great Strike: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. ISBN0520285611
Williams, Charles. "Reconsidering CIO Political Culture: Briggs Local 212 and the Sources of Militancy in the Early UAW." Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 7.4 (2010): 17-43.
Zieger, Robert H. The CIO 1935-1955. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. ISBN0-8078-2182-9online
Zieger, Robert H. John L. Lewis: labor leader (1988) online
Historiography and memory
Nelson, Bruce. "Class, race and democracy in the CIO: the 'new' labor history meets the 'wages of whiteness'." International Review of Social History 41.3 (1996): 351-374. online
Turini, Joseph. "The New Deal Reform and Labor Project at the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives." Labor History (2003) 44#3 pp 315-317. Covers the Congress of Industrial Organizations Records, the Philip Murray Papers, the John Brophy Papers, the John A. Ryan Papers, and the Francis J. Haas Papers.
Zieger, Robert H. "Déjà Vu All Over Again" American Communist History (2012) 11#1 pp 59-62. Historians debate role of Communists in CIO.
Primary sources
De Caux, Len. Labor radical; from the Wobblies to CIO, a personal history (1970) online
Report of President John L. Lewis to the third constitutional convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Atlantic City, New Jersey, November 18, 1940 (1940) online
In 2013, the AFL-CIO named the University of Maryland Libraries as their official repository, succeeding the closed National Labor College. The archival and library holdings, an estimated 40 million documents, were transferred in 2013, dating from the establishment of the AFL (1881), and offer almost complete records from the founding of the AFL-CIO (1955). The George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive contains material that will help researchers better understand pivotal social movements in this country, including those to gain rights for women, children and minorities.
Southern Labor Archives. Department of Special Collections, The University Library, Georgia State University. (Official repository for hundreds of local and regional union offices, as well as the national offices of IAMAW, NFFE, UGWA, UFWA, PATCO, UTWA, and the Georgia State AFL-CIO.) Online guide retrieved May 18, 2012.
Martin, Katherine F., ed. Operation Dixie: The CIO Organizing Committee Papers, 1946-1953. Media: 75 reels of 35mm microfilm. Online guide to the microfilm edition retrieved April 27, 2005.
John Llewellyn Lewis was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960. A major player in the history of coal mining, he was the driving force behind the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which established the United Steel Workers of America and helped organize millions of other industrial workers in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. After resigning as head of the CIO in 1941, thus keeping his promise of resignation if President Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1940 election against Wendell Willkie, Lewis took the United Mine Workers out of the CIO in 1942 and in 1944 took the union into the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The 1936–1937 Flint sit-down strike, also known as the General Motors sit-down strike, or the great GM sit-down strike, was a sitdown strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, United States. It changed the United Automobile Workers (UAW) from a collection of isolated local unions on the fringes of the industry into a major labor union, and led to the unionization of the domestic automobile industry.
The United Auto Workers (UAW), fully named International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, is an American labor union that represents workers in the United States and southern Ontario, Canada. It was founded as part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and grew rapidly from 1936 to the 1950s. The union played a major role in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party under the leadership of Walter Reuther. It was known for gaining high wages and pensions for automotive manufacturing workers, but it was unable to unionize auto plants built by foreign-based car makers in the South after the 1970s, and it went into a steady decline in membership; reasons for this included increased automation, decreased use of labor, mismanagement, movements of manufacturing, and increased globalization. After a successful strike at the Big Three in 2023, the union organized its first foreign plant (VW) in 2024.
The Communist Party USA and its allies played an important role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but wasn't successful either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda of fighting for socialism and full workers' control over industry, or in converting their influence in any particular union into membership gains for the Party. The CP has had only negligible influence in labor since its supporters' defeat in internal union political battles in the aftermath of World War II and the CIO's expulsion of the unions in which they held the most influence in 1950. After the expulsion of the Communists, organized labor in the United States began a steady decline.
The Communist Party (CP) and its allies played a role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but largely wasn't successful either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda or in converting their influence in any particular union into membership gains for the Party. The CP has had only negligible influence in labor since its supporters' defeat in internal union political battles in the aftermath of World War II and the Congress of Industrial Organizations's (CIO) expulsion of unions in which the party held the most influence in 1950. The expelled parties were often raided by stronger unions, and most withered away.
The nature and power of organized labor in the United States is the outcome of historical tensions among counter-acting forces involving workplace rights, wages, working hours, political expression, labor laws, and other working conditions. Organized unions and their umbrella labor federations such as the AFL–CIO and citywide federations have competed, evolved, merged, and split against a backdrop of changing values and priorities, and periodic federal government intervention.
Philip Murray was a Scottish-born steelworker and an American labor leader. He was the first president of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), the first president of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), and the longest-serving president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), is an independent democratic rank-and-file labor union representing workers in both the private and public sectors across the United States.
Operation Dixie was the name of the post-World War II campaign by the Congress of Industrial Organizations to unionize industry in the Southern United States, particularly the textile industry. Launched in the spring of 1946, the campaign ran in 12 Southern states and was undertaken as part of a dual effort to consolidate wage gains won by the trade union movement in the Northern United States by raising wage levels in the South while simultaneously transforming the conservative politics of the region, thereby allowing the trade union agenda to win on a national scale.
Roland Jay Thomas, also known as R. J. Thomas, was a left-wing leader of the United Auto Workers in the 1930s and 1940s. He grew up in eastern Ohio and attended the College of Wooster for two years. The need to help support his family caused him to leave college and go to work. In 1923, he moved to Detroit, where he worked in a number of automobile plants.
The Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) was one of two precursor labor organizations to the United Steelworkers. It was formed by the CIO on June 7, 1936. It disbanded in 1942 to become the United Steel Workers of America. The Steel Labor was the official paper of SWOC.
Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) was an American labor union formed in 1876 to represent iron and steel workers. It partnered with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the CIO, in November 1935. Both organizations disbanded May 22, 1942, to form a new organization, the United Steelworkers.
David John McDonald was an American labor leader and president of the United Steelworkers of America from 1952 to 1965.
Wyndham Mortimer was an American trade union organizer and functionary active in the United Auto Workers union (UAW). Mortimer is best remembered as a key union organizer in the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike. Mortimer was the First Vice President of the UAW from 1936 to 1939. A member of the Communist Party USA from about 1932, Mortimer was a critic of the efforts of the conservative American Federation of Labor to control the union and was a leader of a so-called "Unity Caucus" which led the UAW to join forces with the more aggressive Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
The Little Steel strike was a 1937 labor strike by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its branch the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), against a number of smaller steel producing companies, principally Republic Steel, Inland Steel, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company. The strike affected a total of thirty different mills belonging to the three companies, which employed 80,000 workers. The strike, which was one of the most violent labor disputes of the 1930s, ended without the strikers achieving their principal goal, recognition by the companies of the union as the bargaining agent for the workers.
The tool and die strike of 1939, also known as the "strategy strike", was an ultimately successful attempt by the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) to be recognized as the sole representative for General Motors workers. In addition to representation rights, the UAW, working jointly with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), sought to resolve existing grievances of skilled workers.
Meyer Bernstein (1914–1985) was a 20th-Century American labor leader and educator who worked for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), the United Steel Workers of America (USWA), the U.S. Department of Labor, and the United Mine Workers of America (UMW).
Harold J. Ruttenberg was an American labor activist for the Congress of Industrial Organizations's Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) and later United Steel Workers of America (USWA), who in 1946 left labor for management and became an "outspoken" business executive in the steel industry.
Strikes in the United States in the 1930s played a major role in reshaping the economy as it recovered from the Great Depression. Unions gained millions of members for unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL)and the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Energized by successful strikes in major industries with the help of New Deal agencies, the unions played a major role in Democratic Party efforts to reelect President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, as well as 1940 and 1944.
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