The CIO was formed in 1938 as part of the UNION MOVEMENT to help organize workers in mass-production industries such as steel, coal, and automobiles.
During World War II, the CIO supported government defense efforts, and in return for following a nostrike policy, the federal government required all workers in defense-related factories to join the union. As a result, membership in the CIO rose from 4 million in 1938 to over 6 million by 1948. At the same time, concerns about wartime inflation led LABOR, BUSINESS, and government to limit wage increases and instead provide workers with ever more lucrative benefit packages. After the war, the CIO unions renewed their struggle for higher wages and benefits by calling hundreds of strikes, sometimes against entire industries. In 1945 alone, unions in both the CIO and American Federation Of Labor (AFL) conducted 4,750 strikes that involved 3.4 million workers, including a major walkout by the United Automobile Workers against General Motors. This strike was particularly important because the union demanded that the company increase wages without increasing prices. Although labor did not get this concession, the demand influenced later collective bargaining in which unions won an automatic COST-OF-LiviNG adjustment (COLA), as well as annual automatic wage increases arising from savings based on technological advances.
By 1946, the number of strikes reached unprecedented levels, and although labor was generally victorious, there was also increased criticism and condemnation of its growing power. The following year, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which tried to curb the power of organized labor. It outlawed the closed shop (where a worker had to join a union before getting a job), the secondary boycott, and the use of union dues for political activities. The law also instituted an 80-day “cooling-off’ period for strikes affecting national safety or health, and required all union officials to swear under oath that they were not communists. The law was a stinging defeat for the AFL and CIO, which denounced Taft-Hartley as the “slave labor bill.”
The next major wave of CIO union activism began in 1950 and climaxed in 1952 when the number of workdays lost because of strikes exceeded the total of every preceding postwar year except 1946. The most serious work stoppage was the 53-day strike by the United Steel Workers in 1952. President Harry S. Truman attempted to seize the steel industry, a move the Supreme Court later ruled unconstitutional. Although the CIO scored several victories in these labor disputes, they impeded defense industries during the Korean War, attracting antiunion criticism from political commentators and the press.
The growing anticommunist hysteria of the post-World War II years reduced the effectiveness of the CIO. During the 1930s, some key CIO organizers held that industrial unionism would lay the foundations for the ascendancy of COMMUNISM in the United States, even though rank-and-file workers had little interest in communism. For years, some of the CIO’s largest unions had procommunist leaders or followed communist-influenced policies, and while this was not a major issue in the early history of the organization, by the late 1940s, some influential CIO leaders strongly criticized the presence of these groups. These tensions increased when America became embroiled in the Second Red Scare with its anticommunist agitation in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Eventually the CIO felt pressure to rid the organization of unpatriotic elements. In 1949, the executive committee formally expelled 11 left-wing unions, an action that resulted in the loss of nearly 1 million members, including many who were black and female.
During the postwar years, the CIO also attempted to expand its membership into the southern United States. Although the vast majority of CIO members were located in the North and Midwest, the CIO leadership wanted to organize the mining, textile, and transport workers of the
South who were notoriously underpaid and seemed ideal candidates for unionization. In the process, the CIO faced issues of race, a weak union tradition, and strong pro-business governments. As a result, a major southern organizing campaign conducted in 1946 met with only limited success.
Actions like the Taft-Hartley Act, the seizure of the steel industry, and the events of the Red Scare eventually led to unification of the two major American labor organizations. The process began as early as 1950 when the AFL and the CIO formed a United Labor Policy Committee to deal with government labor policies, and the committee soon became involved in other areas of organizational cooperation. In 1952, the deaths of AFL president William Green and CIO president Philip Murray also removed two of the main antagonists in the bitter rivalry between the two organizations, and brought the AFL and CIO closer to a merger. Early in 1955, a Joint Unity Committee was formed, and a new constitution was drafted. The formal merger of the labor organizations came in December 1955. George Meany, who had succeeded Green as head of the AFL, was elected president of the new AFL-CIO, which now had a membership of 16 million members, equal to about 30 percent of all employed Americans.
Further reading: Robert Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
—Dave Mason
World History
