International Association of Machinists

INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MACHINISTS. Launched by southern railroad machinists in 1889, the International Association of Machinists (IAM) was by 1900 a national union of skilled machine-shop workers and one of the largest and most influential organizations to be affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The union’s changing politics reflect both the general fortunes of American socialism and the specific history of the machine trades.

The IAM was not, at first, a socialist stronghold. Indeed, the union gained its AFL charter in 1895 at the expense of the International Machinists Union, an industrial organization led by Socialist Labor Party members Thomas Morgan and August Waldinger. By 1903, however, the IAM had become one of the leading socialist opponents of Samuel Gompers within the AFL; supporters of the Socialist Party dominated the union’s executive council, and the IAM constitution committed the union to “class struggle upon both economic and political lines” and to using “the means of production and distribution for the benefit of all the people.” Between 1904 and 1911, moreover, IAM members were prominent among socialist candidates for municipal office, and in the latter year the union elected as president William Johnston, a socialist and former Socialist Party candidate for the governorship of Rhode Island.

This transformation of union politics reflected in part the influence of Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union on IAM members employed in railroad shops—members who resented their leaders’ failure to support the Pullman strike. More important, populist demands for economic and political democracy had special appeal (and strong roots) among railroad machinists fighting large railway companies. With the demise of the People’s Party, the union joined the move of labor’s Left to the Socialist Party, whose gradualist program particularly suited the IAM’s largely Anglo-Saxon leadership. The spread of socialism in the IAM reflected, finally, the obvious failure of pure and simple unionism after 1901, when metal trades employers—with the support of courts and militia—turned to belligerent open-shop policies.

Despite its socialist politics, the IAM remained a highly exclusive union. During the early twentieth century, rapid concentration of capital, technological innovations, and scientific management undermined the privileges and bargaining power of skilled men. These changes reinforced the search for political solutions to workplace exploitation. But the same trends also pitted the sectional orientation of craft leaders against a large minority of IAM members who increasingly turned to industrial unionism and syndicalism as appropriate strategies for preserving control at work. Northern locals proved receptive to influence from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) after 1905, and beginning in 1910 railroad machinists joined all-grades “system federations” and cooperated with activists from the Syndicalist League of North America. Such rank-and-file initiatives were strenuously opposed by conservative and socialist IAM officials alike.

Even before the end of Johnston’s presidency (1926), the IAM followed the labor movement’s left wing in moving away from socialist politics. As with other AFL unions, Woodrow Wilson’s administration (1913–1921) drew IAM support away from the Socialist Party. Wartime economic conditions and labor policies further moderated union politics. With the IAM gaining new members in war industries and representation on the National War Labor Board, collaboration proved more attractive than the Socialist Party’s pacifism. Political moderation, in turn, reinforced the union’s industrial conservatism. IAM leaders continued to endorse amalgamation among metal trades unions, but they also opposed rank-and-file militancy whenever it threatened war production or, as in 1919–1920, it involved cooperation with such radical organizations as the Workers International Industrial Union or the “One Big Union,” as IWW offshoots were variously known.

While the IAM strongly supported railroad nationalization in 1920 and the La Follette candidacy in 1924, by the mid-1920s it had become an exemplar of AFL liberalism—in principle nonpartisan, in practice pro-Democratic, and reserving its strongest political passions for fighting the Communist Party. (The IAM was one of the first unions, in 1925, to make Communist Party membership grounds for expulsion.) IAM executives also played leading roles in the AFL’s battle against the early Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and they sought employer support as a “responsible” alternative to more radical labor organizations. These policies heightened conflict within the union as conservative leaders suppressed militant action by industrial unionist members and disciplined rebellious locals on the West Coast.

For most of the postwar era, too, IAM politics have remained within the AFL-CIO’s liberal wing, with the union a major actor in the Committee on Political Education. But in the late 1970s, amid renewed challenges from anti-union employers and from new technologies (supported once more by government policies), the IAM leadership again moved to the left of the AFL-CIO mainstream. After assuming the IAM presidency in 1977, William Winpisinger became a major figure in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and its successor, the Democratic Socialists of America. While sympathetic to the ideal of an independent labor party, Winpisinger considered it more realistic to push the Democratic Party to the left on issues of social welfare, military spending, and union rights. To this end he strongly advocated building alliances with constituencies outside the union movement (e.g., environmental and peace groups).

These socialist political leanings—unlike those of the pre–World War I IAM—complemented progressive industrial goals, summarized in the union’s 1981 “Technology Bill of Rights.” This proposed amendment to national labor law called for greater union control over the design and use of new technology, with the participation of citizen action groups outside the labor movement. The best-known (if partial) application of these ideals was the Workplace Democracy project launched at Eastern Airlines (1983), in which wage concessions were paired with union representation on the company board and union participation in the implementation of new technology. The union’s capacity to sustain such measures in an era of union decline is questionable (the Eastern agreement collapsed in 1986). So, too, is the IAM leadership’s willingness to integrate progressive political and industrial goals with rank-and-file militancy—a dilemma familiar from the Johnston era and still commonly resolved in favor of bureaucratic control. In retrospect, Winpisinger’s efforts presaged the overturn of conservative AFL-CIO leadership in 1995.

Winpisinger’s successor, George Kourpias, actively supported the reform forces.
In the early twenty-first century, under new leadership, the IAM continued to widen its outreach and promote left-leaning enterprises and causes. In 1966, the union had become the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and continued to further diversified its membership to include, for example, Harley-Davidson workers. In its mission statement, the IAM reaffirmed its belief that “it is a natural right of working people to enjoy to the full extent the wealth created by their labor.”
Since 1990, the affiliated Machinists Non-Partisan Political League donated disproportionately to Democratic candidates. The IAM endorsed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in their campaigns for president. The IAM supported such non-profits as the Economic Policy Institute, Networks Nation, and the Workers Defense League. High on the agenda was opposition to the growing number of right-to-work laws and in 2019 endorsements of medicare-for-all. Nevertheless, complaints of serious mismanagement of union dues, especially with regard to the pension fund, brought the IAM to the attention of the US Department of Labor multiple times since 2002. Charges of racism also sullied its reputation. With aggressive organizing in the aerospace industry, the IAM in 2020 claimed a membership of 600,000 active and retired members.

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Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Perlman, Mark. The Machinists: A New Study in American Trade Unionism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961.

Rodden, Robert. The Fighting Machinists: A Century of Struggle. Washington, D.C.: Kelly Press, 1984.