Industrial Unionism

INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM. The struggle for industrial unionism has been a central theme in American labor history since the late nineteenth century. Efforts to organize unskilled workers and to confront major corporations have often faced fierce opposition from employers and the state. Not surprisingly, these efforts have often brought the Left into a prominent role within the labor movement, while they have more often than not been opposed by the official leadership of the organized labor movement. Into the 1980s, the struggle for industrial unionism has continued to be a magnet for militancy and radicalism within the labor movement.

Coal miners and rail workers, employed by America’s largest industrial corporations in the late nineteenth century, were the first to try to develop industrial unions. In the early twentieth century, labor activists and radicals attempted to spread industrial unionism throughout America. They argued that organizational and technological changes were destroying the bases for craft unionism. They pointed to the Homestead, Pennsylvania, strike of 1892. There, a strong craft union and a unified community were defeated by their employer’s ability to transfer production to other plants and to replace skilled workers with the new technology of the Bessemer furnace. Activists likewise pointed to the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants arriving each year, taking unskilled jobs in the new, expanding industries owned by gigantic, impersonal corporations. A new approach was needed to reach these new workers, the militants argued, as well as to deal with the new corporations and their new technologies.

Experienced unionists, Socialist Labor Party veterans, socialists, anarchists, and labor radicals joined to establish the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905. Their approach—revolutionary industrial unionism, prepared to cripple the American economy through a general strike—was opposed to the conservative craft unionism of the “American Separation of Labor.” Leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in turn condemned the new organization. Their opposition helped corporations and the state destroy the IWW during World War I and thereby derail the struggle for industrial unionism.

Labor radicals in organizations of all sorts kept alive the idea of industrial unionism during the 1920s and early 1930s. Welfare capitalism, company unionism, and the open shop combined with new technologies and new investment patterns to decimate the organized labor movement. Yet small, committed organizations like the Trade Union Unity League, the Communist Party, Trotskyists, and even remnants of the IWW and the old Socialist party continued to put forward the struggle for industrial unionism, particularly among unskilled workers. Here and there, skilled workers experimented with “amalgamation movements,” linking up different groups of skilled workers employed by the same corporation and moving toward collective action and broader-based organization.

During the 1930s, deteriorating conditions including wage cuts, speed-ups, deteriorating working conditions, and management capriciousness in layoffs and recalls spread across industry. These developments, along with the more long-term industrial trends of technological change, managerial reorganization and the emergence of multiplant corporations, rendered industrial unionism the necessary first step for any future labor revival. At the base, most of the new unions came out of the work of experienced unionists and committed radicals, many of whom had participated in the efforts to keep industrial unionism alive during the 1920s and early 1930s. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers provided the symbolic figurehead and made himself the leader of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Together with counterparts in clothing, steel, rubber, printing, auto, electrical products, and meatpacking, Lewis spurred the greatest union organizing drive in US history. During campaign after campaign, the Left provided organizers, leaflet writers, newspaper editors, resources, and communication networks.

In the aftermath of World War II, however, the Left found itself largely exorcised from the CIO. In turn, the remaining CIO unions incorporated themselves into the existing systems of collective bargaining and business unionism, and logically returned to the arms of the AFL through merger of the two federations in the middle 1950s. Now a partner in the “social contract” of Keynesianism and Cold War America, industrial unionism lost much of its historic thrust.

By the 1980s, deteriorating conditions for organized labor returned the struggle for industrial unionism to its rightful place. Corporations diversified and went multinational, thereby sapping America’s industrial base, undermining industrial unions, and confronting industrial workers with unprecedented demands for concessions. Faced with declining manufacturing membership, existing AFL-CIO unions resorted to mergers and amalgamations, taking in workers from industries not in the least related to their traditional bases. Industrial workers often found themselves a minority in their own unions, unable to control the decisions affecting their lives. The Hormel struggle of 1985–1986 in Austin, Minnesota, made these issues clear. This protracted conflict saw expressions of solidarity, militancy, and union democracy rarely seen in the previous fifty years. It also saw a familiar return of official union leadership opposed to the struggle for thorough-going industrial unionism. The solidarity campaign around Hormel likewise offered a notable if short-lived opening for the Left, in popular strike support and associated cultural activities, including the creation of a historic mural.

Labor’s few advances in recent decades have increasingly featured industrial or workplace-wide unionization over craft unions for one obvious reason: health services and the various entertainment industries have offered the best opportunities to organize. A fracture within the AFL-CIO brought into existence an alliance intended to become a new labor federation. Change to Win (CTW), formally launched in 2005, featured hotel and restaurant workers along with health workers as the model unionists of the new era. The failure and collapse of CTW, amidst infighting and a union-unfriendly environment, demonstrated for many observers and activists the need for new and better approaches, including a social solidarity embracing the community beyond the workplace. Another of labor’s aspirations, organizing the growing armies of gig workers, also demanded an occupation-wide basis. Blue collar jobs in on-line sales, especially warehouse workers, seemed especially ripe for a renewal of industrial union values and goals, a goal still largely to be realized.

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Lynd, Alice, and Staughton Lynd, eds. Rank and File. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982.