Stephen Schwartz: American Labor Unions and How They Got That Way
[Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.]
Labor unions in the United States were not always tied to the Democratic party and to a leftist ideological agenda. Once upon a time, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) stood at odds with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); the former resisted statist labor law changes and leftist union policies beginning in the 1930s and the latter supported them.
The AFL and the CIO united in 1955, but two decades before, William Green, president of the older AFL movement, denounced the CIO in terms familiar to present-day tea party critics of the Obama administration. On September 7, 1937, as reported in the Washington Post, Green assailed CIO leader John L. Lewis for “subordinating the welfare of workers to personal political ambitions .  .  . and encouraging communistic support.” Green warned that CIO ambitions could “pave the way to a fascist dictatorship.”
The AFL’s Green, who generally supported the New Deal but criticized Franklin Roosevelt’s diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia, pledged that his labor organizers “are not seeking political preferment. They are not moved by a consuming ambition to establish themselves as political dictators.” In today’s era of “card check” unionism, when rank-and-file union members have almost no voice, the message seems uncannily relevant: “Shall we be ruled from the bottom up or from the top down, by an individual who is governed only by a consuming ambition?”
Criticism of governmental unionism in the late 1930s was not limited to William Green. The CIO unions were frequently imposed in the workplace by orders from the National Labor Relations Board (which included numerous prominent Communists) in disregard of worker preferences for the AFL. The CIO unions were also replete with Communist officials. Labor militants who were anti-Stalinist kept their unions in the AFL.
The anti-Communist unionists included, in the New York garment industry, immigrant Jewish social democrats who had fought the czars and the Bolsheviks in Russia, and Italian-American leftists who were the most serious enemies of Mussolini. The Communists and their enthusiasts in the media relentlessly attacked Green and the AFL unions as enemies of the “progressive” agenda....
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Labor unions in the United States were not always tied to the Democratic party and to a leftist ideological agenda. Once upon a time, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) stood at odds with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); the former resisted statist labor law changes and leftist union policies beginning in the 1930s and the latter supported them.
The AFL and the CIO united in 1955, but two decades before, William Green, president of the older AFL movement, denounced the CIO in terms familiar to present-day tea party critics of the Obama administration. On September 7, 1937, as reported in the Washington Post, Green assailed CIO leader John L. Lewis for “subordinating the welfare of workers to personal political ambitions .  .  . and encouraging communistic support.” Green warned that CIO ambitions could “pave the way to a fascist dictatorship.”
The AFL’s Green, who generally supported the New Deal but criticized Franklin Roosevelt’s diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia, pledged that his labor organizers “are not seeking political preferment. They are not moved by a consuming ambition to establish themselves as political dictators.” In today’s era of “card check” unionism, when rank-and-file union members have almost no voice, the message seems uncannily relevant: “Shall we be ruled from the bottom up or from the top down, by an individual who is governed only by a consuming ambition?”
Criticism of governmental unionism in the late 1930s was not limited to William Green. The CIO unions were frequently imposed in the workplace by orders from the National Labor Relations Board (which included numerous prominent Communists) in disregard of worker preferences for the AFL. The CIO unions were also replete with Communist officials. Labor militants who were anti-Stalinist kept their unions in the AFL.
The anti-Communist unionists included, in the New York garment industry, immigrant Jewish social democrats who had fought the czars and the Bolsheviks in Russia, and Italian-American leftists who were the most serious enemies of Mussolini. The Communists and their enthusiasts in the media relentlessly attacked Green and the AFL unions as enemies of the “progressive” agenda....