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.
===
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).
Spread the word