For a Model of Working-Class Mass Organizing, Look to the CIO
Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), is shown addressing the opening of the CIO Fourth National Convention in Detroit on November 17, 1941. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
The level of anti-capitalist sentiment in the US today hasn’t been seen since the 1930s. Labor radicals seized that moment to create the pivotal Congress of Industrial Organizations. We should take lessons from their achievements — and their missteps.
An interview with STEVE FRASER by BENJAMIN Y. FONG
BENJAMIN Y. FONG
What was the CIO, and what is its primary historical significance?
STEVE FRASER
The CIO was the first enduring mass organization of the industrial working class in America. There had been many attempts before that, but it’s the CIO that emerges as the ongoing successful institutional project to organize large sections of the industrial working class in America and make a permanent breakthrough — or what seemed to be a permanent breakthrough — in collective bargaining, which had been a very difficult thing for the labor movement to achieve outside of the ranks of craft workers before the CIO came along.
We all have a tendency to be present-minded in the way we do history. That’s kind of inevitable, built into the way we live. And if you would ask this question in, say, the 1960s, “What’s the significance of the CIO?”, it would be a different answer than you’ll get today. In the ’60s, it would’ve been a more ambivalent response, because then, while the CIO obviously had made an enormous achievement in winning industrial democracy for large sections of the working class, there was also this notion that the CIO had short-circuited more revolutionary developments, that something called corporate liberalism had co-opted what might have been the more far-reaching attempts by the CIO to really challenge capitalism.
And that’s because at that moment the enemy, so to speak, seemed to be a kind of liberalism, which was under assault from a lot of different directions because of its behavior in the world — in Vietnam and race matters, and so on and so forth. You ask that question today, when liberalism is itself under attack by the Right, and it looks different. The CIO emerges as a bastion of democracy, a great democratic achievement, and it was. And one looks back at that with a kind of yearning that that could happen again today, especially given the deindustrialization and deunionization of so many sections of the working class today.
And no one worries too much about what might have been the revolutionary — or let us say, more than strictly collective bargaining — potential of the CIO back in the 1930s. And maybe both those things are true.
That is to say, it may be that in the ’30s more was possible than was achieved, but what was achieved was enormously important in ensuring democracy among large sections of the population for whom a voice had been denied for generations. So one might have a mixed assessment of the CIO’s significance is what I guess I’m trying to say.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG
What was the American Federation of Labor (AFL)?
STEVE FRASER
The AFL was formed in the 1880s, and it was very single-minded in what it attempted to do, which was to win collective bargaining rights for craft workers who have a certain leverage in the labor marketplace because of their skills. It was very tough to organize, but nonetheless there was greater leverage for the AFL then. This is an organization of mainly either American-born or, if immigrant, largely German and Irish workers. It is a Protestant one in the main, and it is an apolitical organization by design. The AFL develops over time a certain suspicion, fear, and a sense of infeasibility about organizing the growing mass of semiskilled and unskilled industrial workers that increasingly make up the core of mass production industry in America.
There’s a certain kind of anti-immigrant nativist culture that is bred inside the AFL, which heightens that reluctance to organize the unorganized. There are many exceptions to this, but the AFL steers clear of that. It’s very, very risky to do what the CIO ultimately does do, which is to take on the most powerful corporations in America in their heartland. You’re meeting enormous resistance, both violent and legal and so on, and you are trying to organize a variegated, heterogeneous working class with a lot of divisions, ethnocultural divisions, religious divisions. This is a scary, complicated prospect. Is it worth risking the institution? The AFL doesn’t want to take that chance. It had a difficult enough time establishing a foothold in the trades, in the craft industries, and it is reluctant to put those institutional accomplishments at risk come the Great Depression.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG
What role did the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) play in stoking working-class upsurge?
STEVE FRASER
Let me make two points about that. On the one hand, I think of the CIO in some sense as a political phenomenon. That is to say, it emerges and consolidates itself within a wider political context, the context of the New Deal. It closely calibrates its own activities with the growing New Deal wing of the Democratic Party. It relies on state institutions like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the La Follette Committee, which investigates industrial espionage and industrial assaults on labor. It calibrates its activities to Roosevelt’s election. The NIRA is an example of that because it contains this clause 7A, which presumably gives workers the right to engage in collective bargaining under these new industrial codes, which the NIRA sets up in order to spur economic recovery.
Roosevelt gets a lot of credit for that. John Lewis, the head of the mine workers, goes out into the country and says, “The president wants you to join a union.” No doubt that inspired people. It gave them confidence. It made them feel that, “Gee, the president is on our side. This is our right. We should do this.”
But, on the other hand, I think sometimes historians overemphasize that aspect of what went on in the CIO. Because what’s also happening at the time of the NIRA, before there’s a CIO, are enormous upsurges all over the country. The Farm Holiday Association, mass tenant movements, strikes in the South. The Great Textile Strike of 1934, San Francisco General Strike, Minneapolis General Strike in 1934. These are all before the second election of Roosevelt. There’s seizures of coal mines. There are unemployed leagues from 1931 to ’33.
This is also the context for the CIO, for the inspiring of people, for the confidence-building that we can do this. There is a shift in the zeitgeist, and working people generally are fighting back. And so I think sometimes Roosevelt, the NIRA, and 7A get a little bit too much credit. After all, Roosevelt was never prepared to enforce 7A; it never was enforced, and it was ignored again and again and again. Two different labor boards were established under the NIRA, and neither did much. Only in unions that were already strong, like in the garment trades, did the NIRA have any real effect. You could use it to support already-established unions in those sectors. So on the one hand, yes, the CIO is a phenomenon that emerges out of this political context: Roosevelt is key, the New Deal is key. But there’s also this activity from below, which is I think inspiring to people and gives workers courage later on to form the CIO.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG
How did the CIO finally realize the dream of industrial unionism?
STEVE FRASER
To some degree, it had the assistance of an administration that increasingly relied on working-class support for political survival. Initially, that’s not the case: Roosevelt and the New Deal are quite friendly toward the business community. The NIRA is a corporatist attempt to allow big business to discipline itself, and Roosevelt is not an advocate of the National Labor Relations Act until very late in the game. But the business community deserts him. He has to move, and the administration has to move, increasingly to the left to rely on working-class people for support — and I think that is understood by the original organizers of the CIO and becomes increasingly helpful. In the Flint sit-down strike, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins is of help to the fledgling United Auto Workers (UAW). The La Follette Committee exposes the machinations of corporate America to deny what by this time were the rights established by the NLRA. So that’s one reason.
Another reason the CIO succeeds is that given that zeitgeist, it practiced what we nowadays call social unionism. That is to say, the CIO was very conscious of itself as fighting not only for the rights of specific workers, say, in the steel industry or the auto industry to establish collective bargaining rights, but was also part of a broader social movement to establish dignity, a voice, a real political influence for the working class in America, and I think that gave the union enormous political traction and clout in the country.
Another is the deliberate effort to bring surrounding communities into the effort to organize industry — for instance, in the Back of the Yards movement in Chicago to bring communities to bear on the steel workers’ efforts to organize the steel industry. In that way, it’s reminiscent of the mass strikes of the nineteenth century, which called on whole communities to join in support of attempts by railroad workers or whoever happened to be organizing, which is part of the picture of a kind of social movement unionism.
BENJAMIN Y. FONG
How did the sit-down tactic play a role here?