Congress of Industrial Organizations - History

History

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 (efficiency), 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.

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.

While the bureaucratic leadership of the AFL was unable to win strikes, three victorious strikes suddenly exploded onto the scene in 1934. These were the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 the leadership of which included some members of the Trotskyist Communist League of America, the 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike the leadership of which included some members of the Communist Party USA, and the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike led by the American Workers Party. Victorious industrial unions with militant leaderships were the catalyst that brought about the rise of the CIO.

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.

Shortly after the Convention, Lewis called together Charles Howard, President of the International Typographical Union, Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, David Dubinsky, President of the ILGWU, Thomas McMahon, head of the United Textile Workers, John Sheridan of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, Harvey Fremming from the Oil Workers Union and Max Zaritsky of the Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers to discuss the formation of a new group within the AFL to carry on the fight for industrial organizing. The creation of the CIO was announced on November 9, 1935. Whether Lewis always intended to split the AFL over this issue is debatable; at the outset, the CIO presented itself as only a group of unions within the AFL gathered to support industrial unionism, rather than a group opposed to the AFL itself.

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.

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.