CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Labor Day Lessons: Can CIO Best Practices Aid Union Organizing Today?

The CIO’s second headquarters was an office on the third floor of this building, the United Mine Workers’ headquarters, at 900 15th Street NW, Washington, DC – Public Domain

Industrial union building in the 1930s has long been the lodestar for the post-New Deal labor left.

If organized labor in the U.S. could go from historic membership lows in the 1920s to an early 1950s peak union density of nearly one-third of all private sector workers, maybe that great leap forward could be repeated again, sometime in the future?

Other than the public sector worker upsurge of the late 1960s and 1970s—which has propped up (with less success over time) overall unionization rates ever since—there has been little sign yet of the second coming of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), in some 21st century form.

Unless a union like my own, the Communications Workers of America (CWA), or the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), or the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) was able to neutralize management opposition, using bargaining leverage with a partially unionized employer, there have been few recent private sector organizing breakthroughs on a large scale, certainly not industry wide ones.

Starbucks workers have won hundreds of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections in small retail store units but, so far, have been thwarted in their effort to reach an acceptable national agreement covering thousands of workers. At Amazon, representation votes have been far harder to win; when bargaining rights have been won, union supporters face even longer first contract delays.

In their own struggle for collective bargaining, workers in basic industry in the 1930s also had to overcome past defeats and find new ways of organizing themselves to change the balance of power between themselves and giant corporations. In his new book, Unions, Race, and Popular........

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