Craft Unionism - Challenges

Challenges

As long as the craft unions were the dominant power in the AFL, they took every step possible to block the organizing of mass production industries. This led to challenges from both inside and outside the Federation.

One early challenge came from outside: the Western Federation of Miners, a union that had fought a series of violent battles with mine owners over the right to represent mill workers as well as hard rock miners, joined with activists from other unions and from the Socialist Labor Party of America to form the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which aimed to organize all workers, regardless of craft, nationality, gender or race, into one big union. In practical terms the IWW pursued organizing on an industrial basis.

In at least one sense the IWW practiced (and practices) the most egalitarian form of industrial unionism, organizing and accepting membership of workers in any given industry whether they are currently employed or not. The IWW also welcomed immigrant workers, minorities and women as equals.

The IWW was successful in some cases, leading a strike of immigrant workers employed in the woolens industry in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and many smaller strikes in longshore, agriculture and the lumber industry. In its first three years it was greatly hampered by deep political divisions, such as the question of unions engaging in electoral politics (resolved in favor of ruling out alliances with political parties). The IWW was seriously damaged by government prosecution and vigilantism in the post-war red scare that reached its peak in 1919, and in the Palmer Raids of the same period.

The next challenge to the dominance of craft unions within the AFL came from inside, as John L. Lewis of the Mine Workers, David Dubinsky of the ILGWU, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Charles Howard of the International Typographical Union, Thomas McMahon, head of the United Textile Workers, John Sheridan of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union (the descendant of the WFM), Harvey Fremming from the Oil Workers Union and Max Zaritsky of the Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers joined to form a Committee for Industrial Organizing within the AFL. The craft unions demanded that Lewis and his committee stop; Lewis persisted.

This 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 member of the fledgling union of tire factory workers who was 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, then relit his cigar and returned to the rostrum. The incident – which was also “small potatoes,” but very memorable – personified the conflict between craft and industrial organizing.The CIO proceeded to organize mass production workers on an industrial basis.

The AFL's response to the challenge from the CIO was twofold: both fighting a rearguard action before the National Labor Relations Board to preserve its right to represent the skilled trades in many of the plants that the CIO was organizing, and attempting to emulate it. Thus, within a decade of the founding of the CIO, unions that had been primarily craft unions, such as the International Association of Machinists, originally a railroad union with much of its membership in the construction industry, began to make serious efforts to organize on an industrial basis as well. Even the Carpenters took in sawmill workers who had organized on an industrial basis, although the union continued to treat them as second-class members until they seceded to form the International Woodworkers of America in 1937.