Unions of the Unemployed

UNIONS OF THE UNEMPLOYED (1935–1941). In response to the economic devastation created by the Great Depression, several unemployed organizations arose in the early 1930s to assert the rights of America’s jobless. The Communist-sponsored Unemployed Councils, Musteite Unemployed Leagues, and the Socialist Workers Committee on Unemployment all played a role in this organizational activity, which ended in the merger of the Socialist-dominated Workers’ Alliance and the remnants of the Councils in 1936. The enlarged Workers’ Alliance of America assumed leadership of the unemployed movement for the remainder of the 1930s.

The Alliance attempted to meet the needs of both relief recipients and jobless unionists, including the burgeoning ranks of workers employed on federal projects by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The expansion of government employment resulted in a new worker assumption of employee status, which fostered a sense of entitlement to the collective bargaining rights possessed by employed workers. Alliance leaders professed and practiced solidarity among all workers, employed or unemployed.

The acceleration of unemployed activism coincided with the enormous growth of unions stimulated by Section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Wagner Act of 1935. With the rise of industrial unionism after 1936, the Workers’ Alliance increasingly sought affiliation with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The Alliance’s affinity toward industrial unionism reflected the crucial role played by early unemployed organizers in the rise of industrial unions. As the shock troops of John L. Lewis’s industrial army, these experienced activists often assumed leadership roles in the organization of mass unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW), the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee.

The CIO displayed an active interest in the unemployed from the outset of its own organization. This concern deepened with the onset of the recession of 1937–1938. Declaring that “every worker has the right to a job,” the CIO demanded that the WPA, the Public Works Administration, and other government agencies absorb all surplus labor. As a follow-up, CIO leaders in November 1937 began to develop a coherent policy on union service to the unemployed.

In so doing, Lewis and John Brophy followed a trail blazed by the UAW, which in 1937 had established a Welfare Department committed to serving its unemployed members and thus retaining them within the union. In 1938, the UAW moved to expand this concept by organizing all workers employed by the WPA. So powerful did the union become in Wayne County, Michigan, that for some time it assumed responsibility for certification of the union unemployed for relief purposes. UAW organizers worked tirelessly to inculcate the spirit of unionism among unemployed workers, many of whom were crucial in the organization of Ford, the last holdout against the UAW in Michigan. At the national level, the CIO moved to institutionalize the UAW model by creating an Unemployment Committee and instructing Internationals to assume responsibility for organizing and serving their unemployed members. Left with a contracting organizational base in 1938, the Workers’ Alliance came increasingly to represent relief recipients and those outside the house of industrial unionism. In 1938, this reality led the Alliance to pursue merger with the CIO, but Lewis, fearful of the unemployed organization’s increasingly leftist image, held David Lasser, Herbert Benjamin, and the Workers’ Alliance at arm’s length.

Challenged by CIO activism, the Workers’ Alliance struggled for life after 1938. However, pressures from congressional red-baiters, reduced funding for the WPA, competition from CIO unions, and the gradual improvement of an economy stimulated by defense expenditures doomed the Alliance as a mass organization. Because of their greater resources, the CIO Unemployment Committee and the UAW Welfare Department survived into 1941. By this time, they had become the voice of the “unemployables” whose needs remained unmet on the verge of American entry into World War II.

Despite its short duration, the union-based unemployed movement had played an important role in the development of industrial unionism. By promoting solidarity among jobless and employed workers, CIO unions such as the UAW had been able to discourage the exploitation of the unemployed as scab labor. Moreover, in some instances, the WPA projects and Welfare Committees had become a training ground for the union leadership of the future. For a brief moment, a broadened concept of the union as social family seemed to hold potential as a vehicle for mass organization. In American capitalism’s darkest hour, the army of the unemployed had become a union force.

Goldberg, Chad Alan. “Contesting the Status of Relief Workers During the New Deal: The Workers Alliance of America and the Works Progress Administration, 1935-1941.” Social Science History, 29 (Fall 2005), pp. 337-71.

Lorence, James J. “Controlling the Reserve Army: The United Auto Workers and Michigan’s Unemployed, 1935–1941.” Labor’s Heritage 5 (spring 1994).

Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People’s Movements. New York: Pantheon, 1977.

Rosenzweig, Roy. “Socialism in Our Time: The Socialist Party and the Unemployed, 1932–1936.” Labor History 20 (Fall 1979).

Sargent, James E. “Woodrum’s Economy Bloc: The Attack on Roosevelt’s WPAs.” Virginia Magazine 93 (April 1985).

Sullivan, Martin Edward. “On the Dole: The Relief Crisis in Detroit, 1929–1939.” Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1974.

Workers Alliance of America Records, 1931-1999. Guide. University of Pittsburgh Digital Collections. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3AUS-PPiU-ais200703