Labor leaders meet to form the AFL-CIO in 1955.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations united on November 5, 1955 to form one federation of mainstream unions in the United States. The CIO had been created within the AFL in the mid-1930s and formally left the AFL in 1938. The reunification of 1955 helped give us our modern U.S. labor movement.
The early conflicts that gave rise to the CIO are most often described as conflicts between two different concepts of what a labor movement in the United States should look like, who unions should represent and how, and the degrees to which unions should practice solidarity and voluntary cooperation. The AFL craft unions had a history of organizing skilled workers and seeking the highest pay and the best benefits possible for those workers. These unions could be exclusionary, bureaucratic and racist, and they often limited their interests to the immediate needs of their members. Political action was not key to these unions; they sought uplift and inclusion for their members by leveraging their power as skilled workers within the capitalist system. They developed what has become known as "bread and butter unionism" and "business unionism." The CIO sought to build a new labor movement out of industrial workers, and the strongest CIO unions brought together Black, white, Chicano, women, and "new immigrant" workers. Some of these unions engaged in progressive political action from their earliest days and built political machines. The two federations were rivals, and this rivalry sometimes found expression in violent conflicts and almost always diminished the power of organized labor.
That is a thumbnail sketch of what differentiated the AFL and CIO from one another, but actual labor history is more complicated. The skilled workers in the AFL-affiliated unions were often able to exercise a great deal of control over their work that others workers could not. They defined what worker control on the job can mean. Their unions often reflected the legitimate concerns of German, English, Welsh, Irish and native born white male workers as the Industrial Revolution progressed. Many AFL-affiliated unions practiced admirable forms of self-help and member education and were intrinsic to the formation of working-class identity in the United States. And not all of the AFL unions were craft unions or politically opportunistic. The Federation often adopted what were either relatively liberal stands on some social issues for the times or abstained from taking positions; the problem was not always in the positions that the Federation took or abstained from taking, but in taking decisive action on the stands taken and implementing them because federations are, by their nature and structures, fragile. The AFL included the Teamsters, the International Longshoremen, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and, at certain points in its history, the United Mine Workers, the Brewery Workers, and the Western Federation of Miners/International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. These unions were a mix of craft, trade, and industrial unions. Decentralized as most AFL unions were, the daily practice of its unionism was a mix of the democratic and the undemocratic and of radical and conservative militancy.
The early CIO was based primarily in eight unions, with the United Mine Workers and its president John L. Lewis having pride of place in the CIO's leadership. Lewis differed from Samuel Gompers, the architect of the AFL, in many respects, but the two men did not have necessarily opposing world views. The CIO's early leadership, and probably most of its membership, backed President Roosevelt in 1938 and were seeking to use Roosevelt's New Deal to both improve the lot of their members and institutionalize the CIO's growing power. A number of dramatic strikes were used to build this power. The rank-and-file coming into the new CIO unions were often influenced by the social movements of the 1920s and 1930s, and many workers took it for granted that their unions and these social movements would remain allied with one another.
Much changed between 1938 and 1955. The AFL's philosophy of self-help and its ambiguous relationships to politicians and politics shifted. The presence of workers of color and women workers in the unions changed power relations within the labor movement. Most unions signed no-strike pledges during the Second World War, and all unions cooperated with the government in order to win the war against fascism. The leadership of the United Mine Workers grew disenchanted with President Roosevelt and the New Deal and for a time attempted to form rival unions and did not join the AFL-CIO in 1955. Conservative forces took power within the CIO. The now-largely-forgotten campaign by Henry Wallace for the Presidency of the United States might have given Labor an opportunity to organize the South and strike a blow against racism and hold together a postwar anti-fascist coalition, but these CIO leaders would not hear of it. The heroic postwar strike wave was answered by a government- and employer-led Red Scare and McCarthyism that hobbled Labor's ability to organize, engage in solidarity actions, run our unions free of government interference, and led to the expulsion of 11 of the CIO's most progressive and anti-racist unions. These expulsions, in turn, led to sometimes violent intra- and inter-union conflicts. Today only two of the those great eleven unions are left---the United Electrical Workers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. This mess is where we get "right-to-work" and "fair share" from.
And so it was that by 1955 the top echelons of the AFL and the CIO had little to fight about, and few of their arguments could not be settled behind closed doors with lawyers and political strategists and the fighters who had survived the battles of the 1930s and 1940s and who had risen to power present. The AFL-CIO looked forward in its early days to a future of labor-management-government cooperation and an expanding capitalism that gave Labor a leading role and prioritized American manufacturing and American interests. The Cold War was the problem of the times. The new federation supported American involvement in the wars, developed a foreign policy arm that cooperated with our government, and opposed or stayed neutral on the rising civil rights and feminist movements. The United Auto Workers and the Teamsters unions dissented in the late 1960s. Seven unions formed the Change to Win federation in 2005.
Labor unity can be a tricky and messy project and history is full of what-ifs. Almost any unity is better than none, if only because positives and negatives have ways of trading places over time. We can and should mark the founding of the AFL-CIO as a step forward, but we should also work with and within Labor's most progressive legacies.
The opinions expressed in the body of this post are not those of the Marion-Polk-Yamhill Central Labor Chapter or the Oregon AFL-CIO.
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