Cio's Left-led Unions

269 Pages·1992·7.811 MB·English

by  Steven J. Rosswurm

THE CIO’s
LEFT- LED UNIONS
edited by
STEVE ROSSWURM
L RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
New Brunswick, New Jersey
A volume in the
CLASS AND CULTURE series
Miiton Cantor and Bruce Laurie, series editors
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosswurm, Steven,
The C105 left-led unions / Steve Rosswurm.
p. trim—(Class and culture series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8135-1769-9 (cloth)—ISBN 0-8135—1770-2 (pbk.)
1. Congress of Industrial Organizations (U.S.)——History. 2. Trade
unions and communism—United States—History—ZOth century.
I. Title. H. Series.
HD8055.C75R67 1992
331.88'33’0973—dc20 91-19467
CIP
British Cataloging-in-Publication information available
Copyright © 1992 by Rutgers, The State University
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
For
Antonio Cavorso (1901—1971), FE
Thomas]. Fitzpatrick (1903—?), UE
John W. Nelson (1917—1959), UE
Lo, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the things of
the past shall not be remembered or come to mind.
Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness in what I
create; for I create Jerusalem to be a joy and its people to be a delight; I
will rejoice in Jerusalem and exult in my people. No longer shall the
sound of weeping be heard there, or the sound of crying; no longer
shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man
who does not round out his full lifetime; he dies a mere youth who
reaches but a hundred years, and he who fails of a hundred shall be
thought accursed.
They shall live in the houses they build, .and eat the fruit of the
vineyards they plant; they shall not build houses for others to live in,
or plant for others to eat.
As the years of a tree, so the years of my people; and my chosen
ones shall long enjoy the produce of their hands. (Isaiah 65:17—22)

CONTENTS
—
Preface ix
Acronyms xvii
Introduction:
An Overview and Preliminary Assessment of the CIO’s
Expelled Unions 1
STEVE Rossws
Class and Race in the Crescent City:
The ILWU, from San Francisco to New Orleans 19
BRUCE NELSON
Who Controls the Hiring Hall?
The Struggle for Job Control in the ILWU
During World War II 47
NANCY QUAM-WICKHAM
Black and White Together:
Organizing in the South with the Food, Tobacco,
Agricultural & Allied Workers Union (PTA—C10),
1946—1952 69
KARL KORSTAD
William Sentner, the UE, and Civic Unionism in St. Louis
ROSEMARY FEURER
The Catholic Church and the Left-Led Unions:
Labor Priests, Labor Schools, and the ACT U 119
STE‘VE Rosswum
McCarthyism and the Labor Movement:
The Role of the State 139
ELLEN W. SCHRECKER
Fighting Left-Wing Unionism:
Voices from the Opposition to the IFLWU 1n Fulton County,
New York 159
GERALD ZAHAVI
The Shop-Floor Dimension of Union Rivalry:
The Case of Westinghouse in the 19505 183
MARK MCCOLLOCH
”An Old Soldier” 201
TOM IURAVICH
Notes 203
Contributors 241
Index 243
PREFACE
—
”That is that,” pronounced Philip Murray, CIO president, after the
1950 CIO convention officially expelled nine left-led unions, having
ousted two others in 1949.
Murray meant this brief sentence, I think, in two ways. One is
obvious: a drawn-out, bitter, and enervatinglcontroversy—the prob-
lem of the ”Communist-dominated” unions in the CIO—had ended.
But he also meant that which is signified by our contemporary slang
phrase ”They’re history”—so obscenely wrongheaded, but so indica-
tive of life in contemporary American society.
Murray, however, was wrong.
His literal meaning overstated the matter: the C105 initial expul-
sion decision, taken at its 1949 convention, merely had established a
precondition for the left-led unions’ demise. The federation’s leader-
ship then had to commit sizable resources to destroy the expelled
unions, which did not obligingly disappear. Several of them, includ-
ing the International Fur 6: Leather Workers Union (IFLWU), the Inter-
national Longshoremen’s 8t Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), the
United Electrical, Radio 8: Machine Workers of America (UE), and the
International Union of Mine, Mill &'. Smelter Workers (IUMMSW),
x Preface
remained powerful enough to be targets of C10 ”raiding” into the
mid-19505 and beyond. The IFLWU merged with the Amalgamated
Meat Cutters 8: Butcher Workmen in 1955, lUMMSW with the United
Steel Workers of America in 1967, and the ILWU reaffiliated with
AFL—CIO in 1988. The UE, which left the CIO before being ejected,
still-’remains independent and, in Frank Emspak’5 words, ”a moral
beacon of the labor movement. ”1
And what about Murray’s figurative meaning? That which has hap-
pened in the past, history, is not dead, is not gone. It continues to shape
our lives—indeed, it establishes the boundaries of our existences—no
matter how unaware we are of its influence. The record and experi-
ences of the expelled unions speak to us, as working people and as
citizens, across the decades.
They may reach us in many ways. Some of the men and women of
these unions, still alive, can talk directly to us. We can listen to the
recorded words of others who were interviewed before their deaths.
The expelled unions address our lives in still another way: not only
are we still experiencing the long-range results of the expulsions, but
many of the goals that the expelled unions set for their members and
their country have yet to be accomplished.
Perhaps, however, the expelled unions speak to us most pertinently
in an abstract sense. They remind us that the collective struggle
against the boundaries of our existence—for they understood that
there were boundaries out there—is the essence of a meaningful life.
They prod us to recall that in the effort, sometimes successful, often
not, to change the world—for they understood that the world could be
transformed—barriers to equality can be lowered and attitudes can be
altered. Each struggle, moreover, helps create the conditions for the
next one.
This book of essays, none previously published and all based upon
exhaustive research, is a collective effort to listen to the expelled
unions. What then, ever so briefly, do they tell us? Rather, what do I,
as editor, think they tell us? No contributor has seen this preface and
none, therefore, is in complicity in its viewpoints.
My introduction provides an overview of the history of the expelled
unions as well as a preliminary assessment of their significance. I
discuss the unions’ social composition and leadership and their rela-
tionship to the CIO. Both the immediate and long-run implications of
the expulsions are examined in the last section of the introduction.
The body of the book begins with Bruce Nelson’s essay on the
ILWU’s effort to organize the predominantly African-American long-
shoremen in New Orleans in the late 19303. ILWU organizers went
Preface xi
into the South with tremendous courage, flush with the elan of suc-
cessful struggles against obdurate employers and state and city offi-
cials up and down the west coast. Attitude and experience was not
enough: the ILWU was soundly defeated in a 1938 NLRB election.
Nelson’s analysis of .this defeat is appropriately complex. On the one
hand, he stresses the massive violence, from virtually every conceiv-
able source, that greeted the ILWU’s efforts. On the other, he empha-
sizes the specificity of the black experience on the New Orleans docks
during Jim Crow and the ILWU’s lack of familiarity with that history.
Nelson’s ultimate conclusion—that the ILWU’s opponents simply
had too much state-sanctioned power—draws our attention to, the
”state’s vital role in influencing the outcome of events.” But he also
points out that the defeat ”demonstrates the complexity of working-
class consciousness and the complicated ways in which race has af-
fected the social relations of production and the development of
, unionism.”
Nancy Quam-Wickham, the first scholar to use the numerous oral
histories done under joint ILWU-National Endowment for the Hu-
manities sponsorship in the 19805, takes up similar issues in her dis-
cussion of the ILWU’s defense of the hiring hall during World War II.
Despite the class-collaboration rhetoric of some ILWU leaders, particu-
larly Harry Bridges, job-control struggles continued on the docks. For
various reasons, some patriotic, some self-interested, there was rela-
tively little Opposition to the no-strike pledge. Yet the ” ’34 men,” in
Howard Kimeldorf’s evocative phrase, continued to defend jealously
their hard-won rights.2 One of those rights, however, was to work
with men of their own choosing; during the war, that came to mean
other whites. In some cases, it is difficult, if not impossible, to sepa-
rate job control, ethnic identity, and racism; that the bosses histori-
cally had used race to divide working people made the situation even
more complicated. The general trend, however, is clear: The ’34 men
used job control to enforce their restricted vision of who constituted
the American working class. The ILWU leadership, although commit-
ted to interracial unionism, seldom used their power to effectively
oppose such actions—partly because of their intense commitment to
job control and partly because of their egalitarian, but economistic,
reading of race relations.
Karl Korstad’s essay, the reminiscences of a Southern, postwar or-
ganizer for the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural & Allied Workers (FTA),
takes us into the next decade. Right from its origins, the FTA under-
stood that a confrontation with racism and the institutions that subor-
dinated and segregated people of color was essential to successful