The CIO
By Robert H. Zieger
University of North Carolina Press, 476 pages, $39.95
How many Americans can identify the present leaders of the United Auto Workers union, the Steelworkers or the Mine Workers? In the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, everyone knew their predecessors: impressive men like Walter Reuther, Philip Murray and the epic John L. Lewis.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations was born during the Depression, as a militant split from the American Federation of Labor. The CIO was a major factor in American life for 20 years, until it once again merged with the AFL in 1955. By then, both wings of the labor movement had signed up millions of new members and won the significant improvements in working conditions and wages that were the largest single factor in the American post-war prosperity that lasted until the early 1970s.
Labor historian Robert Zieger, presently a professor at the University of Florida, has spent 15 years poring through a mass of primary and secondary sources to produce a well-paced, definitive narrative.
In the mid-1930s, American industrial workers were in an aggressive mood. The Depression had brought long bouts of unemployment, and they seethed at arbitrary, dictatorial practices on the shop floor. Steel, auto, rubber and other industries were almost wholly unorganized, and you could get fired merely for talking union.
The old AFL was half-hearted, committed only to organizing along craft lines. Crafts, the descendants of medieval guilds, were designed to keep wages up by restricting entry; if you limited the number of carpenters or plumbers, you could charge more for your members’ services. AFL policy was to enter a steel mill, parcel out the skilled workers among its various affiliates and ignore the mass of semi- or unskilled people.
Dissidents within the AFL, led by John L. Lewis of the Mine Workers and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, had a more inclusive idea: industrial unionism. You organize everyone at, say, U.S. Steel South Works, and then you bargain with management on behalf of all of them. At the 1935 AFL convention, Lewis, angered by the federation’s inaction, led a walkout to form the CIO.
At first, the union campaign achieved success. Sit-down strikes in Flint, Mich., forced General Motors to recognize the United Auto Workers; then U.S. Steel gave in without a fight. But other employers resisted bitterly; on Memorial Day 1937, the Chicago police killed 10 people, part of a crowd demonstrating peacefully near Republic Steel.
Zieger includes an inspiring account of the CIO’s positive record on racial justice. At a time when most of American life was still segregated, the new labor federation sought black members and promoted black officials. Less impressive was the CIO’s spotty record on internal democracy. Lewis ran the Mine Workers as an autocrat, and the same style characterized the Steelworkers; Auto and the United Electrical Workers were much better.
A sizeable minority of the CIO unions were Communist-influenced, with party members in some senior positions. Some Communists kept their party membership a secret and shifted their views on foreign policy in synchrony with the Soviet Union. In the end, the CIO expelled 10 of its affiliates as Communist-dominated, losing some of its best organizers.
Despite the CIO’s shortcomings, Zieger lauds it as “a positive force in American life.” From the standpoint of the mid-1990s, with a sputtering economy and union membership hitting all-time lows, the labor federation looks even better.
