Our History, Part II: From WWI to the Birth of the AFL-CIO
The Loray Mill Strike of 1929 in Gastonia, North Carolina organized by the National Textile Workers Union. It was one of the first attempts to organize labor unions in the South. The demands of the workers were: a 40-hour workweek, a minimum $20-a-week wage, equal pay for men and women, recognition of the union, and abolition of the Hank Clock system (stretch-out system), which doubled the intensity of labor while reducing wages.
This is the second part in our three-part history of the US labor movement, based on an internal RWC-CTR Union School presentation. If workers today are to successfully revive the US labor movement, it is essential that we study our own history. If we don’t know how we got to the present, we will be powerless to chart a path into the future.
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World War I was a war between imperialist countries to re-divide the world between themselves. Germany had industrialized but had no colonies, while France and England had colonies, but had declined. The resulting war caused misery for the masses, with 20 million dead. But while a calamity for the mass of humanity, WWI allowed the expansion of US monopoly capitalism.
For most of the war, the US adopted a politics of neutrality, which allowed it to provide war matériel to belligerent nations in tremendous need of weaponry and other products for war. Between 1914-1918, US heavy industry (arms, automobiles, metallurgy) and agriculture increased output by nearly one-third, while light industry (textiles, paper goods, leather) aimed at individual consumers decreased just as rapidly.
The result of the rapid rise in war production was an increase in the concentration of capital and the growth of monopolies. In 1919, just over 10,000 firms had an output valued at over 1 billion dollars, employing the majority of workers and making up over two-thirds the total value of production.
The US government aided in the process of monopolization, setting up the War Industries Board in 1917 in order to coordinate purchases of war supplies, provide private capitalists with raw materials, and to encourage companies to use efficient mass-production techniques. At the end of 1917, Wilson ordered the Secretary of War to seize the railroads. The US Railroad Administration invested $1 billion in this crucial sector. New factories were established through state investment, e.g., in munitions. The state gave all manner of subsidies and loans to private capitalists.
During WWI, labor suffered tremendously. The working day was lengthened, and there were coordinated efforts by the state and the AFL to suppress strikes. Immigrant workers faced restrictions on employment and speech. Real wages declined by 25%.
During WWI, the US was a military labor camp for workers, and a paradise for capitalists.
The Post-WWI Period
In April 1917, the US entered the war on the side of the allies to share in the spoils of victory and to defeat Germany, its most dangerous competitor.
In October 1917, the Russian Revolution established a state in which the working class were masters of society. This contributed to a tremendous wave of worker militancy across the capitalist countries. In 1919 alone, over 4 million workers in the US participated in strikes, the largest of which was the Great Steel Strike of 1919.
Steelworkers worked 12-hour shifts for low pay, and death and injury were common. US Steel refused to negotiate with the 18 craft unions representing the workers. In August, steelworkers opposed their own leaders and voted by 98% in favor of a strike. In September, idled steelworkers shut down half the industry.
The steelworkers were opposed by the steel companies, who portrayed the strike leaders as Communists and stoked anti-immigrant sentiment against the workers. The state jailed and beat strikers by the hundreds. After striking workers and strikebreakers clashed, 2000 US Army troops were brought in to occupy Gary, Indiana.
The AFL refused to contribute to strike relief and generally opposed mobilizing the immigrant and Black workers who made up a significant portion of the steelworkers. Moreover, the AFL remained dedicated to craft unionism, which organized workers along professional lines, despite the fact that that the war years had led to mass deskilling of workers, making craft distinctions increasingly irrelevant. By 1920, the steel strike had been defeated.
The transition from a war economy to a peacetime economy was difficult. There was a sharp decline in production, as savings were rapidly exhausted. In 1920-21, excessive productive capacity collided with narrow markets, triggering an economic crisis. Industrial production fell by 23%, steel production by 53%, and agriculture by 41%. Unemployment rose to 23%. Such is the irrationality of capitalism: there are idled factories, raw materials, and workers, but if there is no profitable way to bring these elements together, production comes to a standstill and the working class suffers.
The 1920-21 crisis was followed by a boom. Capitalists undertook the “rationalization” of production, introducing new techniques, automation, and mass production. There was an expansion of credit, particularly for the purchase of cars, furniture, and other durable goods, growing the market for domestic consumption. By 1929, the US was in first place in world capitalist trade, and profits from foreign investments were even greater. Monopolies expanded at an unprecedented rate. The US had displaced Europe as the leading capitalist center in the world.
But the roaring economy of the 1920s was in reality quite fragile. Productivity gains were achieved by adopting techniques that led to mass unemployment. Agriculture was in chronic crisis throughout the decade. And the US violently struggled with other imperialists in Asia and Latin America over raw materials.
The 1930s
October 21, 1929 signaled the start of the Great Depression. Production plummeted by an economy-wide average of nearly 50%. In automobiles, production fell by 95%. Production equipment remained unused. Agricultural products were destroyed in enormous quantities. Some 10 million workers found themselves without a job.
In 1933, Roosevelt’s New Deal aimed to suppress the economic crisis, pacify the working class, and reinforce the domination of monopoly capital. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) aimed to regulate labor-management relations. This gave workers the right to unionize and bargain collectively. The intention was to bring the class struggle into institutional channels, but in fact the NIRA sharply increased the number of workers participating in strikes.
In 1934, a series of organizing campaigns were accompanied by major strikes: the Minneapolis Transport Workers’ Strike, which led to a declaration of martial law, mass arrests, and the murder of workers; the West Coast Waterfront Strike, which shut down ports, and led to a general strike after police fired into a crowd of workers, killing three; the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike, which included a five-day battle between 10,000 strikers and the National Guard, leading to mass injuries and the death of two workers.
These militant actions and others laid the foundation for a new model of unionization.
In 1935, AFL members proposed organizing workers by industry, rather than craft. The AFL leadership rejected this proposal. This led to the split that gave birth to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The new “vertical” model of unionization was appropriate to the de-skilling and massification of labor introduced by capital during the previous decades.
That same year, the NIRA was declared unconstitutional. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also known as the Wagner Act, was passed, which protected private-sector unionizing, private-sector collective bargaining, and strike activity. The NLRA remains the legal basis of our unionizing activity even today. As with the NIRA, the goal of the NLRA was to calm the class struggle through state-regulated collective bargaining, which was now overseen by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). But also like the NIRA, the NLRA did nothing to pacify workers. Unionization and strike activity increased dramatically, and capitalists responded with open violence.
One such strike was the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37, which established the United Automobile Workers (UAW) as a major, centralized union. Workers physically occupied factories, preventing owners from resuming production. The striking workers elected their own leadership, established worker courts, and organized resistance to attacks by police. After the victory of the Flint strike, the UAW grew by over 1600%.
The Post-WWII Period
In 1945-46, the Great Strike Wave hit the US, in numerous sectors: automobile, electricity, meatpacking, steel, mining, transportation, etc. These were the largest strikes in US history, with 5 million workers participating. Workers made demands previously considered “out of bounds,” for example, that account books be opened to worker inspections and wages be raised without raising prices of wage goods.
US unionism now included all workers, skilled and unskilled, in unified and centralized sectoral organizations.
This advance was undermined by the behavior of union leaders, who refused to implement internal democracy and who increasingly saw their job as maintaining stability, rather than combating the class enemy. The union leaders were often business owners, intellectuals, or well-paid skilled workers.
The corrupt trade-union bureaucracy was a product of US capitalism at the time. The US had profitable large-scale industry and US monopoly capitalists were exporting capital all over the world. The capitalist class used a small part of its immense profits to corrupt an aristocratic layer to lead the labor movement away from independent struggle.
In 1947, the Labor Relations Management Act, known as the Taft-Hartley Act, was passed in response to the 1945-46 strike wave. Taft-Hartley deprived workers of numerous rights that had been acquired through the NLRA. It outlawed mass picketing, solidarity strikes, unauthorized strikes, and public-sector strikes. It allowed the President of the US to declare an emergency which could delay any strike with a 60-day “cooling off” period. It provided for employer “free speech” at the expense of labor. It forced union leaders to legally swear they were not Communists. It legitimated “right to work” laws and banned the closed shop.
Traitorous trade union leaders accepted Taft-Hartley lying down, organizing only two demonstrations against Taft-Hartley – and only because they were forced to do so following a larger, spontaneous demonstration of automobile workers in Detroit. The policy of trade-union “leaders” became to oppose all strikes.
In the late 1940s, the CIO undertook a failed campaign to organize the textile industry in the South, called “Operation Dixie.” Southern capitalists appealed to racist prejudices and anti-Communism in order to defeat the drive. The Southern states remain unorganized to this day. This consolidated a peculiarity of the US labor movement: the geographical concentration of unions.
In 1949, the CIO expelled two member unions for their refusal to stand with the bosses against their own workers. By the end of that year, nine additional unions had been expelled. In 1953, the AFL and CIO signed a non-raiding pact, ending what had been a common practice, setting the stage for the unification of the two federations.
In 1955, the CIO merged with the AFL to form the AFL-CIO under the leadership of George Meany, and the betrayal was complete. The mid-1950s saw the highest union density in US history. Beginning with the birth of the AFL-CIO, the history of the labor movement has been a history of increasingly ineffective union activity and ever-lower rates of union density.