Alliance For Labor Action - Formation and Growth

Formation and Growth

The Teamsters had been expelled from the AFL-CIO in 1957 for corruption. The UAW had disaffiliated from the AFL-CIO on July 1, 1968, after UAW President Walter Reuther and AFL-CIO President George Meany could not come to agreement on a wide range of policy issues or reforms to AFL-CIO governance. Although Teamsters president Frank Fitzsimmons was originally seen as a proxy for jailed Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, Fitzsimmons had begun taking a more leftist stand on a number of public policy issues. Reuther was particularly impressed that Fitzsimmons had been the only other national labor leader present at the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.

On July 24, 1968, just days after the UAW disaffiliation, Fitzsimmons and Reuther formed the Alliance for Labor Action to organize unorganized workers and pursue leftist political and social projects. While Reuther himself remained active in the ALA, Fitzsimmons assigned Teamsters leader Harold J. Gibbons as his union's liaison.

Fitzsimmons and Reuther offered the AFL-CIO a no-raid pact as a first step toward building a working relationship between the competing trade union centers, but the offered was rejected. AFL-CIO President George Meany denounced the ALA as a dual union, although Reuther argued it was not. The ALA later passed a resolution permitting ALA members to raid AFL-CIO unions or organize in jurisdictions claimed by AFL-CIO unions if the AFL-CIO-affiliated union was not doing enough to organize workers into union. Although Reuther had a lengthy list of unions he hoped would join the ALA, few did so. In September 1968, the 110,000-member International Chemical Workers Union (now part of the United Food and Commercial Workers) affiliated with the ALA, and was expelled from the AFL-CIO a year later. Ten of the largest local unions (representing 40,000 members) belonging to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union disaffiliated from that international union, formed a new union (the National Council of Distributive Workers of America), and joined the ALA. Although the United Rubber Workers and the Glass Workers both expressed official interest in joining the ALA, neither did so. The ALA's founding split the American Federation of Teachers, which debated joining but never formally considered such an act.