On the CIO

As I stated some time ago now, I am part of the CIO podcast being hosted on Jacobin. My interview with the historian Benjamin Fong, who is hosting the podcast, is now up in its complete form at Jacobin as well. I know that some in this crew will diminish anything published over there out of hand, but does that really make sense? Or do the readers of that site need to hear some of this stuff. I had my points and I made them, especially those demythologizing the labor movement. Here’s a couple of excerpts:

BENJAMIN Y. FONG

You talked about the combination of context and tactics. One of the key tactics that the CIO moment is known for is the sit-down strike. What did this tactic mean for the emergence and success of the CIO?

ERIK LOOMIS

I think that the sit-down strike is one of these tactics that can be romanticized, outside of its appropriate context. But the Flint sit-down strike is the key moment, with workers occupying parts of plants, and it did change the equation to a certain extent. People have debated where exactly sit-down strikes began. Maybe the US, maybe Europe. But it was an occasionally used thing until the mid-‘30s.

In Flint, you have a pretty organized group of workers occupying Fisher Body Plant no. 1, which was a General Motors (GM) facility. By sitting down and staying in there, the idea was that first, it would show workers’ responsibility. They would do this but do this in a respectable way. And so, drinking wasn’t allowed, and they were very clean. A lot of the early examples of the sit-down strike really emphasized this respectability narrative. But it was also just an effective tactic. It would prevent strikebreakers. The problem with the traditional strike is that you leave the factory, and even if you have pickets around the factory, generally the courts and the police were working on the side of the companies, and so would basically force the allowance of strikebreakers into the factory. The sit-down was intended to prevent that. The idea, at least theoretically, was that a company would not want to destroy its own facility.

However, it’s worth noting that GM would’ve been happy to destroy its own facility. GM wanted the police to go in and kick those people out at any cost. And this is, I think, a key part of this broader story. The reason that it doesn’t happen (and it’s worth keeping in mind that the Flint police force was completely bought and sold by GM) is that the workers of Michigan had elected a guy named Frank Murphy to be governor. Murphy had campaigned on never betraying workers. He had said would not use the police or the National Guard to break a strike. He’s close to FDR and is a good strong liberal governor, but nobody really knows how he’s going to react to this. In fact, he has a panic attack as it all goes down.

But in the end, although GM is demanding that he call the National Guard, he refuses to do it. It’s really only after he refuses to call the National Guard that GM sits down and says, “Okay, we give up,” which again goes back to the issue I mentioned earlier. If unions can neutralize that government-corporate alliance (and you can’t really ever expect government to be on the side of unions in the United States, that’s really rare), so they don’t call in the cops or the army, then it really changes the whole perspective.

So that tactic got a ton of play, and you saw different versions of it pop up very quickly. But it’s worth noting that it’s a very, very difficult tactic to pull off. If we’re going to talk about Flint, it’s probably also worth a brief discussion of the failed attempt by a newly forming union with the CIO called the United Chocolate Workers to use a sit-down strike at its plant in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in the big Hershey plant. This was a complete and unmitigated disaster, in part because they did not have the political support, in part because Hershey bought his milk off of local farmers. The local area was completely opposed to it, versus the solidarity culture you had in Flint. And in fact, the United Chocolate Workers never organized that plant.

So if we’re thinking about the sit-down strike, we do need to understand that it has some pretty sharp limitations to it, and by no means worked in all cases.

BENJAMIN Y. FONG

Part of the CIO leadership’s skittishness about the sit-down was that they felt the public was turning against this tactic. Why was that?

ERIK LOOMIS

People turned against the sit-down strike in part because it felt like an attack on private property. We have to understand that unions were not exactly popular among the American people as a whole. I think this is always worth noting, that even at the very peak of the labor movement, huge parts of the country were effectively totally unorganized. This will come back to seriously haunt the CIO down the line.

What you have here is a lot of Americans who strongly believe in this mythology of private property, and that very much includes many union members and the leaders of the labor movement. Some CIO lawyers were pushing a legal idea that people had a right to their job, that their job was a sort of property. Let’s just say the American courts were not very welcoming to this idea. And so, it really felt like, for many Americans, that this was a radical tactic that was perhaps communist — sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t — and that really threatened the core identity of an America that defended private property.

Truth be told, the Supreme Court simply declared the tactic unconstitutional in 1939. So one of the reasons that you don’t see it today is that it’s outright illegal. If we’re talking about sit-down strikes in the present, first of all, rather than just romanticize it, I think we have to consider, first and foremost, is this a good tactic? Would this actually work in a given workplace? And then secondly, what are we going to do about the fact that it’s illegal? Now, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do that. I’m not making evaluations or judgements here, but the fact is that the courts declared it unconstitutional.

I also enjoyed getting this line in.

BENJAMIN Y. FONG

What lessons does the CIO moment have for the present?

ERIK LOOMIS

I would really focus on the issue of bigness. We are in a moment in which there’s a lot of emphasis on individual autonomy and small-scale change and things like, I don’t know, organic food and symbolic gestures.

In labor circles, I think that’s led to a kind of romanticizing of the IWW. That’s an organization that a lot of particularly younger people look to as an inspiration. And there’s some good reasons for that. Certainly, the cultural productions were amazing. They did great visuals. And there was a focus on a kind of decentralized, individualized way of making change without compromising with the state or anything like that.

I don’t have any particular problem with this except to note that it was an abject failure. The IWW never really succeeded in American life. And where it did, it disappeared almost immediately after that success. There’s not a lot of evidence that you can organize the American working class based on individualistic means.

In any case, the podcast has been doing well and the United Auto Workers has been pushing it pretty good too. Check it out!