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It would be hard to exaggerate the need for a book on the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The CIO was the dynamic new centre of union organizing that transformed the North American labour movement in the 1930s and 1940s and brought thousands of workers into stable collective bargaining relationships with employers in the key industries of the industrial economy. Yet, in the four decades since it dissolved back into a unified House of Labour with the American Federation of Labor, there has never been a full-scale, scholarly study of the organization. Many years ago, Robert Zieger decided to tackle the daunting tasks of wading through voluminous archival material, carefully integrating all the local and industrial studies that have appeared, including several of his own, and negotiating the minefield of debate over this organization. The result is a masterful synthesis that finally charts the CIO's remarkable history with clarity and confidence.
The essentials of the story are familiar to most labour historians: the struggles inside the crusty old American Federation of Labor to launch a serious organizing drive in US mass-production factories in 1935; the new organizing committees that were created in several industries to guide and inspire the widening militancy among industrial workers; the support of the American government's new labour legislation, known as the Wagner Act; the wartime expansion and postwar consolidation of the new unions; the fierce internal battles in the late 1940s to drive out Communists and, if necessary, the unions they led; and finally the merger with the AFL in 1955. Zieger covers all these developments thoroughly and fills in a good deal of new information along the way, particularly on the final phase, between the anti-Communist purges and the merger, where he reveals how stagnant the organization had become at the centre. He is particularly sensitive to the role of African Americans in the organization. The book is thus the most comprehensive overview of CIO history available.
Almost all previous versions of this story have recognized that CIO unions had a remarkable record of laying down solid foundations of unionism in the heartland of North American industry where none had existed in the mid-1930s, and then bringing to their members a higher standard of living than they had ever...