The Post-War Era
The end of the war meant the end of the no-strike pledge and a wave of strikes as workers sought to make up the ground they had lost, particularly in wages, during the war. The UAW went on strike against GM in November 1945; the Steelworkers, UE and Packinghouse Workers struck in January 1946.
Murray, as head of both the CIO and the Steelworkers, wanted to avoid a wave of mass strikes in favor of high-level negotiations with employers, with government intervention to balance wage demands with price controls. That project failed when employers showed that they were not willing to accept the wartime status quo, but instead demanded broad management rights clauses to reassert their workplace authority, while the new Truman administration proved unwilling to intervene on labor’s side.
The UAW took a different tack: rather than involve the federal government, it wanted to bargain directly with GM over management issues, such as the prices it charged for its cars, and went on strike for 113 days over these and other issues. The union eventually settled for the same wage increase that the Steelworkers and the UE had gotten in their negotiations; GM not only did not concede any of its managerial authority, but never even bargained over the UAW’s proposals over its pricing policies.
These strikes were qualitatively different from those waged over union recognition in the 1930s: employers did not try to hire strikebreakers to replace their employees, while the unions kept a tight lid on picketers to maintain order and decorum even as they completely shut down some of the largest enterprises in the United States.
The CIO’s major organizing drive of this era, Operation Dixie, aimed at the textile workers of the South, was a complete failure, due to the CIO’s reluctance to confront Jim Crow. Although the Steelworkers' Southern outpost in the steel industry remained intact, the CIO and the union movement as a whole remained marginalized in the Deep South and surrounding states.
In 1946 the Republican Party took control of both the House and Senate. That Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which made organizing more difficult, gave the states authority to pass right to work laws, and outlawed certain types of strikes and secondary boycotts. It also required all union officers to sign an affidavit that they were not Communists in order for the union to bring a case before the NLRB. This affidavit requirement, later declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, was the first sign of serious trouble ahead for a number of Communists in the CIO.
Read more about this topic: Congress Of Industrial Organizations
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