CONVENTIONAL WISDOMS

A new brand of unionism exploded on the American scene in the 1930s. Between 1934 and 1937, general strikes were waged in San Francisco and Minneapolis. Automobile and rubber workers staged sitdown strikes in Michigan and Ohio. Miners took over mines and steelworkers shut down steel mills in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Throughout the country, workers previously ignored by or excluded from unions were busy being organized into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

Working-class insurgency in this period was new in part because it was political in the broadest sense. More than ideologically radical, the CIO was radically “political.” Unlike the American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions, at least initially, CIO affiliates were more internally democratic and, to the extent they practiced industrial unionism, antielitist as well. CIO unions were also, relatively speaking, more inclusive on matters of race and gender. Their direct action tactics, moreover, made political participation an organizing strategy. These expressions of working-class insurgency were perhaps most profoundly political because they made workplace governance an issue. Workers insisted on the right to participate in decisions about work; and they forced factory owners to observe that right officially. They compelled owners to bargain in good faith; and they refused to work until employers formally recognized their organizations. CIO successes empowered ordinary workers and seriously restricted management's unilateral authority on the shopfloor.