Congress of Industrial Organizations - Initial Triumphs

Initial Triumphs

The CIO met with dramatic initial successes in 1937, with the UAW winning union recognition at General Motors Corporation after a tumultuous forty-four day sit-down strike, while the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) signed a collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Steel. Those two victories, however, came about very differently.

The CIO’s initial strategy was to focus its efforts in the steel industry and then build from there. The UAW, however, did not wait for the CIO to lead it. Instead, having built up a membership of roughly 25,000 workers by gathering in federal unions and some locals from rival unions in the industry, the union decided to go after GM, the largest car maker of them all, by shutting down its nerve center, the production complex in Flint, Michigan.

The Flint Sit-Down Strike was a risky and illegal enterprise from the outset: the union was able to share its plans with only a few workers because of the danger that spies employed by GM would alert management in time to stop it, yet needed to be able to mobilize enough to seize physical control of GM’s factories. The union, in fact, not only took over several GM factories in Flint, including one that made the dies necessary to stamp automotive body parts and a companion facility in Cleveland, Ohio, but held on to those sites despite repeated attempts by the police and National Guard to retake them and court orders threatening the union with ruinous fines if it did not call off the strike.

While Lewis played a key role in negotiating the one-page agreement that ended the strike with GM’s promise to recognize the UAW as the exclusive bargaining representative of its employees for a six months period, UAW activists, rather than CIO staff, led the strike.

The organizing campaign in the steel industry, by contrast, was a top-down affair. Lewis, who had a particular interest in organizing the steel industry because of its important role in the coal industry where UMW members worked, dispatched hundreds of organizers, many his past political opponents or radicals drawn from the Communist-led unions that had attempted to organize the industry earlier in the 1930s, to sign up members. Lewis was not particularly concerned with the political beliefs of his organizers, so long as he controlled the organization; as he once famously remarked, when asked about the “reds” on the SWOC staff, “Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?”.

The SWOC signed up thousands of members and absorbed a number of company unions at U.S. Steel and elsewhere, but did not attempt the sort of daring strike that the UAW had pulled off against GM. Instead Lewis was able to extract a collective bargaining agreement from U.S. Steel, which had previously been an implacable enemy of unions, by pointing to the chaos and loss of business that GM had suffered by fighting the UAW. The agreement provided for union recognition, a modest wage increase and a grievance procedure.

The CIO also won several significant legal battles. Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization 307 U.S. 496 (1939), arose out of events late in 1937. Jersey City, New Jersey Mayor Frank "Boss" Hague had used a city ordinance to prevent labor meetings in public places and stop the distribution of literature pertaining to the CIO's cause. District and circuit courts ruled in favor of the CIO. Hague appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which held in 1939 that Hague's ban on political meetings violated the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly.