The AFL was the smallest union grouping in the United States for the first half of the twentieth century, even after the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) by unions that left the AFL in 1938 over its opposition to organizing mass production industries. While the union was founded and dominated by craft unions throughout the first fifty years of its existence, many of its craft union affiliates turned to organizing on an industrial basis to meet the challenge from the CIO in the 1940s.
The AFL represented a conservative "pure and simple unionism" that stressed foremost the concern with working conditions, pay and control over jobs, relegating political goals to a minor role.[1] Unlike the Socialist Party or the even more radical Industrial Workers of the World, it saw the capitalist system as the path to betterment of labor. The AFL's "business unionism" favored pursuit of workers' immediate demands, rather than challenging the rights of owners under capitalism, and took a pragmatic, and often pessimistic, view of politics that favored tactical support for particular politicians over formation of a party devoted to workers' interests.
Early years
AFL was formed in large part because of the dissatisfaction of many trade union leaders with the Knights of Labor, an organization that contained many trade unions and which had played a leading role in some of the largest strikes of the era, but whose leadership had supported several rival unions that had bargained for lower wages and provided strikebreakers during other unions' strikes. The new AFL distinguished itself from the Knights by emphasizing the autonomy of each trade union affiliated with it and limiting membership to workers and organizations made up of workers, unlike the Knights who, according to their producerist philosophy, also admitted small employers as members.
The AFL grew steadily in the late nineteenth century while the Knights went into decline. The Knights lost a series of large strikes which cost the organization many members. Employer opposition rose (particularly after the Haymarket Riot and Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886), and the organizational structure of the Knights was unsuited to withstanding and countering this opposition. Conflict between the rank and file and leadership in the Knights also worsened. But conflict with the AFL also contributed to the Knights' demise as the trade union federation raided the Knights, affiliated trade unions which had been expelled from the Knights, and challenged the Knights for the right to represent workers.[2]
It took on three major functions that its affiliates could not accomplish alone. First, it organized unorganized workers. It spread information, brought union leaders into contact, and gave financial support to newly organized unions. Out of its national offices it published a periodical, The American Federationist, and employed a staff of organizers and administrators.
Early membership and exclusion
During its first years, the AFL admitted nearly anyone. Gompers opened the AFL to radical and socialist workers and to some semiskilled and unskilled workers. Women, African Americans, and immigrants joined in small numbers. But by the 1890s, the Federation had begun to organize only skilled workers in craft unions and became an organization of mostly white men.
Though the Federation preached a policy of egalitarianism in regard to African American workers, it actively discriminated against black workers. In 1895, that policy of egalitarianism also gave way when the AFL admitted the International Association of Machinists. The new affiliate was a merger of one organization which the AFL had previously refused to admit, and the rival union that the AFL had previously chartered. The merged union discriminated against black workers.
The AFL then sanctioned the creation of segregated locals within its affiliates — particularly in the construction and railroad industries — which actively excluded black workers altogether from union membership, and from employment in the industries they had organized. The AFL also actively supported legislation, such as literacy tests, that would reduce unskilled immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.
In 1901, the AFL lobbied Congress to reauthorize the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and issued a pamphlet entitled "Some reasons for Chinese exclusion. Which shall survive?" The AFL also began one of the first organized labor boycotts when they began putting white stickers on the cigars made by unionized white cigar rollers while simultaneously discouraging consumers from purchasing cigars rolled by Chinese workers.
In most ways, the AFL’s treatment of women workers paralleled its policy towards black workers. The AFL never adopted a strict policy of gender exclusion and, at times, even came out in favor of women’s unionism. But despite such rhetoric, the Federation only half-heartedly supported women’s attempts to organize and, more often, took pains to keep women out of unions and the workforce altogether. Only two national unions affiliated with the AFL at its founding openly included women, and others passed by-laws barring women’s membership entirely. The AFL hired its first female organizer, Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, only in 1892 and after releasing her after five months, and it did not replace her or hire another women national organizer until 1908. [3] Women who organized their own unions were often turned down in bids to join the Federation, and even women who did join unions found them hostile or intentionally inaccessible. AFL unions often held meetings at night or in bars when women might find it difficult to attend and where they might feel uncomfortable, and male unionists heckled women who tried to speak at meetings.
Generally the AFL viewed women workers as competition, as strikebreakers, or as an unskilled labor reserve that kept wages low. As such, the Federation often opposed women’s employment entirely. When it did organize women workers, most often it did so to protect men’s jobs and earning power and not to improve the conditions, lives, or wages of women workers. In response, most women workers remained outside the labor movement. In 1900, only 3.3% of working women were organized into unions. In 1910, even as the AFL surged forward in membership, the number had dipped to 1.5%. And while it improved to 6.6% over the next decade, women remained mostly outside of unions and practically invisible inside of them into the mid-1920s. [4]
Expansion and competition
The AFL was left as the only major national union body after the demise of the Knights of Labor in the 1890s. It subsequently brought in a number of unions formed on industrial union lines, including the United Mine Workers, International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the United Brewery Workers. Even so, the craft unions within the AFL maintained power within the Federation.
The AFL made efforts in its early years to assist its affiliates in organizing: it advanced funds or provided organizers or, in some cases, such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Teamsters and the American Federation of Musicians, helped form the union. The AFL also used its influence (including refusal of charters or expulsion) to heal splits within affiliated unions, to force separate unions seeking to represent the same or closely related jurisdictions to merge, or to mediate disputes between rival factions where both sides claimed to represent the leadership of an affiliated union or one seeking affiliation. The AFL also chartered "federal unions"—local unions not affiliated with any international union—in those fields in which no affiliate claimed jurisdiction.
The AFL faced its first major reversal when employers launched an open shop movement in 1903 designed to drive unions out of construction, mining, longshore and other industries. At the same time, employers discovered the efficacy of labor injunctions, first used with great effect by the Cleveland administration during the Pullman strike in 1894. While the AFL sought to outlaw "yellow-dog contracts," to limit the courts' power to impose "government by injunction" and to obtain exemption from the antitrust laws that were being used to criminalize labor organizing, the courts reversed what few legislative successes the labor movement won.
While the AFL together with its offspring, the AFL-CIO have comprised the longest lasting and most influential labor federation in the United States, there have been other entities which offered competition. Sometimes the competition has been subsumed through mergers or evolution, other times the actions of government have played a significant role. Competition has come from organizations large and small, but some of the most notable organizations have included the Western Federation of Miners (WFM); the Western Labor Union (WLU), which was later renamed the American Labor Union (ALU); the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); the CIO; and, after the AFL merged with the CIO, the Change to Win Federation.
From the outset, unions affiliated with the AFL found themselves in conflict when both unions claimed jurisdiction over the same groups of workers: both the Brewers and Teamsters claimed to represent beer truck drivers, both the Machinists and the International Typographical Union claimed to represent certain printroom employees, and the Machinists and a fledgling union known as the "Carriage, Wagon and Automobile Workers Union" sought to organize the same employees — even though neither union had made any effort to organize or bargain for those employees. In some cases the AFL mediated the dispute, usually favoring the larger or more influential union. The AFL often reversed its jurisdictional rulings over time, as the continuing jurisdictional battles between the Brewers and the Teamsters showed. In other cases the AFL expelled the offending union, as it did in 1913 in the case of the Carriage, Wagon and Automobile Workers Union (which quickly disappeared).
These jurisdictional disputes were most frequent in the building trades, where a number of different unions might claim the right to have work assigned to their members. The craft unions in this industry organized their own department within the AFL in 1908, despite the reservations of Gompers and other leaders about creation of a separate body within the AFL that might function as a federation within a federation. While those fears were partly borne out in practice, as the Building Trades Department did acquire a great deal of practical power gained through resolving jurisdictional disputes between affiliates, the danger that it might serve as the basis for schism never materialized.
Affiliates within the AFL formed "departments" to help resolve these jurisdictional conflicts and to provide a more effective voice for member unions in given industries. The Metal Trades Department engaged in some organizing of its own, primarily in shipbuilding, where unions such as the Pipefitters, Machinists and Iron Workers joined together through local metal workers' councils to represent a diverse group of workers. The Railway Employees Department dealt with both jurisdictional disputes between affiliates and pursued a common legislative agenda for all of them. Even that sort of structure did not prevent AFL unions from finding themselves in conflict on political issues. For example, the International Seamen's Union opposed passage of a law applying to workers engaged in interstate transport that railway unions supported. The AFL bridged these differences on an ad hoc basis.
The AFL also encouraged the formation of local labor bodies (known as central labor councils) in major metropolitan areas in which all of the affiliates could participate. These local labor councils acquired a great deal of influence in some cases. For example, the Chicago Federation of Labor spearheaded efforts to organize packinghouse and steel workers during and immediately after World War I. Local building trades councils also became powerful in some areas. In San Francisco, the local Building Trades Council, led by Carpenters official P. H. McCarthy, not only dominated the local labor council but helped elect McCarthy mayor of San Francisco in 1909. In a very few cases early in the AFL's history, state and local bodies defied AFL policy or chose to disaffiliate over policy disputes.
Workers could also form organizations within the AFL to promote their cause in ways the AFL failed to accomplish. Between 1903 and 1917, women organized into a number of unions composed largely or exclusively of women. The most important and largest women’s union was the socialist International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, but women organized independent locals among New York hat makers, in the Chicago stockyards, and among Jewish and Italian waist makers, to name only three examples. Through the efforts of middle class reformers and activists, often of the Womens’ Trade Union League, these unions joined the AFL.[5]
Political activities
While the organization was founded by socialists such as Gompers and Peter J. McGuire, it quickly became more conservative. The AFL adopted a philosophy of "business unionism" that emphasized unions' contribution to businesses' profits and national economic growth. The business unionist approach also focused on skilled workers' immediate job-related interests, while ignoring larger political issues.
The AFL showed no interest in supporting a labor party and found itself in conflict with the socialist organizations of the day. It resolved in 1894 not to affiliate itself with any political party, and distanced itself from the Socialist Labor Party headed by Daniel De Leon.
In some respects the AFL leadership took a pragmatic view toward politicians, following Gompers' slogan to "reward your friends and punish your enemies" without regard to party affiliation. Over time, after repeated disappointments with the failure of labor's legislative efforts to protect workers' rights, which the courts had struck down as unconstitutional, Gompers became almost anti-political, opposing some forms of protective legislation, such as limitations on working hours, because they would detract from the efforts of unions to obtain those same benefits through collective bargaining.
The AFL concentrated its political efforts during the last decades of the Gompers administration on securing freedom from state control of unions — in particular an end to the court's use of labor injunctions to block the right to organize or strike and the application of the anti-trust laws to criminalize labor's use of pickets, boycotts and strikes. The AFL thought that it had achieved the latter with the passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914 — which Gompers referred to as "Labor's Magna Carta". But in Duplex Printing Press Co. v. Deering, 254 U.S. 443 (1921), the United States Supreme Court narrowly read the Act and codified the federal courts' existing power to issue injunctions rather than limit it. The court read the phrase "between an employer and employees" (contained in the first paragraph of the Act) to refer only to cases involving an employer and its own employees, leaving the courts free to punish unions for engaging in sympathy strikes or secondary boycotts.
The AFL's pessimistic attitude towards politics did not, on the other hand, prevent affiliated unions from pursuing their own agendas. Construction unions supported legislation that governed entry of contractors into the industry and protected workers' rights to pay, rail and mass production industries sought workplace safety legislation, and unions generally agitated for the passage of workers' compensation statutes.
Unions, including the AFL itself, also welcomed governmental intervention in favor of collective bargaining during World War I. Unions in the packinghouse industry were able to form due to governmental pressure on the largest employers to recognize the unions rather than face a strike. The AFL endorsed the 1924 Presidential campaign of Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and the railroad unions' Conference for Progressive Political Action supported the Socialist Party. The campaign failed to establish a permanent Progressive Party, and thereafter the Federation embraced the Democratic Party even though many union leaders remained Republicans.
At the same time, the AFL took efforts on behalf of women in supporting protective legislation. It advocated fewer hours for women workers, and based its arguments on assumptions of female weakness. Like efforts to unionize, most support for protective legislation for women came out of a desire to protect men’s jobs. If women’s hours could be limited, reasoned AFL officials, they would infringe less on male employment and earning potential. But the AFL also took more selfless efforts. Even from the 1890s, the AFL declared itself vigorously in favor of women’s suffrage. It often printed pro-suffrage articles in its periodical, and in 1918, it supported the National Union of Women’s Suffrage. [6]
Some unions within the AFL also helped form and participated in the National Civic Federation. The National Civic Federation was formed by several progressive employers who sought to avoid labor disputes by fostering collective bargaining and "responsible" unionism. Labor's participation in this federation, at first tentative, created internal division within the AFL. Socialists, who believed the only way to help workers was to destroy capitalism, denounced any cooperation with capitalists in the National Civic Federation. The AFL nonetheless continued its association with the group, even after the National Civic Federation became much less important after 1915.
The AFL relaxed its rigid stand against legislation after the death of Gompers. Even so, it remained cautious. Its proposals for unemployment benefits (made in the late 1920s) were too modest to have practical value, as the Great Depression soon showed. The impetus for the major federal labor laws of the 1930s came from the New Deal. The enormous growth in union membership came after Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 and National Labor Relations Act in 1935. The AFL refused to sanction or participate in the mass strikes led by John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers and other left unions such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. After the AFL expelled the CIO in 1936, the CIO undertook a major organizing effort. The AFL responded with its own massive organizing drive that kept its membership totals 50 percent higher than the CIO's.
The AFL retained close ties to the Democratic machines in big cities through the 1940s. Its membership surged during the war and it held on to most of its new members after wartime legal support for labor was removed.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not Communists. Many CIO leaders refused to obey that requirement, later found unconstitutional. The CIO merged with the AFL in 1955.
The CIO supported Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal Coalition, and was open to African Americans. Both federations grew rapidly during the Great Depression. The rivalry for dominance was bitter and sometimes violent. The CIO (Committee for Industrial Organization) was founded on November 9, 1935, by eight international unions belonging to the American Federation of Labor. In its statement of purpose, the CIO said 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 had joined in the previous year). In 1938, these unions formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a rival labor federation. In 1955, the CIO rejoined the AFL, forming the new entity known as the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
The CIO was born out of a fundamental dispute within the U.S. labor movement over whether and how to organize industrial workers. Those who favored craft unionism believed that 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 through 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, i.e. into unions that 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 that 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, by the 1930s the most dogmatic craft unionists had a strong hold on power within the federation. They used that power to quash any drive toward industrial organizing.
The debate over 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 of America and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. A number of labor leaders, and in particular John L. Lewis of the 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 did, in fact, respond, 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 these to organize workers on an industrial basis. The AFL did not, however, promise to allow those unions to maintain a separate identity indefinitely. That meant these unions might be broken up later in order 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 did authorize 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 only succeeded in making it less credible among the workers it was supposedly trying to organize. This 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, when William Hutcheson, the President of the Carpenters, made a slighting comment about a rubber worker delivering an organizing report. Lewis responded that Hutcheson’s comment was “small potatoes,” to which Hutcheson replied “I was raised on small potatoes, that is why I am so small.” After some more words, Lewis punched Hutcheson, knocking him to the ground; Lewis then relit his cigar and returned to the rostrum. The incident – which was also “small potatoes,” but very memorable – helped cement Lewis’ image in the public eye as someone willing to fight for workers’ right to organize.
The AFL leadership, however, treated the CIO as an enemy from the outset, 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 those industrial workers keen on organizing and disillusioned with the AFL’s ineffective performance. Lewis continued to denounce the AFL’s policies while 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.
The first major industrial union to be chartered by the CIO on November 16, 1938 were the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, also called the UE. See a photograph of the first charter ever issued by the CIO at[1].
The subsequent explosive growth of the UE was instrumental for the survival in those early days of the CIO. By the end of 1936, the UE had organized the General Electric plant at Schenectady, NY and the UE went on to organize 358 more local unions with contracts covering over 600,000 workers in 1,375 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 car maker 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 his past political opponents or radicals drawn from the Communist-led unions that had attempted to organize the industry earlier in the 1930’s, 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 procedure.
The CIO also won several significant legal battles. Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization307 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; but there were no concrete organizing successes.
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, later renamed the Allied Industrial Workers of America.
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, when one union supporter failed to dim his headlights. The strike collapsed shortly thereafter.
The CIO found organizing textile workers in the South even harder. 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. On the other hand, some independent left-wing unions, such as Mine, Mill and the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers Union of America, that aggressively organized both black and white workers had more success than the more cautious Textile Workers Organizing Committee founded by the CIO.
Adding to the uncertainties for the CIO was its own internal disarray. When the CIO formally established itself as a rival to the AFL in 1938, renaming itself as the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 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 FDR administration. Lewis finally resigned as President of the CIO in 1941, after endorsing Wendell Willkie for President in 1940, choosing his protégé Murray to succeed him.
The doldrums did not last forever, however. 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. Other CIO affiliates made progress during these years in organizing workers in mass transit, packinghouses, tire factories, shipyards and electrical manufacturers while the UAW successfully organized aircraft workers.
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. In some instances bloody confrontations took place between the rival federations, each supported by their political allies.
The Dies Committee determined in 1938 that 280 salaried CIO organizers, were members of the CPUSA.
Growth during the Second World War
See Homefront-United States-World War II 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.
In spite of its strong opposition to fascism, in August 1939 the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. 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. 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.
The post-War 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 South, was a complete failure, due both to the social and political backwardness of the region and the CIO’s reluctance to confront Jim Crow. 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 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 authority to pass so-called 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 Communists 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.
Purging the Communists
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 and Fur and Leather Workers. Other Communists held senior staff positions in a number of other unions.
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 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.
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 merger of the two organizations with George Meany, Green’s successor as head of the AFL, the next year.
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 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 essentially disappeared in the merger process.
Industrial Unionization: CIO and the Black Community
Although CIO was beneficial to all workers, it is known to have helped the black workers the most. In the days prior to the establishment of the CIO, under one hundred thousand blacks only were members of the American trade union. This number rapidly multiplied after the foundation of CIO was in place. The number grew until it reached upwards around five hundred thousand in the early 1940s.
At the events which were held by the union prior to 1939-1940, it was very rare and unlikely to see a black union official representing them. But in the year of 1939-1940, it became more and more common to the point where it was actually seen as almost normal occurrence that there would be a black union official at all of these events; one of these negro union officials was UAW-CIO orginizer Leon E. Bates. During these time periods another group was formed to help support the black workers. This group was known as the National Negro Congress. The National Negro Congress supported both the AFL and the CIO. However, it was more interested in forming an alliance with the CIO rather than the AFL due to the fact that they believed the CIO would accomplish and get a lot more beneficial things done for the black workers. Although many of the black community felt this way and agreed that there should be a unionization, The National Negro Congress did not speak for the whole black community. In fact many felt that unionization with the CIO was not the way to go. One side felt that racism should be the major argument and was strongly linked to capital. The other side felt the National Trade Union was the only way to go. Although they were split the one thing that did not waiver was that both sides were strongly looking to further advancing the presence and strength of the black community in the workforce.
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, commonly AFL-CIO, is a national trade union center, the largest federation of unions in the United States, made up of 56 national and international unions (including Canadian), together representing more than 10 million workers. It was formed in 1955 when the AFL and the CIO merged after a long estrangement. From 1955 until 2005, the AFL-CIO's member unions represented nearly all unionized workers in the United States. The largest union in the AFL-CIO is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), with more than a million members, since 2005 when several large unions split away from AFL-CIO.
The AFL-CIO is a federation of international labor unions. As a voluntary federation, the AFL-CIO has little authority over the affairs of its member unions except in extremely limited cases (such as the ability to expel a member union for corruption (Art. X, Sec. 17) and enforce resolution of disagreements over jurisdiction or organizing). As of January 2007, accounting for the disaffiliation of the Change to Win Federation unions, the AFL-CIO had 54 member unions.
Membership in the AFL-CIO is largely unrestricted. Since its inception as the American Federation of Labor, the AFL-CIO has supported an image of the federation as the "House of Labor"—an all-inclusive, national federation of "all" labor unions. Currently, the AFL-CIO's only explicit restriction on membership excludes those labor unions whose "policies and activities are consistently directed toward the achievement of the program or purposes of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, terrorism and other forces that suppress individual liberties and freedom of association..." (Art. II, Sec. 7). Under Art. II, Sec. 4 and Sec. 8, the AFL-CIO has the authority to place conditions on the issuance of charters, and formally has endorsed the policy of merging small unions into larger ones. In 2001, the AFL-CIO formally established rules regarding the size, financial stability, governance structure, jurisdiction, and leadership stability of unions seeking affiliation. And although the AFL-CIO constitution permits the federation to charter Directly Affiliated Local Unions, the AFL-CIO has largely refused to charter such unions since the 1970s.
Some of the current member unions are listed in section Member unions.
Governance
The AFL-CIO is governed by its members, who meet in a quadrennial convention. Each member union elects delegates, based on proportional representation. The AFL-CIO's state federations, central and local labor councils, constitutional departments, and constituent groups are also entitled to delegates. The delegates elect officers and vice presidents, debate and approve policy, and set dues.
Executive council
The AFL-CIO has three executive officers: president, secretary-treasurer and executive vice president. The executive vice president is the most recently established office; it was created by constitutional amendment in 1995. Each officer's term is four years, and elections occur at the quadrennial convention.
The AFL-CIO membership also elects 43 vice presidents at each convention, who have a term of four years. Election is by plurality, with the top 43 candidates with the highest votes winning office. Article VI, Sec. 5, of the AFL-CIO constitution permits the president of the federation to appoint up to three additional vice presidents during the period when the convention is not in session, in order to increase the racial, gender, ethnic and sexual diversity of the executive council.
The three officers and the vice presidents form the executive council, which is the federation's governing body between quadrennial conventions. It is required to meet twice a year, and in practice meets four or five times a year. It passes resolutions, directly oversees AFL-CIO's legislative program, and has other duties. In 2005, the AFL-CIO constitution was changed to permit the executive council to form "Industrial Coordinating Committees" based on geography, employer, occupation or other appropriate subdivisions to coordinate the organizing and collective bargaining work of the member unions.
Executive committee
An executive committee was authorized by constitutional change in 2005. The executive committee is composed of the president, vice presidents from the 10 largest affiliates, and nine other vice presidents chosen in consultation with the executive council. The other two officers are non-voting ex officio members. The executive committee governs the AFL-CIO between meetings of the executive council, approves its budget, and issues charters (two duties formerly discharged by the executive council). It is required to meet at least four times a year, and in practice meets on an as-needed basis (which may mean once a month or more).
General Board
The AFL-CIO also has a General Board. Its members are the AFL-CIO executive council, the chief executive officer of each member union, the president of each AFL-CIO constitutional department, and four regional representatives elected by the AFL-CIO's state federations. The General Board's duties are very limited. It only takes up matters referred to it by the executive council, but referrals are rare. However, because of the sensitive nature of political endorsements and the advisability of consensus when making them, the General Board traditionally is the body that provides the AFL-CIO's endorsement of candidates for president and vice president of the United States.
State and local bodies
Article XIV of the AFL-CIO constitution permits the AFL-CIO to charter and organize state, regional, local and city-wide bodies. They are commonly called "state federations" and "central labor councils" (CLCs), although the names of the various bodies varies widely at the local and regional level. Each body has its own charter, which establishes its jurisdiction, governance structure, mission, and more. Jurisdiction tends to be geo-political: Each state or territory has its own "state federation." In large cities, there is usually a CLC covering the city. Outside large cities, CLCs tend to be regional (to achieve an economy of scale in terms of dues, administrative effectiveness, etc.). State federations and CLCs are each entitled to representation and voting rights at the quadrennial convention.
The duties of state federations differ from those of CLCs. State federations tend to focus on state legislative lobbying, statewide economic policy, state elections, and other issues of a more over-arching nature. CLCs tend to focus on county or city lobbying, city or county elections, county or city zoning and other economic issues, and more local needs.
Both state federations and CLCs work to mobilize members around organizing campaigns, collective bargaining campaigns, electoral politics, lobbying (most often rallies and demonstrations), strikes, picketing, boycotts, and similar needs.
Although the AFL-CIO constitution requires that all state and local unions affiliate with the appropriate state and local AFL-CIO body, in practice this is not enforced. Many unions do not affiliate with their state federation or CLC, or affiliate only a portion of their membership, leaving state feds and CLCs chronically short of funds.
Interestingly, the AFL-CIO constitution permits international unions to pay state fed and CLC dues directly, rather than have each local or state fed pay them. This relieves each union's state and local affiliates of the administrative duty of assessing, collecting and paying the dues. International unions assess the AFL-CIO dues themselves, and collect them on top of their own dues-generating mechanisms or simply pay them out of the dues the international collects. But not all international unions pay their required state fed and CLC dues.[2]
State federations and CLCs are historically important to the AFL and its successor, the AFL-CIO. George Meany, for example, had little experience as a union member or local union leader, but rose quickly to the top of the AFL-CIO due to his effectiveness as president of the New York State AFL. During the AFL's early history, when the federation remained as apolitical as possible, state feds were the legislative dynamos—lobbying for workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, child labor laws and the minimum wage. But in the 1970s and 1980s, state feds and CLCs became organizational backwaters. They were revitalized beginning in 1995, when John Sweeney campaigned heavily for their votes in his successful quest to unseat AFL-CIO interim president Thomas R. Donahue. Sweeney has continued to emphasize them throughout his presidency.
Constitutional departments
Throughout its history, the AFL-CIO had a number of constitutionally mandated departments. They are governed by Article XII of the constitution. Initially, the rationale for having them was that affiliates felt that such decisions should not be left to the whims (or political needs) of the president of the federation.
Currently, Art. XII establishes seven departments, but allows the executive council or convention of the AFL-CIO to establish others. Each department is largely autonomous, but its must conform to the AFL-CIO's constitution and policies. Each department has its own constitution, membership, officers, governance structure, dues and organizational structure. Departments may establish state and local bodies. Any member union of the AFL-CIO may join a department, provided it formally affiliates and pays dues. The chief executive officer of each department is may sit in on the meetings of the AFL-CIO executive council, and departments have representation and voting rights at the AFl-CIO convention.
One of the most famous departments was the Industrial Union Department (IUD). It had been constitutionally mandated by the new AFL-CIO constitution created by the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955, as CIO unions felt that the AFL's commitment to industrial unionism was not strong enough to permit the department to survive without a constitutional mandate. For many years, the IUD was a de facto organizing department in the AFL-CIO. For example, it provided money to the near-destitute American Federation of Teachers (AFT) as it attempted to organize the United Federation of Teachers in 1961. The organizing money enabled the AFT to win the election and establish its first large collective bargaining affiliate. For many years, the IUD remained rather militant on a number of issues. It provided to be a center of opposition to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, and was abolished in 1999.
As of January 2007, there are six AFL-CIO constitutionally mandated departments:
"Constituency groups" are nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations chartered and funded by the AFL-CIO to enhance the representational effectiveness of various under-represented groups. Usually they serve as a means to enhance the organizing of new members and as voter registration and mobilization bodies. The four more mature constituency groups are A. Phillip Randolph Institute, Alliance for Retired Americans, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and Coalition of Labor Union Women. They conduct research, host training and educational conferences, issue research reports and publications, lobby for legislation and build coalitions with other groups.
Although constituency groups are not explicitly mentioned in the AFL-CIO constitution, the AFL-CIO exercises its general authority under Article XII to establish them in much the same way that it establishes other departments. Each constituency group has its own charter, officers, governance structure, etc., as constitutionally mandated departments do. They also have the right to sit in on AFL-CIO executive council meetings, and have representational and voting rights at AFL-CIO conventions. Many constituency groups are not self-sustaining and receive significant funding from the AFL-CIO.
As of January 2007, there are seven constituency groups within the AFL-CIO:
"Allied organizations" are nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations chartered and funded by the AFL-CIO to serve certain policy goals of the federation. They have evolved in a number of ways. For example, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity started out as the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), an "independent" organization funded and controlled by the AFL to promote anti-communist labor unions overseas.[3] However, the Working for America Institute started out as a nonconstitutional department of the AFL-CIO. Established in 1958, it was previously known as the Human Resources Development Institute (HRDI). President Sweeney renamed the department and spun it off as an "independent" organization in 1998 to act as a lobbing group to promote economic development, develop new economic polices, and lobby Congress on economic policy.[4]
Although allied organizations are not explicitly mentioned in the AFL-CIO constitution, the AFL-CIO exercises its general authority under Article XII to establish them in much the same way that it establishes other departments. Each allied organization has its own charter, officers, governance structure, etc., as constitutionally mandated departments do. However, they do not have the right to sit in on AFL-CIO executive council meetings, and do not have representational or voting rights at AFL-CIO conventions. The current three allied organization are all self-sustaining. Their boards are interlocking with the AFL-CIO executive council.
As of January 2007, there are three allied organizations:
"Allied groups" are organizations that have more informal relationships to the AFL-CIO. Some, like the Labor and Working-Class History Association, are truly independent organizations that wish to work very closely with the AFL-CIO and promote its mission and goals. Others, like American Rights at Work, are independent in name only; they are nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations with their own articles of incorporation, charter, governance structure, etc., but are funded largely by the AFL-CIO, and their boards are dominated by its directors. Others are plainly programs of the AFL-CIO operated as federation-wide, cross-cutting organizations serving AFL-CIO goals (such as disaster relief or member mobilization apart from legislative or organizing work). These programs have little or no staff (often using staff already employed by the AFL-CIO), and little or no need for funding (or using funds provided on an as-needed basis through existing AFL-CIO budgets).
"Programs" are organizations established and controlled by the AFL-CIO to serve certain organizational goals. Because of legal requirements (such as federal and state securities laws), they are truly independent organizations. But their governance structures are either dominated by or have sizable blocks of AFL-CIO directors, which effectively direct them to implement policies favored by the AFL-CIO.
Programs serve a variety of goals. For example, the AFL-CIO Building Trust enables union pension and health funds to invest in the for-profit Building Investment Trust. The Trust then uses this capital to construct office buildings, hotels, housing developments, and other capital construction. Some profits are kept by the Trust to build its investment capabilities, the rest are distributed to the investors. Other programs serve goals such as the banking needs of individual union members (AFL-CIO Credit Union) or to provide credit card and other consumer services (Union Privilege).
As of January 2007, there were five programs of the AFL-CIO:
In 2003, the AFL-CIO began an intense internal debate over the future of the labor movement in the United States with the creation of the New Unity Partnership (NUP), a loose coalition of some of the AFL-CIO's largest unions. This debate intensified in 2004, after the defeat of labor-backed candidate John Kerry in the November 2004 U.S. presidential election. The NUP's program for reform of the federation included reduction of the central bureaucracy, more money spent on organizing new members rather than on electoral politics, and a restructuring of unions and locals, eliminating some smaller locals and focusing more along the lines of industrial unionism.
In addition to the issues listed above, the dispute was seen as deeply personal. SEIU President Andy Stern, the most outspoken leader of the Change to Win coalition, was once considered the protege of former SEIU President and current AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney.
During a fire, firefighting personnel are exposed to a wide variety of construction materials, many of which, especially in older buildings, contain asbestos. Firefighters may well be at risk for exposure to asbestos and should be fully aware of its adverse health effects.
