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UNIONS NEED BOTH DEMOCRACY AND STRONG LEADERSHIP, AN INTERVIEW WITH
RUTH MILKMAN  
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Benjamin Y. Fong
August 19, 2024
Jacobin
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_ A common view of the two major US labor federations of the 20th
century is that the AFL was top-down while the CIO was bottom-up. In
truth, the CIO’s success was owed to a potent mix of rank-and-file
militancy and strategic leadership. _

Richard Frankensteen, organizer for the United Auto Workers,
addressing a crowd in Detroit, Michigan, near the Ford Motor Company's
River Rouge plant on June 5, 1937., Bettmann / Getty Images

 

The rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the
1930s marked a pivotal moment in American labor history. Sociologist
Ruth Milkman [[link removed]] offers a nuanced
perspective on this era, exploring the relationship between union
leadership and worker militancy against the backdrop of changing
economic and legal conditions. Her insights on union democracy, the
efficacy of militant tactics, and the CIO’s strengths and weaknesses
provide valuable lessons for today’s labor movement.

Ruth Milkman is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY
Graduate Center and the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. She is
the author, most recently, of _Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat_
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(Polity, 2020) and _On Gender, Labor, and Inequality_
[[link removed]] (University of
Illinois Press, 2016).

One consistent feature of Milkman’s analysis of the CIO moment is
her ability to see both sides of the debates about the period. There
are multiple paths to union victory, and they don’t always align
with inherited theories of transformation.

Benjamin Y. Fong
What was the CIO, and what is its primary historical significance?

Ruth Milkman
The CIO first formed as a committee within the American Federation of
Labor, or the AFL, in 1935. It was called the Committee for Industrial
Organization, and later it broke away from the AFL and formed a
separate organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations. It
was a group of unions that decided it was time to organize on an
industrial basis rather than an occupational basis, as most AFL unions
had traditionally done. So following a lot of changes in the economy,
the way in which companies were organized, and the de-skilling of work
that led to the possibility of mass production on assembly lines, the
old-fashioned way of organizing people based on their occupational or
craft group made less and less sense.

It’s not that the CIO leaders were the first to figure that out.
There were lots of experiments with industrial unionism prior to the
1930s, but at this point in the middle of the Depression, and in a
period when labor law was changing in a way that was beneficial to
union organizing, a bunch of labor leaders decided this was the moment
for change.

Benjamin Y. Fong
Why was the AFL so attached to the craft orientation?

Ruth Milkman
It goes back to the nineteenth century when mass production didn’t
yet exist, and modern labor law didn’t exist either. It was very
hard to unionize, a lot like today actually, in that the law was
totally stacked against unions. And so one of the few sources of power
for workers was skill. If you were a skilled carpenter or machinist,
the employer depended on you much the way employers depend on, say, IT
workers today. If you stopped working, it would be very disruptive to
an employer, and so that became the primary basis for successful
organizing in the nineteenth century. If you couldn’t be easily
replaced, you had some power, and you could extract concessions from
employers, and that was much harder to do if you were not skilled.

There were attempts to organize unskilled workers here and there, and
some of them succeeded, though not usually in a sustained way. The
most famous is the Knights of Labor in the 1880s, which had a meteoric
rise and fall. They organized everybody, but that was difficult to
sustain in this period where there was no law protecting the right to
collective bargaining.

Benjamin Y. Fong
The dream of industrial unionism had been around for decades before
the CIO organized the mass production industries. What were the
specific factors involved in their success?

Ruth Milkman

I should say first that the prior history was not 100 percent
failures. For example, the garment workers in the 1910s successfully
organized on an industrial basis, starting in 1909 with the big strike
in New York City that is sometimes called the “Uprising of the
20,000.” That was industrial unionism. The union involved had
previously included only the cutters and the other skilled male
workers, and then there was this uprising of the less-skilled masses
of women workers. They successfully organized by the tens of thousands
and won a union. But it was difficult to sustain. The mine workers
also organized on an industrial basis quite early and relatively
successfully. And of course, the head of the [United] Mine Workers
union, John L. Lewis, was the main leader of the CIO later.

But what changed in the ’30s? Well, a bunch of things. I already
mentioned the rise of mass production, which makes focusing on skilled
craft workers less and less logical, because suddenly you have these
masses of workers gathered together in large factories, and most of
them can be easily replaced. They aren’t skilled enough to have the
kind of leverage that the AFL unions once had. So more and more people
start thinking, well, maybe instead of just organizing people based on
skill, we should organize whoever the boss hires, and our power will
be in unity, not in irreplaceability.

There’s a lot of experimentation with that idea before the ’30s,
but then with the Depression, the New Deal, and the passage of the
Wagner Act giving workers the right to collective bargaining, the
moment seemed opportune to launch this on a big scale, and that’s
what happened. There was a lot of resistance from employers, despite
the law, just like today, but they did pull it off.

But of course, it’s during the war that it really takes off. In the
late ’30s, there are some big breakthroughs, most famously the 1937
recognition of the United Auto Workers [UAW] after the strike in
Flint, Michigan. That’s the big moment when people say, “Yes, we
can do this,” and it starts spreading after that. But it’s really
when the war leads to the dramatic expansion of manufacturing in the
US, as the economy is completely converted to producing military
goods, that the big numbers come.

Benjamin Y. Fong
What was the role of FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt] and the federal
government in spurring the upsurge of the ’30s?

Ruth Milkman
There’s a big debate about that among scholars. I’m a little bit
of an agnostic. One side points to the strikes that occurred prior to
the passage of the Wagner Act in the early ’30s — the Teamsters
strike in Minneapolis, the Ohio auto parts strike, the west coast
waterfront strike. Some people argue that worker militancy made FDR
and his colleagues concerned that there was going to be a lot of
industrial strife and disorder, and this was not good in the middle of
a depression when they were trying to get things going again
economically. In that view, passing the Wagner Act was a co-optation
of worker militancy. That’s one view. The other view is that it was
only after the passage of the law that the CIO was really able to take
off.

By the way, the AFL unions also grew in the late ’30s, partly
because of the Wagner Act, so it was not just the CIO. In my
generation, which came of age in the 1970s and in the waning days of
the New Left, the dominant view was that the AFL unions were racist,
sexist, and anti-immigrant, so we tended to be dismissive of their
history. We believed that the only unions worth paying any attention
to were the unions that came with the CIO. They had their warts too,
but they were much better. That was the orthodoxy. So the fact that
the AFL also grew in the 1930s was a surprise when I learned about it.
So at least for my generation, there was a distorted view of the two
federations that we’re still trying to correct.

Anyhow, the other view is that it was the law that was the key; that
Roosevelt, as a progressive, forward-looking guy, concerned about the
Depression and how to get out of it, wanted industrial stability and
therefore fought along with Robert Wagner and the others for the
passage of the Wagner Act against great resistance from employers and
their political advocates in Congress.

I think the truth probably lies somewhere in between, that the
militancy did contribute to the desire to stabilize industrial
relations on the one side. In fact, if you look at the language of the
Wagner Act, it actually says that the purpose of the law is to level
the playing field, stabilize industrial relations. That’s what they
were thinking about. And at the same time, once it passed, it created
completely new conditions that enabled unions to really gain traction.
Ultimately, they’re not mutually exclusive views, and I myself come
down in the middle.

Benjamin Y. Fong
How do you see the relation between the top-down and bottom-up
elements in the CIO?

Ruth Milkman

I think you absolutely need both. So for example, take the Flint
strike of 1936, ’37. Even with the law on their side, I’m not sure
the UAW could have possibly gained a foothold without both the
militancy of ordinary workers and the strategic capacity of the
leaders. They didn’t just spontaneously rise up — they had a whole
plan of action that was extremely successful in how to outwit General
Motors. They pulled it off amazingly.

It also really helps to have the law either neutral or on your side.
There’s no question about that because labor law has been used as a
battering ram against unions throughout American history. So, in the
1930s, when it seems to be tilting in a way that doesn’t favor
workers, but at least equalizes the playing field between management
and labor, that’s key. That’s not either top-down or bottom-up,
but it’s a precondition for successful organizing.

That’s part of why it’s so difficult to organize big corporations
today. The employers have all the cards in terms of the legal stuff.
The places where unionism _is_ winning a foothold, just like in the
days of the old AFL, is where workers have skill. So medical interns
and residents, they’re winning. Graduate student workers and
adjuncts, who are not easily replaced. Maybe more easily replaced than
residents and interns because there are a lot of us academic workers
out there, but still, it’s a very highly skilled job. You can’t
just fire everybody and start over tomorrow. Journalists are another
example. They have a lot of skill and they’re winning.

So in a way we are back to those days where skill really matters. The
law is less relevant because you have power outside the law. It
doesn’t matter so much if you have other leverage, based on the fact
that you’re hard to replace. There is a great article by Howard
Kimeldorf, about the pre-CIO period that makes this exact point that
workers won strikes when they were not easily replaced, and I think it
applies today too.

But back to your question: historians tend to focus on bottom-up over
top-down elements. For instance, everybody focuses on the UAW. When I
was in graduate school and writing a dissertation, I thought I would
study the UAW, the UE [United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of
America], and the United Steelworkers, who were the three biggest CIO
unions at the peak during the war. And I ended up doing just the UAW
and the UE. But one thing that was so striking was that there was
almost nothing written about the steelworkers relative to the others.
Nobody was interested. Whereas there are libraries about the UAW.

Why? Because the United Steelworkers was a top-down union from the
very beginning. It did not fit the New Left view of what the CIO was
all about. That view was that the CIO unions were democratic and
militant and then got crushed with McCarthyism. But in fact they were
very mixed all along. In that regard, the CIO wasn’t as different
from the AFL as many people assume.

David Brody has made a big deal about that, arguing that there was
much more continuity between the AFL and the CIO than a lot of people
appreciate. His point has been absorbed now into the conventional
wisdom, but when he first wrote about it, there was this romance about
the UAW and the communist-led unions too, of which the UE was the
biggest.

Benjamin Y. Fong
Why has the UAW in particular held such a romanticized place for labor
scholars?

Ruth Milkman
I think because it’s in this sweet spot between the communist-led
unions, which some people also were very enamored of, and the
mainstream, more conservative unions. The UAW was led by leftists,
some of them communists, some of them socialists, some of them
Trotskyists. And because they’re all competing for domination, at
least for a while before the [Walter] Reuther faction wins out, the
UAW is more democratic internally. I think that’s the kind of thing
that riveted people and made it seem like the most attractive
organization among the array of CIO unions.

I remember this book by Irving Howe and B. J. Widick called _The UAW
and Walter Reuther_, which is all about internal democracy and the
organized factions within the union that kept each other honest. The
UAW resisted, at least for a while, what Robert Michels, the Italian
theorist, called the “iron law of oligarchy.” “Who says
organization, says oligarchy” is the famous quote from Michels’s
book. In other words, unions ossify into these top-down organizations,
where the leaders have all the power, and they suppress dissent.

Again, the UAW, at least for a while in its early days, was different
from that, precisely because there were these organized factions that
forced each other to be accountable to the rank-and-file as well as to
each other.

Benjamin Y. Fong
How important would you say union democracy is to building powerful
workers’ movements?

Ruth Milkman
I think you would want to distinguish between building unions and
sustaining unions. In my view, in the building phase it’s not that
necessary. If you can extract union recognition because you’re John
L. Lewis and you basically control the coal industry and you can
threaten to disrupt the steel industry in a country where that’s the
fundamental product that everything else depends on, maybe it
doesn’t matter if you’ve got anything democratic behind you. On
the other hand, when the employer goes after you later and tries to
get rid of the union or weaken it, it really does help to have
militant rank-and-file workers there defending it. So, that’s where
it becomes more critical than in the initial winning of recognition.

Of course, you can win recognition in a lot of different ways, as we
see today as well. Sometimes it is completely top-down, and it’s
because somehow there’s leverage from the organization that makes it
less costly to the employer to say yes than to keep fighting.

Benjamin Y. Fong
Could you describe the importance of the sit-down tactic in the early
stages of the CIO?

Ruth Milkman
Factory occupations — what better way to disrupt production than to
just take over the building? In the case of the Flint strike, it went
on for a few months that they occupied those factories. That was not
the only tactic, of course, but it was the most publicly visible one.
And when they won, most observers, workers, and others attributed the
victory to the sit-down strike. We could argue about whether that was
really the key thing, but that was certainly the optic. That’s how
it looked to everybody.

And there was this epidemic of sit-down strikes thereafter, all over
the place, including retail stores in Detroit. There was a famous
Woolworth’s strike where the clerks were sitting on the counter and
occupying the store. It just inspired copycat organizing all over the
place.

Why was it so inspiring? It’s a pretty appealing idea: if you’re a
worker who’s treated terribly by your employer every day, you can
just take over the whole enterprise and win rights by doing so. I
think it’s as simple as that.

I’ll tell you a story about this guy called Clyde Summers, who’s
dead now, but who was a very eminent labor law scholar who taught at
University of Pennsylvania for many years. He came of age in the
’30s. I met him once at some conference, and he said to me, “You
know, Ruth, in my day, labor law was a field for romantics. Now,
it’s a field for masochists.” This was probably in the ’80s or
early ’90s that we had this conversation, but it really stayed with
me.

There was something transformative about the 1930s: the sit-down
strikes, the Wagner Act, the New Deal itself, regulation, FDR, all of
which emerged against the backdrop of the biggest crisis that
capitalism has ever experienced, the Great Depression. This was a
thrilling time for the people who participated in it, and I think that
romance lives on among people like me who are interested in labor
history. There’s something magical about it that we haven’t really
seen since — or before, for that matter. It’s when all the stars
lined up, which doesn’t happen too often in labor history.

Benjamin Y. Fong
Do you see other points of leverage that workers can use today, other
than skill and power at the point of production?

Ruth Milkman
Well, I think sometimes they’re able to seize the moral high ground
and win the hearts and minds of the public on the basis of exposing
employer abuse and stuff like that. I spent some time studying
low-wage immigrant workers and their organizing efforts, which were
pretty successful in the ’90s and ’00s. There it was symbolic
leverage, some people call it, or the ability to expose abuse — that
was key. It didn’t really have to cost employers very much to
recognize the union, in fact, and it would benefit the workers
greatly. Janitors, arguably among the less skilled occupations out
there, were pretty successful in pulling that off. It was through what
some people call “public dramas,” figuring out ways to capture
media attention and therefore public attention by dramatizing the
plight of a low-wage workforce.

After the 1950s, the AFL-CIO was a powerful force. “Big Labor,”
everybody called it. You don’t hear that term much anymore. The idea
was that unionized workers were pampered and over-privileged, that the
unions had so much power that they had won all these great things.
Arguably that was true up through the ’70s in some ways. But nobody
could say that about janitors who were being paid less than the
minimum wage. Nobody could make the “Big Labor” argument faced
with the public dramas that Justice for Janitors and other groups like
it pulled off. So that is another source of power for labor: moral
power or symbolic power.

Benjamin Y. Fong
Why were the CIO’s gains undone?

Ruth Milkman
Well, in recent decades the CIO unions have suffered huge defeats,
mostly because they have lost their leverage. In the industries that
their efforts focused on, mostly manufacturing industries, the rug has
been pulled out from under them by the employers, first in the form of
outsourcing, of moving production away from where unions are strong,
either within the US to the South or outside the country entirely.
That totally undermines the whole logic of industrial unionism.
There’s also new technology that has shrunken the workforce in those
industries quite a bit over the years. So, the base of the old CIO
unions is almost an endangered species.

Now, this may be changing, insofar as the current global conflicts are
bringing manufacturing back to the US or making people aware that
it’s good to have at least some of it here in the United States.
That may create new opportunities for manufacturing unions to make
some kind of rebound. I don’t think it would ever be on the scale of
the ’30s and ’40s, but there’s something going on there, so
we’ll see. I think it’s too early to make any big predictions
about that.

Benjamin Y. Fong
How do you relate the lessons of the CIO moment to the present?

Ruth Milkman
There’s a whole new group of people who have a critique of
capitalism, just as CIO organizers did in the 1930s, and a lot of them
are increasingly interested in labor organizing. So, that is very
similar to the 1930s. This is a huge resource for the labor movement.

But it’s going to be really difficult to win CIO-style 35 percent
density in the United States, without a change in the labor law. So
instead, we have a few highly unionized cities, places where labor has
maintained a foothold. Then there are the skilled workers, in sectors
like higher education and health care, and maybe tech workers will be
part of that mix in the future. But I still think that without a major
reform of labor law that undermines the ability of employers to just
drag things out forever and defeat union organizing campaigns, it’s
going to be difficult.

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Ruth Milkman teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center and at the Murphy
Institute for Worker Education. She is the author of the forthcoming
book On Gender, Labor, and Inequality.

Benjamin Y. Fong is honors faculty fellow and associate director of
the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the
author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st
Century Binge (Verso 2023).

* Labor Unions; Labor History; CIO History; Union Organizing;
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