United Mine Workers of America President John L. Lewis first brought together the group that would become the Committee on Industrial Organization (CIO) at the annual American Federation of Labor (AFL) Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1935. From its outset, Lewis’s effort proved contentious. Then AFL President William Green and the AFL’s Executive Council denounced the CIO and attempted to force the CIO to disband through threats of punitive action from November 1935 through January 1936.
One significant factor that discouraged the AFL from supporting CIO efforts to unionize industrial workers within included the political consequences of opening the union halls to new groups. The AFL traditionally aligned itself with craft unions and skilled workers, often intentionally excluding so called semi-skilled or un-skilled workers for fear that their inclusion would weaken the job security and wages of skilled laborers. AFL leaders reinforced these divisions between skilled and un-skilled workers for both economic and political reasons: skilled workers largely consisted of native-born white men that resented the social and political impact of including semi-skilled and un-skilled groups of workers typically comprised of non-native populations, ethnic minorities, African-Americans, women, and at times individuals that identified intersectionally among these groups. At the time, the AFL excluded many of these workers as a way to ensure their own social and political supremacy in efforts to collectively bargain for the highest wages and best working conditions to go to their members the skilled workers that largely consisted of native-born white men.
The CIO’s efforts to organize industrial labor reveal that even along the socio-political contexts that often divided these groups (including “harsh monopolies” and workplaces that frequently divided workers to ensure their inability to organize), many laborers across different skill-levels and industries shared a common longing for opportunities for a better working condition. Workers within these groups ultimately saw benefit to union drives to end to harsh and punitive management practices and inconsistent practices in pay and wages, establish a federal rule to standardize the forty-hour work week as well as end child labor, among other key goals, even if they did not always feel secure in joining. In the letter below, a union workers writes to John L. Lewis:
“Mr. Lewis, is there anything I can do to help win the struggle for industrial organization of all workers of every craft and calling? The old craft unions or their leaders have willfully neglected their golden opportunity to organize the wage workers of America, through averse policy or lethargy and instability to build up the labor movement. We must have centralization of all workers to cope with centralized money power now in the hands of monopolies, that hinder legislation and hamper the course of our land with their unscrupulous greed for more power.”
In this activity, students should seriously consider the letter-writer’s question. Teachers should have students brainstorm to come up with a list of the individuals they know that work. Students should note the commonalities these individuals share as well as the differences (i.e., the industries they work for, their individual identities or shared roles, and common conceptions of what work is, etc.). Following the creation of such a list, students should consider the challenges that these groups of workers face in their daily lives. What concerns or issues do they recognize as part of the experience of these workers. In what ways might their priorities align and in what ways might their priorities differ based on their lived experiences?
Following a group discussion, each student should use the Workers United Letter Writing worksheet to write their own letter to Lewis as a response to the letter above. Each letter should include a list of ways they think they could improve conditions for all workers in a way that helps unite workers across their separate identities while still accepting and thoughtfully engaging with their differences.