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LABOR DAY LESSONS: CAN CIO BEST PRACTICES AID UNION ORGANIZING TODAY?
 
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Steve Early
September 4, 2026
CounterPunch
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_ In his new book, Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy: Building a
Progressive Labor Movement (Cornell), sociology professor Kim Scipes
examines parallel efforts to build two CIO unions in the Midwest—via
the Steel Workers and Packinghouse Workers. _

The CIO’s second headquarters was an office on the third floor of
this building, the United Mine Workers’ headquarters, at 900 15th
Street NW, Washington, DC, Public Domain

 

Industrial union building in the 1930s has long been the lodestar for
the post-New Deal labor left.

If organized labor in the U.S. could go from historic membership lows
in the 1920s to an early 1950s peak union density of nearly one-third
of all private sector workers, maybe that great leap forward could be
repeated again, sometime in the future?

Other than the public sector worker upsurge of the late 1960s and
1970s—which has propped up (with less success over time) overall
unionization rates ever since—there has been little sign yet of the
second coming of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), in
some 21st century form.

Unless a union like my own, the Communications Workers of America
(CWA), or the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), or the
International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) was able to neutralize
management opposition, using bargaining leverage with a partially
unionized employer, there have been few recent private sector
organizing breakthroughs on a large scale, certainly not industry wide
ones.

Starbucks workers have won hundreds of National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB) elections in small retail store units but, so far, have been
thwarted in their effort to reach an acceptable national agreement
covering thousands of workers. At Amazon, representation votes have
been far harder to win; when bargaining rights have been won, union
supporters face even longer first contract delays.

In their own struggle for collective bargaining, workers in basic
industry in the 1930s also had to overcome past defeats and find new
ways of organizing themselves to change the balance of power between
themselves and giant corporations. In his new book, _Unions, Race, and
Popular Democracy: Building a Progressive Labor Movement_ (Cornell),
sociology professor Kim Scipes examines parallel efforts to build two
CIO unions in the Midwest—via the Steel Workers Organizing Committee
(SWOC) and the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee. (PWOC)

MIXING THEORY AND PRACTICE

The author is a long-time labor educator and faculty union member, as
well as an academic researcher with many prior publications. He has
devoted much of his career to mixing theory and practice, and is adept
at popularizing his findings and ideas to reach a non-academic
audience.

In his detailed case studies, Scipes recounts the key role that
rank-and-file activists played in the creation of what became the
United Steel Workers of America and United Packinghouse Workers of
America (UPWA) respectively.

The book is full of valuable lessons for those hoping to have 21st
century success in “developing an inclusive, rank-and-file based
unionism guided by democratic decision making,” rather than having
full-time officials, far removed from the shop floor, exercise too
much bureaucratic control.

Just like Depression-era radicals in the SWOC and PWOC, activists in
present-day networks like the Emergency Workplace Organizing
Committee, co-sponsored by Democratic Socialists of America, have to
navigate a labor landscape still overly-dominated by the latter-type
of labor organization.

Scipes’ book includes a compelling indictment of the US labor
movement’s historic failures to resist racism and, in the case of
some unions, their disgraceful record of discriminating against black
workers and even white women as members.

He also provides much evidence that denying workers of color an equal
voice in union affairs—where and when that was the case—ended up
being self-defeating, because it reinforced the divide-and-conquer
strategies of management and hampered efforts to raise working class
living standards for all. The result was a steady “weakening of
labor’s power” and “white workers getting less themselves than
they would have gotten had blacks and other peoples of color been
included as equals…”

RANK AND FILE MILITANCY

Among the book’s many strengths is the author’s understanding that
rank-and-file militants can also be “marginalized” and deprived of
“appropriate attention” in labor history because both academic
researchers and authors of labor leader biographies have, in the past,
focused too much on the role of top officials.

The author highlights the UPWA’s exemplary record of developing
black leadership in half of its founding locals “in racist,
segregated Chicago” will be very instructive for seekers of greater
racial and gender diversity among elected local officers today.

Scipes’ discussion of the UPWA’s approach to membership education
and political action, building alliances with non-labor groups, and
fighting racial injustice on the job and in the community has great
contemporary relevance and resonance. Modern day organizers face
similar challenges to building unity between “white ethnics,”
African-Americans, and recent immigrants from Latin America, the
Middle East, and Haiti.

_Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy_ very much follows in the
footsteps of Tony Gilpin’s _The Long Deep Grudge_, a history of the
militant, racially integrated, and internally democratic Farm
Equipment Workers, a left-led union similar to the Packinghouse
Workers in its heyday.

UFCW REFORM STRUGGLE

The evolution of PWOC into a far more democratic and progressive union
than the USWA–deeply committed to developing and elevating
African-American leadership long ago–will be of particular interest
to union reformers now seeking to transform the United Food and
Commercial Workers (UFCW).

That AFL-CIO affiliate, with 1.3 million members, is the conservative
amalgamated union that UPWA eventually ended up in, via a series of
mergers that much diluted its original organizational heritage and
culture.

As Scipes suggests, if more unions today were like the original
Packinghouse Workers, they might not have had such a hard time
rallying their own members against the clear and present danger of a
right-wing, anti-union Republican control of Congress and the White
House. 

During three presidential election cycles, Donald Trump’s electoral
college win in 2016 and popular vote victory two years ago exposed how
the decline in union social and political influence and membership
density in the rust belt has left too many working-class people overly
receptive to MAGA appeals, based on “white supremacy” and
immigrant bashing.

The “social justice unionism” that Scipes advocates as a better
way forward, now and in the 1930s, definitely proved to be a buffer
against fascism during the Great Depression. Readers of_ Unions, Race,
and Popular Democracy_ will find it to be an important contribution to
current discussions about how to create more militant, progressive
unions through internal restructuring, democratization, and
reform—or starting all over again with independent labor
organizations outside the AFL-CIO.

_STEVE EARLY has been active in the labor movement since 1972. He was
an organizer and international representative for the Communications
Workers of American between 1980 and 2007. He is the author of four
books, most recently Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money and The
Remaking of An American City from Beacon Press. He can be reached at
[email protected]_

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