American labor history is typically broken up into three periods. In the first, roughly from industrialization through the 1930s, unions and workers struggled against a brutal capitalist class and made limited gains. In the second, the basic industries were rapidly organized, and there was a transformation in working and living standards. And in the third, from the 1970s to the present, those gains were gradually dismantled with deindustrialization and a new employers’ offensive against unions. Another way to describe these three periods could be: before the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), after the CIO, and after the gains of the CIO period were undone.

This rough schematic gives one a sense of the CIO’s historical importance. The CIO moment was the greatest labor upsurge in American history. It was not only a time when workers displayed a great militancy and courage in the face of vicious employers but also one in which they won. They won unions, they won a new labor law regime, and they won life-changing material and social gains. How did they do it? In Organize the Unorganized: The Rise of the CIO, a limited-series podcast from Jacobin magazine and the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University, I’m telling the story of the CIO with the help of prominent labor historians and scholars as well as archival audio material and songs from the period.