Benjamin Y. Fong is associate director of the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University. He has a Substack focusing on labor and logistics called On the Seams.
From iconic strikes at Goodyear to the battle against GM, episode 3 of Organize the Unorganized: The Rise of the CIO tells the story of transformational victories in rubber, auto, and steel that put the militant CIO on the map.
Episode 2 of Organize the Unorganized: The Rise of the CIO explores the institutional formation of the CIO and the key personalities who would become the organization’s early leaders, John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman.
Episode 1 of Organize the Unorganized: The Rise of the CIO explores key developments that led to the CIO’s founding: the split with the AFL, the broken promises of welfare capitalism, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the mass strikes of 1934.
The 1937 Little Steel strike is often dismissed as a failure and relegated to a footnote. But it was a courageous organizing effort and a crucial moment in US labor history — revealing the limits of the New Deal order and the deepest dynamics of capitalism.
Declining union density has diminished American workers’ awareness of labor organizing, pride in union status, and sense of belonging to a tradition of collective struggle. The history of the CIO can teach us how to embed unions in the working class again.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations is often understood to the be the innovative, solidarity-based alternative to the American Federation Labor, its immediate predecessor. But the CIO had limits too — and the AFL had more to offer than it gets credit for.
The 1930s rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations led to millions of people being union members for the first time. The lesson of the CIO is that it’s necessary to harness the collective power of the working class on a grand scale.
In the depths of the Great Depression, maritime and waterfront workers on the Pacific Coast of the US — from Bellingham, Washington, to San Diego, California — erupted in militant strikes against their shipping magnate employers.
The level of anti-capitalist sentiment in the US today hasn’t been seen since the 1930s. Labor radicals seized that moment to create the pivotal Congress of Industrial Organizations. We should take lessons from their achievements — and their missteps.
When the Great Depression sank workers to new depths, craft unions weren’t up to the task. Then, in 1934, a team of revolutionary leftists in Minneapolis organized a brave and bloody strike that reinvigorated labor and changed the course of American history.
Workers in the US were deeply split in the 1930s, not least by race and ethnicity. To organize greater swaths of the working class, the Congress of Industrial Organizations had to turn division into solidarity.
In the 1930s, unions grabbed headlines and won major battles with sit-down strikes, where striking workers occupied their workplaces. The fiery tactic put the Congress of Industrial Organizations on the map and struck fear in the hearts of business elites.
Workers in the Great Depression were beaten down but desperate for change. When a militant new labor federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, raised their sense of political possibility, they seized the opportunity and unionized en masse.
Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph’s Jobs and Freedom Strategy offers a path forward for a Left that has become increasingly insular, minoritarian, and powerless.
In the 1930s and ’40s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations unionized American workers with an energy never seen before. But its peak years were short-lived, and the labor movement has struggled to reach such heights again.
Tomorrow, 75,000 health care workers are set to strike at hundreds of Kaiser facilities across several states in the largest such strike in US history. Their primary grievance is low staffing levels, which unions say are hurting patients and workers alike.
The US is remarkable for its extreme relationship to drugs, marked by a love affair with psychoactive substances of all kinds and also draconian efforts to curtail drug use. That relationship has roots in America’s particularly virulent strain of capitalism.
Activist and organizer Norman Hill was present for every major development in the civil rights movement during the 1960s. He spoke to Jacobin about the arc of the movement, the legacy of its leadership, and the lessons for the modern left.
In the absence of a powerful workers’ movement, 19th-century reformers blamed alcohol for poverty and despair. Their assumption that moral shortcomings rather than political and economic ones were the root cause unfortunately resonates with our politics today.
John Brophy earned the moniker “Mr. CIO” in the 1930s for his excellent organizing for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He was steadfast and never flashy, which is perhaps why he’s been forgotten. It’s also what makes him a model for our times.