The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. Originally created in 1935 as a committee within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) by John L. Lewis, a leader of the United Mine Workers (UMW), and called the Committee for Industrial Organization. Its name was changed in 1938 when it broke away from the AFL. It focused on organizing 'unskilled' workers, who had been ignored by most of the AFL unions.
The CIO supported Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal coalition, and membership in it was open to African Americans. CIO members voted for Roosevelt overwhelmingly.
Both the CIO and its rival, the AFL, grew rapidly during the Great Depression. The rivalry for dominance was bitter and sometimes violent.
In its statement of purpose, the CIO said that it had formed to encourage the AFL to organize workers in mass production industries along industrial union lines. The CIO failed to change AFL policy from within. On September 10, 1936, the AFL suspended all 10 CIO unions (two more CIO unions had joined the AFL during the previous year). In 1938, these unions formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a rival labor federation.
Section 504 of the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not Communists, which some CIO leaders refused to do; they were expelled. In 1955, the CIO rejoined the AFL, forming the new entity known as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
The CIO was born out of a fundamental dispute within the United States labor movement over whether and how to organize industrial workers. The eight union chiefs who founded the CIO were not happy with how the AFL was unwilling to work with America's manufacturing combines. Those who favored craft unionism believed the most effective way to represent workers was to defend the advantages they had secured through their skills. They focused on the hiring of skilled workers, such as carpenters, lithographers, and railroad engineers in an attempt to maintain as much control as possible over the work their members did by enforcement of work rules, zealous defense of their jurisdiction to certain types of work, control over apprenticeship programs, and exclusion of less-skilled workers from membership.
Craft unionists were opposed to organizing workers on an industrial basis, into unions which represented all of the production workers in a particular enterprise, rather than in separate units divided along craft lines.
The proponents of industrial unionism, on the other hand, generally believed that craft distinctions may have been appropriate in those industries in which craft unions had flourished, such as construction or printing, but they were unworkable in industries such as steel or auto production. In their view, dividing workers in a single plant into a number of different crafts represented by separate organizations, each with its own agenda, would weaken the workers' bargaining power and leave the majority, who had few traditional craft skills, completely unrepresented.
While the AFL had always included a number of industrial unions, such as the United Mine Workers and the Brewery Workers, the most dogmatic craft unionists had a stronghold on power within the federation by the 1930s. They used that power to quash any drive toward industrial organizing.
Industrial unionism became even more fierce in the 1930s, when the Great Depression in the United States caused large membership drops in some unions, such as the United Mine Workers and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. A number of labor leaders, particularly John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, came to the conclusion that their own unions would not survive while the great majority of workers in basic industry remained nonunion. They started to press the AFL to change its policies in this area.
The AFL, in fact, responded and added even more new members than the CIO. The AFL had long permitted the formation of "federal" unions, which were affiliated directly with the AFL; in 1933, it proposed to use them to organize workers on an industrial basis. The AFL did not, however, promise to allow the unions to maintain a separate identity indefinitely. That meant the unions might be broken up later to distribute their members among the craft unions that claimed jurisdiction over their work. The AFL, in fact, dissolved hundreds of federal unions in late 1934 and early 1935.
While the bureaucratic leadership of the AFL was unable to win strikes, three victorious strikes suddenly exploded onto the scene in 1934. These were the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934, the leadership of which included some members of the Trotskyist Communist League of America; the 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike, the leadership of which included some members of the Communist Party USA; and the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike, which was led by the American Workers Party. Victorious industrial unions with militant leaderships were the catalyst that brought about the rise of the CIO.
The AFL authorized organizing drives in the automobile, rubber, and steel industries at its convention in 1934 but gave little financial support or effective leadership to those unions. The AFL's timidity succeeded only in making it less credible among the workers that it was supposedly trying to organize. That was especially significant in those industries, such as auto and rubber, in which workers had already achieved some organizing success, at great personal risk.
The dispute came to a head at the AFL's convention in Atlantic City in 1935. On October 19, the closing day of the convention, William Hutcheson, the President of the United Carpenters, made a slighting comment about a rubber worker who was delivering an organizing report. Lewis responded that Hutcheson's comment was "small potatoes," and the 6-foot-3-inch (1.91 m) Hutcheson replied, "I was raised on small potatoes, that is why I am so small." After some more words, during which Hutcheson called Lewis a "vile name", Lewis punched Hutcheson. The two men collapsed a table and fell on the floor, throwing punches. The incident helped cement Lewis's image in the public eye as someone willing to fight for workers' right to organize.
The standard scholarly history by Robert Ziegler provides the historical details.
Shortly afterward, Lewis called together Charles Howard, President of the International Typographical Union; Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America; David Dubinsky, President of the ILGWU, Thomas McMahon, head of the United Textile Workers; John Sheridan of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union; Harvey Fremming, of the Oil Workers Union; and Max Zaritsky, of the Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers. They discussed the formation of a new group within the AFL to carry on the fight for industrial organizing. The creation of the Committee for Industrial Organization was announced on November 9, 1935.
Whether Lewis then intended to split the AFL over this issue is debatable; at the outset, the CIO presented itself as only a group of unions within the AFL gathered to support industrial unionism, rather than a group opposed to the AFL itself.
The AFL leadership, however, treated the CIO as an enemy from the outset by refusing to deal with it and demanding that it dissolve. The AFL's opposition to the CIO, however, only increased the stature of the CIO and Lewis in the eyes of the industrial workers who were keen on organizing and were disillusioned with the AFL's ineffective performance. Lewis continued to denounce the AFL's policies, and the CIO offered organizing support to workers in the rubber industry who went on strike and formed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in defiance of all of the craft divisions that the AFL had required in past organizing efforts. In 1936, Lee Pressman, affiliated with the far left, became the union's general counsel until 1948.