Trade Union Unity League
TRADE UNION UNITY LEAGUE. Established in Cleveland in August 1929 as the American section of the Red International of Labor Unions, the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) functioned as the industrial arm of the Communist Party during the early years of the Great Depression. The league replaced the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), founded in 1920 by William Z. Foster. The TUEL was a rank-and-file opposition group designed to “bore from within” mainstream labor organizations and win them over to a revolutionary program. In contrast, the TUUL aimed to build a revolutionary labor movement through the establishment of dual unions. Its program called for a militant “class against class” line and mass strikes rather than labor/management cooperation; organization of the unorganized; the seven-hour day and five-day week; world trade union unity; full equality for black workers; social insurance; and “the overthrow of the present system of capitalist ownership and exploitation and the establishment of a Soviet system.”
The TUUL’s formation is most often explained in terms of the Comintern’s shift from a United Front to a more sectarian line in the course of 1928. The latter held that capitalism was entering a new era offering tremendous potential for revolutionary movements. At this historical moment it was essential for Communists to abandon movements dominated by “reactionaries” and “social fascists” and to develop their own revolutionary labor organizations.
While the TUUL undoubtedly owed its creation in part to such formulations, practical considerations seemed also to dictate this shift. By the beginning of 1929, long before the league’s foundation, separate “red unions” had already been created in coal mining, textiles, and the needle trades, where wholesale expulsions of rank-and-file radicals during the late 1920s created a mass base for the revolutionary unions. Communists were also able to build a viable industrial union in the giant New York hotel and restaurant industry. In addition, smaller TUUL unions or leagues were active in auto, electrical manufacturing, meat packing, steel, tobacco manufacturing, shoe and leather, furniture, the maritime trades, and several other industries. The TUUL’s National Textile Workers Union led strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina, Paterson, New Jersey, Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Allentown, Pennsylvania, while the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union led a desperate strike of vegetable field laborers in the Imperial Valley of California. In mining, the Communists forged a brief alliance with insurgent elements in the United Mine Workers of America under the banner of the Save the Union movement and waged violent strikes in the western Pennsylvania and Kentucky coalfields during 1931. TUUL membership fluctuated wildly, often in relation to the many strikes the organization led, but it seems clear that the league never represented more than a tiny fraction of organized labor in one of labor’s weakest eras.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from the TUUL’s small size that it had little significance. Its activists organized the Unemployed Councils, the bases for a giant unemployed movement in the early 1930s, and its greatest importance may lie in the groundwork it set for the industrial union movement of the late 1930s. As the Communist line shifted once again during 1934 and the TUUL was dissolved in favor of Popular Front cooperation with other unionists, thousands of experienced Communist activists assumed key roles in the movement that created the giant Congress of Industrial Organizations and unionized American basic industry by the end of World War II.
Further reading
Barrett, James R. William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Devinatz, Victor G. "A Reevaluation of the Trade Union Unity League, 1929-1934." Science & Society 71 (2007): 1-22.
Johanningsmeier, Edward P. Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Johanningsmeier, Edward P. "The Trade Union Unity League: American Communists and the Transition to Industrial Unionism: 1928-1934." Labor History, 42.2 (2001): 159-177.