The CIO was created in 1935 as the Committee for Industrial Organization, and then in 1938, it was reconstituted as the Congress of Industrial Organizations. At that point, it became an independent labor federation, rival to the American Federation of Labor.

What we remember it for is that it was the vehicle for organizing the great mass-production industries in the 1930s. This core part of the American industrial economy — steel, auto, meatpacking, electrical equipment, what was at that time the cutting edge of American industrialism — hadn’t been successfully organized ever since its inception in the late nineteenth century. Then through the aegis of the CIO, that sector became fully organized.

It was a great revolution in American labor relations. In 1933, the labor movement represented 10 percent of the labor force, which is what it is roughly today. By the early 1950s, it was one third, and in the mass-production sector it was almost 100 percent. So that was its great achievement.

The issue in 1935 was whether industrial workers had to be organized in industrial unions — that is to say, unions that covered everybody in the labor force. The AFL resisted that and wanted the craft workers in the industrial sector to be organized in craft unions. They weren’t opposed to organizing the others, but the condition was that the craft workers would be separated out.

The view of the CIO people was that you couldn’t organize that way. That was the core institutional issue. And the question is, why was the AFL so inflexible?

It’s complicated, because the question goes to the very foundation of what the AFL was. The AFL was formed in the late nineteenth century, in 1886, and reflected the evolution of the labor movement up to that time. The form that the labor movement took was local unions of the same trade organized in national unions like the carpenters, lithographers, and so forth. The national unions were the dominant institutional expression of the labor movement.

The impetus for that particular structure was the phenomenon of itinerant craft workers. This was part of our social history: the movement of skilled workers from place to place looking for work. When they came to a town that was already organized in their craft, they represented a threat, because if someone went to work without being covered by the agreement, it would undercut local standards.

The way you dealt with that was by creating a national union, to which all the local unions belonged. A craft worker moving from one town to another carried along his membership card. So you got a national citizenship of craft workers organized through the national union, which had authority because it was the vehicle by which you controlled this flow of workers.

The other part, more ideological, is that the labor movement as it emerged and was given voice by Samuel Gompers believed in voluntarism. It didn’t want to be an organ of the state or regulated by the state, which is why it resisted being incorporated. Workers came together voluntarily and created their organizations.

That was the theory. If you have a labor movement that’s voluntary, the rules become very important. That is the only way by which you maintain order. Once rules are established, they have to be adhered to; otherwise the institution falls apart. So that was the logic of voluntary unionism, which is what the AFL represented, with the national unions as the primary organizations.

One of the rules that was adopted in this early era was exclusive jurisdiction. When a union was chartered by the AFL, it was given jurisdiction over a particular craft, like the machinists or carpenters. Then no other union could organize those workers — it was the exclusive right of that union, even if the chartered union left many in its jurisdiction unorganized. The gravest violation of good order was dual unionism, the possibility that two unions might cover the same workers.

So when you get to the 1930s, these are the basic principles. That was the way the AFL evolved, and that’s why it found it so difficult to be responsive to the industrial workers in the 1930s, who resisted being divided up by craft.

It turned out that the AFL made a couple of exceptions to its general principle. In the case of the coal miners, through what was called the Scranton Declaration, they were given a special dispensation on the grounds that the craft workers around the mines were so far removed from others of the same craft that they could be organized in the Mine Workers union. That was an exception. And it applied to the brewers and also to the mine, mill, and smelter workers. So that was part of the history.

At this time, before World War I, industrial unionism carried a kind of ideological baggage. People on the Left — socialists, the International Workers of the World (IWW) — always advocated for industrial unions on the grounds that that was the most progressive form of labor organization. In the case of the IWW, it was believed that the industrial unions were the germ of a new society.

But by the 1930s, the ideological dimension had become quite attenuated. There was still a connection between people who were radicals and a belief in industrial unionism, but it wasn’t like it had been before. And the CIO approached industrial unionism not in this vein of ideological value, but only as a practical matter.

John L. Lewis was very explicit. He said, “I want to organize the industrial workers, and this is the right vehicle to do so. I’m not attaching any other significance to industrial unionism.”

A number of things came together simultaneously in 1935 and 1936. For one thing, within the working class in general, this was a period of militancy, of strikes, of demands for collective bargaining. It was a very turbulent period stimulated by the Great Depression, by the coming of the New Deal, and by the idea, now maturing, that workers’ right to organize should be protected by the state.

That started out in 1933 when the New Deal was launched, as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act. There was a provision in there called Section 7(a) that said workers had a right to organize and have collective bargaining.

It’s a complex history, but it matured in 1935 into the National Labor Relations Act. You had not only rank-and-file activism but also a new law protecting the right to organize. So in 1935, there was this sense that things were at a crisis point, and you had to either move forward or go backward. The CIO said, we’re going forward, and we’re organizing industrial unions.

There’s a long history of organizing in the steel industry in the late nineteenth century. Before the modern industry emerged or became dominant, the production of iron and steel was a craft process. The puddlers who took molten pig iron and worked it into wrought iron, the rollers who took this metal and made bars and other iron forms — they were all skilled workers. And when they organized, you got craft unions: the puddlers were one, the roll hands were another.

Then they joined together in the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers in the 1870s. That was a union within the AFL. It held a charter for the entire steel industry, although in practice it organized only the skilled metal-making trades.

When the steel industry was transformed by new technology in the late nineteenth century — that is, by new blast furnaces, Bessemer refining, automated rolling, and all these steps integrated into regular flow — you got giant steel plants, like at Homestead, and new corporate forms, culminating in the United States Steel Corporation in 1901. The Amalgamated Association failed to organize this new sector, most notably in the great strike at Homestead in 1892. So the modern steel industry as it emerged in the twentieth century was essentially nonunion.

There were intermittent efforts made to organize this new sector, culminating in a major campaign after World War I, which had stirred great militancy on the part of steelworkers. The AFL set up a National Committee for Organizing Iron and Steelworkers, in which all the unions that held a claim to some part of the steelworkers were represented. The result was the great steel strike of 1919, which was the biggest recognition strike in history. That failed, but it was the precursor to what happened in the 1930s.

They had the power. It’s not so very different from nonunion employers today. Employers looked at unions and collective bargaining as an invasion on managerial rights and a restriction on the ability to make profits. And they were determined to resist this. There was a whole industry of spying and munitions production and industrial police that were used to enforce the open shop.

Later in the 1920s, as the industry stabilized and was profitable in a generally prosperous era, you got the first vestiges of welfare capitalism. Employers began to provide benefits and be more benevolent. They tried to listen to workers. Welfare capitalism took a variety of forms, but it was another side of resisting unions and collective bargaining.

So just as it is today with say, Amazon, which is resisting unions, it’s the same psychology of wanting independence and freedom from limitations by collective bargaining. Steel companies had the means, and they had the ruthlessness, and so they kept an open shop.

John L. Lewis, who’s not very well known anymore, was a towering figure in the 1930s and ’40s as the head of the United Mine Workers. He’s an unusual and striking figure, contradictory, but with great leadership instincts and a wonderful speaking ability.

He was basically conservative. He had always been a Republican. But in the 1930s, he left that behind and supported the New Deal; in 1940, he went back to the Republicans. But in that middle period, if anybody could be said to have changed the course of history by the force of his personality, it was John L. Lewis in 1935.

In the 1920s, the coal-mining industry changed. The collective-bargaining system that had evolved earlier broke down. The Southern mines became more dominant and were nonunion. So the mining sector, which had been very strong, really floundered in the ’20s. But Lewis went through that period and held on. And when the New Deal began and the National Industrial Recovery Act was established in 1933 with Section 7(a), the mine workers just rose up, and there was this huge movement of mine workers all over. Suddenly the miners were a great union again, with resources, with collective bargaining, and with John L. Lewis at the head.

They had an interest in seeing that the industrial sector became organized. Part of that was just their belief that it was a good thing for the labor movement. But there was a more specific interest that Lewis and the miners had, because some of the coal mines were operated by the great steel companies  what were called the “captive mines.” And as long as the captive mines were nonunion, they were an element of instability from the point of view of the mine workers.

So they wanted to organize these captive mines, and in order to do so, they thought, they had to organize the steel industry. That was the particular interest that they had in mind. But again, the larger one was that the opportunity was there. There was a belief that the industrial workers deserve to be represented and to have economic justice.

Lewis brought the leadership and the resources from the Mine Workers into the early CIO. The vehicle for organizing the steel industry was what was called the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. This was an innovation; there hadn’t been anything like it before. The organizing structure in the 1919 steel strike, the National Committee for Organizing Steel, was similar but was very weak, without a strong structure or great resources. With the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, Lewis put $500,000 into it right off the bat, and he put his second in command, Philip Murray, in charge. SWOC hired several hundred organizers and went out and organized.

The Steelworkers Organizing Committee as a vehicle was a temporary thing, and it was intended to be, but it was a very effective way of concentrating organizing power. On the other hand, it was not democratic. It was ruled from the top rather, with little input from the local unions and their representatives. When SWOC became the United Steelworkers of America in 1942, it retained those characteristics of top-down unionism.

It’s complicated. There’s no question that when organizing began, you got evidence of rank-and-file activism on the shop floor, in local strikes and in a new local leadership coming forth. Yes, that happened. It’s also true that there was a community aspect to these struggles. But when New Left historians say that this was a moment that might have led to a different labor movement than the one that we had, I don’t go with that.

There are two dimensions that I think are worth considering. The first has to do with the fact that the object of all this strife was to get collective bargaining and a contract. When you look back at the great strikes of the past, before the 1930s, they were over recognition — whether employers would deal with unions. That had to be overcome in the 1930s. And when the industrial unions organized initially to get collective bargaining and a contract, the employers said, ok, we will accept this, but it has to be two-sided. If we recognize the union and have a contract, then the contract has to be abided by.

So what the unions saw was that they had to keep workers in line in order to have collective bargaining. The condition of getting the agreement was that both sides live up to it. You couldn’t have wildcat strikes going on all over the place because employers said, if there are still these kinds of battles, what’s the point of collective bargaining? So the unions said, yes, we have to enforce the agreement once we have it. That’s one thing.

The other thing is — and this point is much harder to get at — what did workers in the 1930s actually want? That is, what were they looking for? What would satisfy them? That’s a question that I’ve pondered over and written about. If you look at how, at the shop-floor level, organization developed during this period, there was what other scholars have referred to as industrial justice — that is, a conception on the part of workers that they be treated fairly in the context of where and how they worked.

In the 1920s, when there was a lot of work, this wasn’t so important. When you got to the early 1930s and people were being laid off, on what basis were they being laid off? If you were the friend of the foreman or a relative, you stayed on. If you weren’t, you were laid off. Similarly with being rehired.

So one of the things that industrial workers wanted was a system that guaranteed that people would be treated equally and fairly. You can see it particularly in the issue of seniority — the notion that the longer you stayed on the job, the more rights you had in it. There’s a complicated story of how seniority became an issue in this period. It was put forward in an NRA agreement in the automobile industry in 1934. But once it was stated, as a general principle, autoworkers just grabbed onto it. They wanted everything to be determined by seniority. That would make it fair; everybody would be treated equally.

The other issue had to do with job classifications and pay rates. We had gotten to the point in the 1920s where the companies wanted to rationalize the way they dealt with workers. How they did this was by setting up a job-classification system and then putting the jobs in at the various slots, so that each job carried a certain wage rate. The issue of justice that came up had to do with whether you were in the right slot or not. If workers said, look, he’s doing the same job that I’m doing, and he’s at a higher rate, that’s unfair. So that was another issue: to get fairness in the job classification system.

How did you do that? By setting up what I have called workplace contractualism. At the workplace, there would be a contract that set out things like seniority rights and job classification, overtime, and so on. You got that by writing it into the contract, where you had a grievance procedure with a shop steward or a shop committeeman representing workers when there was a dispute.

That’s what emerged even before the CIO. That’s the system that left-wing historians object to, but it captured what industrial workers thought of as industrial justice. So my view is that, in this period, what we got was more or less inevitable. An alternative, more radical system just wasn’t going to happen.

The Communists . . . that’s a complicated subject. I would start by saying that in the 1930s, given the industrial conditions and the suffering that working people experienced, there were going to be workers who would turn to radical ideas. They would look around and say, “Where are people who are saying the system is unfair and should be changed?” There were socialists, and there were still remnants of the IWW and other left-wing organizations, but the primary one was the Communist Party. So workers who were bent toward radicalism out of their circumstances were drawn to the Communist Party.

The other thing about the party was that it produced a whole fighting force of organizers. Communists were more dedicated. They were more willing to take chances. They were hardworking, and they became great organizers. So in various unions, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes deliberately, Communists became organizers and local leaders. In the case of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, quite a large number of the two hundred organizers that were hired in this period were Communists, maybe about sixty. And they did great work.

So Communists and other left-wingers tended to be activists and to take leadership roles in local unions. There was factionalism, and the Communists were involved in that. In unions like the United Auto Workers, there’s a whole history of internal struggle in which Communists played a role.

Then there’s the question of the party itself, which was going through changes in this period. One of the essential questions almost from the very beginning, in the 1920s, was whether the strategy of the new party should be to create independent unions, radical industrial unions, or “bore from within” — meaning bore within the AFL unions. William Z. Foster, who had been the brains behind the steel strike of 1919, advocated boring from within, and his views initially prevailed within the party, but in the late 1920s there was a shift, and thereafter the policy was to build rival industrial unions.

Then in the middle 1930s, the Communists, in part as a reaction to the rise of Adolf Hitler, began to look for allies and established what they called the Popular Front. They then returned to Foster’s idea of boring from within, although they didn’t use that term anymore. But the strategy was that they would work within the existing unions.

The great problem was that the party shifts from one position to another weren’t dictated by the conditions that existed in the US. They were determined by the international interests of the Communist movement.

You see this particularly in 1939, when there was an agreement between Hitler and Stalin, and suddenly the Communists changed direction, and their people in the unions had to do likewise. In 1941, when Russia was invaded by Germany, this was reversed, and the Communists became determined that there should be no strikes or disruption of defense production. During World War II, they were vehemently against violations of the no-strike pledge.

The other element that you have to take into account in estimating the role of the Left is the nature of the labor movement itself. In the late nineteenth century, the labor force in America was highly diverse, with many ethnic groups. You had Southerners; there was the question of race; workers belonged to the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The way that the labor movement dealt with this was to say, we are unconcerned with your other affiliations, so long as when you are in the labor movement, that has to come first.

That wasn’t articulated very clearly, but it was there. So the problem that the Communists in the labor movement in the ’30s had was how to negotiate being part of a party and simultaneously acting as good trade unionists.

The head of the West Coast longshoremen’s union, Harry Bridges, was very skillful at doing this. There’s a new biography of Bridges out by Robert Cherny that closely tracks his connection to the Communist Party. It’s a big issue for Bridges because there was an unsuccessful effort that went on for years to deport him on the grounds that he was a Communist.

It turns out, according to his new biography, that the answer is ambiguous. Bridges never had a party card, but he was active in party affairs, and for a period of time, he sat on the Central Committee. So was he a Communist, or was he not a Communist? The thing about Bridges is that he was a very skillful trade unionist, and the issue for him was always, “what’s good for the longshoreman is what I go for.” As long as he did that, he commanded the loyalty of the men on the docks.

But for Communists more generally, how to accommodate these conflicting pressures became increasingly hard as the Cold War set in. The crisis finally reached a head in the 1948 election, which saw the emergence of a Progressive Party led by Henry Wallace. Communists supported the Progressive Party, but the labor movement, the AFL and CIO both, thought that the preeminent interest in 1948 was to reelect Harry Truman, partly because of the Taft-Hartley Act, which had just been passed and which they hoped to reverse. So it became a test whether you were first a trade unionist or first a party person. That led to the expulsion of a number of unions that had Communist leadership or were Communist dominated.

The communists made a great contribution to the organizing of workers in the ’30s and ’40s, but they were caught in this conundrum, which they never really resolved.

It was not apparent during the 1930s, but ultimately the CIO, despite its great vitality and great contribution, was overshadowed by the AFL. In 1955, the two labor movements united in the AFL-CIO. And the CIO part of it was the lesser of the two. So the question is, what happened, given this early dynamism, that in the long term the AFL dominated? Why did the AFL turn out to be the more dynamic form of unionism?

Let me give you an example: the meat industry, which had two branches. There was meatpacking, which was one of the iconic mass-production industries, and there was the retail end, the meat cutters — the skilled workers employed in butcher shops and then, beginning in the late 1920s, in chain stores. There was a long-standing craft union, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen, that organized mainly in the retail sector, although it also claimed jurisdiction over the packinghouses.

In the 1930s, the Amalgamated was defeated in this latter sector by the CIO packinghouse workers, who looked to be the much more dynamic union. The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) had a strong CP segment to it and was very much out front on race issues. It was a very progressive, dynamic union. But it stopped growing after it organized meatpacking. On the other hand, the meat cutters, who were thought of as a retrograde union in the 1930s, began to organize locally beyond retailing.

One thing about the industrial unions is that they were highly centralized. Organizing took place out of the main offices, not out of the local unions. Whereas in the case of the meat cutters, it was local leaders who looked around and said, “Wait a minute. Where are these workers who are similar to us that we can organize, and get more dues-payers?” So you’ve got these local unions that began to just explode in the 1930s and ’40s, becoming in effect multi-industry food unions.

There’s another dimension here too. In the 1950s, the meatpacking industry began to change. It had been concentrated in the great packinghouse centers: Chicago, Omaha, and so forth. Then as a result of a revolution in transportation, from railroads to over-the-road trucking, it became possible to decentralize and have the processing take place closer to the feed lots where the cattle were, instead of shipping them to Chicago or to Omaha.

That particular development favored the meat cutters, while the UPWA just began to shrink. Its structure really wasn’t adequate to the industrial changes that were taking place. Ultimately, the Packinghouse Workers were absorbed by the Amalgamated, which subsequently became the United Food and Commercial Workers of America.

This is what happened more broadly. The AFL unions studied what the industrial unions did, and then acted on the basis of the advantages that they had and began to grow much more rapidly. So the CIO unions really represented, in the long run, a stagnant sector as compared to the AFL.

That’s the structural argument: that the CIO, because it was wedded to the mass-production sector, lived and died there. And when that sector began to decline, as it did first in meatpacking and another decade or so later in steel and in other mass-production industries, so did industrial unionism.

That’s a very complicated question. I would say that it’s very important that workers recognize the need for unions and for collective strength. Insofar as the labor movement has a future, it really depends on that.

There is a new working-class generation of young people who are sympathetic to being in unions in a way that really hasn’t been true for a long time. There is this stirring going on, and it’s a question of how long lived it will be, and how it can be brought into a position of power in relationship to employers.

One of the things that’s come out very clearly, and it’s a very good thing that it has, is that people on the whole recognize that employers who are not in the union sector are inherently anti-union. In other words, any place that begins to be organized will use similar, ruthless anti-union tactics to prevent collective bargaining from happening. It’s very striking now, and the public is much more aware of it than it’s been in the past. So the public dimension is important. You need a recognition of what the realities are.

The other thing is that there is this tremendous imbalance of power between employers who don’t want to have a union and working people who do. It’s also becoming more apparent that this is the case. It’s quite clear that any employer who doesn’t want to have a union doesn’t have to have a union. They can kill it. They have the ability to do that, unquestionably.

The question then arises: Don’t we have a labor law? Aren’t workers supposed to have a right to organize and have collective bargaining? What’s wrong with our labor law?

The labor law is very important, and especially now, because it structures the way in which organizing takes place, but it structures it so that employers can still kill unions. It’s quite clear that labor law doesn’t work. And as the public becomes more aware of that, there’s a greater possibility that the law will be changed in a way that will alter these power relationships.

We’re in a transitional moment. There has to be a recognition that the law has to be changed so that the power of employers cannot be used to prevent workers from having the rights that the law says that they have. End of lecture.