The rise and fall of the US Congress of Industrial Organizations
In the 1930s, the United States experienced one of the most significant working-class rebellions of the century. The explosion of organising gave rise to the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a union federation that set out to organise the mass production industries across the country. It was a dramatic step forward for the US working class, but its limitations have decisively shaped America's political and industrial terrain for the next 90 years.
The rise of the CIO raised several political questions that remain relevant today. What orientation should rank-and-file workers have towards union leaders? How should workers relate to capitalist political forces, such as the Democratic Party? And what role can and should the left play in a working-class revival? Ryan Laws from Socialist Alternative’s workers’ organising committee provides some tentative answers.
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Kermit Johnson was growing nervous. He and the other members of the United Auto Workers’ strike committee had a plan. But a plan is one thing. Launching a sit-down strike to occupy the key factory of the mightiest corporation on the planet was something else entirely.
In the 1930s, General Motors produced nearly half of all cars sold in the US. Fortune magazine described the company as “not big but colossal”, “the highest technological organism of our technological age” and “the world’s most complicated and most profitable manufacturing enterprise”.
If it were possible for a company like General Motors to have a heart, it would have been in Flint, Michigan. The town held the largest concentration of GM factories in the country. As one UAW organiser said, “whatever happened in this central city of the corporation ... reverberated throughout the financial capitalists of the nation”. The mayor of Flint, the chief of police, the judges, the daily newspaper, the radio station, the churches, municipal relief and even the schools all rested firmly in the bottomless pockets of GM.
In terms of industrial espionage, GM was in a class of its own. According to the company’s director for industrial relations, GM equipped all their plants with an arsenal. The town and its factories were saturated with spies from the notorious, worker-murdering Pinkerton Detective Agency under GM’s employ. Every plant manager engaged their own secret police. A congressional committee that later investigated the labour practices of GM found that the company employed “the most colossal supersystem of spies yet devised in any American corporation ... a far-flung industrial Cheka”. (The Cheka was the Soviet Union’s secret police.) Workers suspected everyone, and everyone was afraid.
Throughout January 1937, GM had been rocked by a growing strike wave across 50 of its plants. At its peak, more than 150,000 workers were out. In the eyes of the managers, the UAW represented an existential threat to their absolute power, and the company was intent on systematically destroying the union. Police and the National Guard had brutally attacked the strikers at Fisher Body 2 with live fire and tear gas, only to be driven off by volleys of hinges, bottles and bolts that rained down on them from workers occupying the factory. This episode would be dubbed “The battle of running bulls”. The fight against GM was considered the most important industrial battle of the 1930s, and it was reaching its climax. The company had not yet folded, and the outcome was far from certain.
It all came down to Chevrolet Plant 4, where Kermit worked. Plant 4 produced all the engines for Chevrolet cars—more than a million a year. This huge factory was considered the most important plant in the GM production chain, but only a quarter of its workers were members of the UAW. If it kept working, the company might be able to last one day longer than the workers. Its capture would be the final nail in the coffin for GM.
The UAW strike committee got the word out that the objective was to shut down a decoy plant, the much smaller and less strategically important Plant 9. Everything had so far gone according to plan. Stool pigeons in the union local told the company to redirect its forces for a battle at Plant 9. Kermit waited impatiently for the union workers to enter Plant 4 for the real occupation. According to his remarkable account of the dispute:
“The next few minutes seemed like hours, and as I ambled toward the door, my previous confidence was rapidly giving way to fear—fear that we’d lost our one big gamble. My thoughts were moving a mile a minute ... and then the door burst inward and there was Ed! Great big Ed, his hairy chest bare to his belly, carrying a little American FLINT ’37— ‘GETTYSBURG’ OF THE CIO flag, and leading the most ferocious band of twenty men I have ever seen. He looked so funny with that tiny flag in comparison with his men, who were armed to the teeth with lead hammers, pipes, and chunks of sheet metal three feet long. I felt like crying and laughing at the same time.”
They were soon joined by hundreds more unionists, who proceeded to march up and down the aisles of Plant 4, shutting the factory down and signing up its workers to the union. They convinced the managers that “leaving the plant under their own power was more dignified than being thrown out”. As the workers sent the plant managers packing, they gave them “the same advice that most of us had been given year after year during layoffs. ‘We’ll let you know when to come back.’”
The victory at Plant 4 was the straw that broke the back of General Motors. After 44 days of strikes, GM surrendered in humiliating fashion, signing its first union agreement, granting sole bargaining rights to the UAW. This sent shock waves through American capitalism. The wall of the open shop in the auto industry was finally breached, and the floodgates of class struggle opened. Workers from one end of the country to the other struck and occupied their workplaces—nearly half a million before the end of 1937.
This indomitable wave of sit-down strikes was one of the turning points in the greatest industrial upsurge in the history of the United States. The creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) played a crucial role in this incredible saga. Over the course of the 1930s and early 1940s, the CIO opened the way for the organisation of the semi-skilled and unskilled workers of the new mass-production industries for the first time, most importantly in auto, steel, rubber, mining and electrical manufacturing. Soon after its stunning victory at GM, one corporate goliath after another fell to CIO unions, signing contracts that would have been inconceivable a year or two earlier. This represented a titanic shift in industrial relations in the United States. Much of the twentieth century cannot be fully explained without understanding the stunning successes and profound limitations of the CIO.
Safety and sanity
The CIO emerged from a split within the top ranks of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) leadership, which was driven by the tectonic forces transforming US capitalism in the 1930s. The Great Depression, beginning with the stock market crash of 1929, was a catastrophic event with few historical precedents. Hunger became widespread in the industrial heartlands of the Western world. By 1933, industrial production and national income in the US had fallen by nearly half. Society appeared to be on the brink of collapse, but the capitalists were determined to push the brunt of the crisis onto the working class. By 1933, a third of workers were unemployed and a third underemployed. Wages had fallen by nearly 50 percent.
Republican President Herbert Hoover denied the severity of the situation. Demonstrations of the unemployed were met with brutal repression, with many killed, wounded or imprisoned. The enduring symbol of the depression became the tin-shack shantytowns, known as “Hoovervilles”, that mushroomed across American cities and towns as working-class families were thrown out of their homes. The response of the AFL leaders was summed up by the editor of Advance, organ of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers:
“The Communists staged hunger demonstrations and marches. The liberals organized unemployment insurance conferences. The socialists advocated remedial legislation and relief measures. The men of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action promoted Unemployment Leagues. The AFL alone carefully guarded its record of safety and sanity and did about nothing.”
The AFL had long since ossified as a conservative federation of craft business unions that jealously guarded their bureaucratic empires. This was most starkly illustrated by their approach to the new mass manufacturing industries that grew rapidly after the First World War. Workers in these industries were largely unskilled or semi-skilled, and heavily migrant—traits anathema to craft unions that maintained their narrow, sectional power largely by excluding unskilled workers (including Black people, migrants and women) from skilled jobs. They were intensely nationalist and anti-communist, and they largely viewed industrial workers with disdain, dismissing them as “unorganisable”. The AFL mostly abandoned the unorganised to the tender mercies of their rapacious employers.
Formation of the CIO
However, a section of the AFL leaders began to view things differently, most notably in coal mining and textile manufacturing. The nature of these industries forced the unions that covered them to organise on a more or less industrial basis. This group of unions was led by John L. Lewis, president of the largest and most influential union in the country, the United Mine Workers of America (UMW). Lewis is a fascinating, paradoxical titan of the American labour movement. No union leader was more ruthless or authoritarian. He viciously drove communists and all other oppositionists out of the union, to the point of bringing the union to the brink of collapse in the 1920s. He broached no challenge to his hold over the UMW machine.
He did, however, possess several traits shared by no other union leader of the time. He rose to power among the coal miners, by far the most militant, unruly stratum of the American working class. He was baptised as the fledgling UMW’s president by the coal strike of 1919, an epic battle in which 400,000 miners walked off the job for 40 days. In other words, he’d learned how to “ride the tiger” of militant class struggle. He was audacious, and he knew a historic opportunity when he saw one.
He could also hear deep rumblings from below. In 1934, there were spectacular strikes by truck drivers in Minneapolis, auto workers in Toledo and dockworkers in San Francisco, all of which shared three things. First, they were driven from below and bordered on mass insurrections, despite the best efforts of the union leaders to stop them. Second, they won smashing victories, including union recognition, drawing huge numbers of workers into the union movement. Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly for Lewis, they were all led by socialists and revolutionaries. Lewis realised that the working class now demanded to be organised and would not take no for an answer. A breakthrough was possible, but if the union leaders weren’t prepared to take this opportunity with both hands, other, more radical forces would.
Lewis was determined to organise the unorganised. He launched a massive organising drive in the coal mines in 1933, and 300,000 miners flooded into the UMW. He then demanded that the leadership of the AFL put serious resources into organising the mass-production industries. His appeals landed on deaf ears; the AFL would do nothing. “They seduced me with fair words”, Lewis poetically declared, “now ... I am enraged and I am ready to rend my seducers limb from limb”. He began preparations to cohere the faction of breakaway unions within the AFL that would go on to form the CIO. The split was consummated when he strode to the podium of the 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City and cracked the jaw of the insolent president of the carpenters’ union, Bill Hutcheson, with a solid left hook.
The heroic years
Immediately after his “punch heard round the world”, John L. Lewis established the Committee for Industrial Organization as a faction of industrial unions in the American Federation of Labor. It eventually broke away in 1938 to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
In the first twenty years of the CIO’s existence, the US working class unleashed a tidal wave of organisation and mass strikes. Total union membership tripled between 1933 and 1941, and wages increased substantially in unionised industries, despite most of these years occurring during the depths of the Great Depression. More than 42 million workers struck between 1936 and 1955. According to Art Preis, author of Labor’s Giant Step, “Even allowing for workers who have struck more than once, this figure puts in the pale the corresponding strike figures for all other countries”.
Although millions of workers flooded into both the AFL and CIO (indeed, the AFL actually grew more than the CIO), it was workers in the mass production industries of the CIO who led the way. However, contrary to popular belief, CIO leaders did not essentially differ from those of the AFL in that they saw strikes as a last resort. The history of the CIO represents the struggle of a working class on the move, straining against its own leaders to fight for meaningful improvements to their lives. This struggle between union officials and the rank and file played out very differently in each union, depending on the balance of forces.
Over the year following the 1936 triumph of the United Auto Workers (UAW) at General Motors (GM), the union grew from 30,000 members to 500,000. The explosive struggles that gave rise to the UAW created a union with a wildly democratic character. The sit-down strikes and flying squadrons of the early years gave the rank and file a power and confidence unsurpassed in the US labour movement. They could win in a few hours or days what union leaders could not through years of negotiations. The stormy conferences of the UAW became legendary, and the rank and file threw out three international presidents in just eleven years. The internal structures of the UAW were roiled by a succession of factional struggles, revolts and opposition movements until the late 1940s, when Walter Reuther finally established one-man rule over the union.
The battle for the steel industry unfolded differently. The CIO established the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in 1936 and sent hundreds of organisers into the steel mills. In the wake of the GM victory, US Steel, which controlled about 40 percent of the basic steel industry, capitulated without a fight. However, unlike the rank-and-file-driven organisation of the UAW, the SWOC was tightly controlled from above. Hand-picked leaders were imposed on the workers by the captains of the CIO, who seemed to be responsible for the successful organising drives. The steel industry was eventually unionised, but without the same rank-and-file initiative, democratic flair or challenge to the supremacy of the CIO leaders seen in the UAW and other unions.
New Deal
One of the great myths about this industrial upsurge is that it was encouraged by the Democratic administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal legislation. Roosevelt is commonly idealised in left and liberal circles as a great reformer and friend of the working class. The main prop of this myth is that he gave labour “the right to organise” through Section 7(a) of his National Industrial Recovery Act.
In reality, 7(a) did virtually nothing to further the right of workers to organise, and workers were already beginning to move by the time Roosevelt took office. Indeed, if there were no such right to organise, how could millions of workers already have been members of the AFL? Nevertheless, many workers were misled into thinking that the government would protect their rights. They were quickly disabused of this notion when the bosses launched a vicious civil war on the labour movement in the 1930s. Hundreds of workers were killed, thousands wounded and tens of thousands arrested. In 1935 alone, the National Guard was employed against 73 strikes across twenty states—most of them under Democratic administrations.
Roosevelt never used his immense powers to stop any of this. He aimed to protect the capitalist system, nothing more and nothing less. He described himself as “the best friend the profit system ever had”. At the height of the Depression, being a friend of the profit system meant implementing some pitiful welfare programs, price controls and banking reforms to stabilise the economy. It also required recognising that the old way of managing industrial relations was no longer tenable. The labour movement had grown too big and too powerful. The situation was becoming dangerous. Roosevelt acknowledged this in his 1932 presidential acceptance speech, saying: “[T]o meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster”.
The administration, and the capitalist class that it represented, needed new legislation and government bureaucracies, such as the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), to contain and control the labour movement by partially incorporating it into the machinery of the state. In this way, the reforms of the Roosevelt administration, as limited as they were, came as reluctant responses to pressure from below in an effort to redirect open industrial warfare into NLRB-sanctioned elections.
While Roosevelt offered little for workers, the top leaders of both the AFL and CIO viewed his administration as an historic opportunity to establish a new arrangement between unions, business and the federal government that would manage American industry. These leaders felt for the first time, but by no means the last, that they could finally secure a seat at the table with government. They were horrified by calls from large sections of the CIO rank and file for the creation of a labour party, particularly when these calls came from the same corners of the union responsible for wave after wave of wildcat strikes. In their view, this unruly, dangerous movement had to be contained within the two-party system. Even the indefatigable John L. Lewis, who brazenly violated the union’s no-strike pledge during WWII by leading a series of colossal miners’ strikes in 1943, simply flipped from supporting the Republicans to the Democrats, and back again.
Thus, the CIO and AFL poured tremendous energy and resources into the Democratic Party. They became the key electoral pillars for the Democrats’ smashing victories in the late 1930s and early 1940s, spending millions of dollars and mobilising tens of thousands of working-class volunteers to get out the vote for Roosevelt.
One problem was that no-one on the left was willing and able to challenge the union leaders’ strategy. The Trotskyists played a historic role by leading the Teamsters rebellion in Minneapolis, and then organising virtually the entire midwest trucking industry. However, they were far too small to have a meaningful impact on events. The Socialist Party was revitalised somewhat in the early 1930s, but had long since lost its ability to cohere an independent left or rebuild a trade union base. It was eventually absorbed into the New Deal coalition.
The Communist Party was the only force on the left that was large and coherent enough to challenge the union leaders seriously. It was key to furnishing the newborn CIO with activists and organisers, being a powerful force in the steel, rubber, auto and electrical unions. By the days of the CIO, however, the thoroughly Stalinised Communist Party was entrenched as a tool of Russian foreign policy. The American version of the Popular Front strategy dictated by Stalin required slavish devotion to the leaders of the CIO, Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats. During WWII, it became the hard right of the union movement, openly demanding the use of speed-ups, piecework and strikebreaking to lift the productivity of workers in the interests of the “war to defend the USSR”. By the beginning of the Cold War, it had lost all credibility in the eyes of the workers and was almost completely smashed and purged from the union movement.
Results
The end of the Second World War brought about the most colossal strike wave yet. In 1945–46, more than 5 million workers poured out of their workplaces and onto picket lines. In January 1946, nearly 2 million auto, steel, electrical and packinghouse workers struck simultaneously for the first and only time, bringing the industrial core of the US juggernaut to a halt. As Art Preis notes, “for the number of strikers, their weight in industry and the duration of struggle, the 1945–46 strike wave in the US surpassed anything of its kind in any capitalist country, including the British General Strike of 1926”. In some ways, this was the greatest triumph of solidarity in the history of the American working class. However, it also reinforced the end of the heroic era of the formation of the CIO. No strikers were killed, reflecting that employers generally did not try to break picket lines. The strikes were tightly controlled from above, and organised with minimal rank-and-file initiative. The union officials used the strikes to let off steam that had built up in the ranks during the war years and the Depression, while further centralising the power of national leadership.
The postwar strike wave was a consolidation of the union bureaucracy and its supremacy over the rank and file of the labour movement. It also represented a recognition by employers and the state that the new trade union movement was here to stay. This dynamic would be consummated with the reunification of the CIO and AFL in 1955 to form the modern AFL-CIO. The differences that initially split the union leaders had been overcome. On one side, the AFL had quietly adopted the approach of organising along industrial lines. On the other, the CIO had tamed the unruly rank and file that ran amok in its early years. The reunification of the two represented the final triumph of bureaucratic business unionism.
The victories of the CIO were many. For the first time, a considerable proportion of the US working class was organised into unions. Workers, particularly in the basic industries, took significant steps forward in wages and conditions. The sheer scale and force of the upsurge transformed the traditional approach of US capitalism to trade unionism. The US had long earned the distinction of being the most violently anti-union, savagely free-market country in the advanced capitalist world. After the late 1930s, however, the killing of striking workers became rare, as avenues developed for collective bargaining and a restricted right to strike.
However, the CIO was equally defined by its defeats. The defeat of the left and the containment of the rank and file by the union leaders in the 1940s and 1950s limited the capacity of the CIO to make further gains. Enslavement of the union movement to the Democratic Party also had dire consequences. Unlike most other advanced capitalist countries, the US working class never won universal entitlements to health care, welfare, minimum wages and other basic rights.
The Democrats also bound the union movement to the twists and turns of US imperialism as the Cold War heated up. The old civil war between craft and industrial unionism was replaced by an anti-Communist witch-hunt against the left. The CIO leaders exploited McCarthyism and new anti-union legislation, such as the Taft-Hartley Act, to drive out the Communists and raid the left-led CIO unions. These factors led to the catastrophic collapse of the CIO’s attempt to organise the south in 1946, known as “Operation Dixie”. Racism remained the Achilles heel of the American labour movement, and large sections of the US working class were left untouched by unionism or even basic federal minimum wage provisions.
Could things have turned out differently? Unions are by their nature contradictory institutions—capable of uniting workers in struggle against the worst features of capitalism, while also accommodating capitalism in order to survive.
Nevertheless, a mass socialist force in the working class could have made a profound difference to the way the CIO turned out. It could have united rank-and-file militants across industries to challenge more effectively the hold of the CIO leaders. It might have held together an opposition to the Democratic Party and US imperialism, while more successfully resisting the purges of the left. It might have more effectively challenged anti-Black racism and made greater inroads into organising in the south. During its more left-wing period in the early 1930s, the Communist Party, for all its limitations, demonstrated that this was possible when it made impressive gains organising and recruiting Black southerners.
The CIO upsurge presented an historic opportunity for the far left to grow massively and take qualitative steps forward. For any of this to have been possible, the US left needed to already have established a large, cohered, anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist party.
