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A major focus of the trade-union activities of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) during "Third Period Communism" (1928-1934) centered on the building of independent "revolutionary," or "red," industrial unions in opposition to the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions. The transformation in 1929 of the CPUSA's trade-union arm, the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), organized in 1921, to the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), with the explicit purpose of establishing Communist-led "dual unions" in industries where AFL unions already represented workers, appeared to be a dramatic shift in policy from the strategy of "boring from within" the AFL that the Party had utilized for most of the 1920s (Johanningsmeier 2001).
While much has been written concerning the CPUSA's role within the Congress of Industrial Organizations, surprisingly little has been written about the TUUL's activities as a whole. Although there have been two volumes solely devoted to analyzing the history of the TUUL's predecessor organization, the TUEL (Foner 1991,1994), no single book has so far been written dedicated only to the TUUL. However, several monographs, limited to one or two chapters, have discussed the trade-union federation within the context of broader treatments of U.S. Communism (Klehr 1984; Cochran 1977; Ottanelli 1991; Levenstein 1981). The roles and activities of individual TUUL-affiliated unions, such as the Marine Workers Industrial Union (Nelson 1988; Kimeldorf 1988), the Auto Workers Union (AWU) (Keeran 1980), the National Miners Union (NMU) (Meyerhuber 1987; Nyden 1977; Draper 1972) and the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (Daniels 1981), have been covered to a greater extent than the TUUL as a whole in the scholarly literature.
Although the Needle Trades Workers Industrial Union (NTWIU) was probably the most successful, as well as being the largest TUUL union and having the most organizational stability, there have been no articles or significant portions of books devoted to this union. This paper's purpose is to debunk the popular misconceptions and to demonstrate the achievements, through the use of archival evidence and the secondary literature, concerning the NTWIU as a TUUL affiliate.
First, although the common belief is that the formation of the NTWIU occurred because of the sectarian policy of the Red International of Labour Unions [RILU]) Profintern due to the implementation of the "class vs. class"...