Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55

by Art Preis

The story of the explosive labor struggles and political battles in the 1930s that built the industrial unions. And how those unions became the vanguard of a mass social movement that began transforming U.S. society. Preface, note on sources, index.

Genres: Labor, History, Nonfiction

736 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1964

Reviews

[Tom Marciniak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring and sobering contemporary source on the early days of the labor movement in the US. Things like the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, and basic labor rights were won with the blood, sweat, and tears of the brave people memorialized in this book.

Labor history is never mentioned in American schools and pedagogy. This is a purposeful omission by the capitalist superstructure, in order to justify both its existence and its exploitation.

If you sell your labor to survive this book is for you.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

What really struck me from this epic is how the "golden era" of post-war prosperity was not handed out on a platter to workers in an economic boom, but wrested in bitter and often bloody struggle by organised labour from the employers and government, and at times against the opposition or treachery of their own union leaders, even.

I knew of the sit-down strikes and labour explosions of the 1930s to some degree. But it was news to me that the wartime labour laws barely suppressed the ongoing workplace unrest and rebellion, leading to the US' greatest strike wave at the end of the war, in 1946. Whereas earlier strikes had mainly been for union recognition and the right to bargain, leading to the formation of the CIO union federation, after the war they were increasingly for pay rises, an end to speed-ups, shorter work weeks and so forth. And the 1946 strike wave was followed by another enormous strike wave in 1949-50, and the 1950s themselves were a decade of intense labour unrest, despite the anti-communist witch-hunt and the ongoing divisions fostered by segregation and racism (all of which are described in some detail here).

Art Preis was a participant and a partisan in all these affairs. That is probably makes the book so lively and readable, because he was there and saw a lot of it, and because he believed in it. As a sometimes union militant I can sympathise with the tales of picket lines (often far more violent than anything I've witnessed, with legions of thugs and national guard, armed with everything up to machine guns, being deployed against pickets at times); I remember wryly the sting of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory by hopeless, peace-at-all-costs union leaders. So a lot of Preis' critique rings true enough.

On the other hand, his partisanship probably leads to some flaws. For one, the Communist Party (CP) are probably treated unfairly; they are referred to throughout with the dismissive label "the Stalinists". According to Preis they didn't do just about anything useful at all after a brief period in the early 1930s when they made headway in organising unemployed workers and some early strikes. It seems unlikely that the whole party was as rotten as he makes out, the whole time.

For reasons that I can't quite fathom, perhaps to present a sense of objectivity, Preis also makes very few references to his own organisation, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers' Party (that was unfairly expelled from the CP in 1929, probably colouring his dire views of its subsequent course). Another reviewer commented that he then tends to present the mass of workers as noble proles forever clashing with or being sold out by the corrupt, class-collaborationist union leaderships. I'm not sure if he's hiding his own party's role, perhaps to protect the identities of active members, or if their membership declined so rapidly that they played no appreciable role in postwar events. I'll leave that to the historians.

An interesting, inspiring and important chapter in world labour history, and as much as things have changed in how the working class is composed today, it does bring home what I said at the start: capital doesn't give out prosperity to the working class unless it's forced to - something plainly obvious today, too.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Preis's work was the first real history of the twenty year existence of the CIO, completed in the early 1960s, just a few short years after the reunification of most of the American labor movement. He had been an active participant as a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, and he is quite open about that affiliation. Preis argued that the CIO was fueled from below by mass independent worker militancy and action, often forcing union bureaucrats and the Stalinist Communist Party into supporting radical militant action. Much of the book frames the battle for the soul of the CIO as one where rank and file worker activism squared off against conservative anti-radical class collaborationist pro-capitalist union bureaucrats and their sometimes allies and sometimes enemies in the Stalinist faction. To Preis, the conservative anti-Marxist faction (except perhaps John Lewis, whom Preis seems to rather like) and the Communists could do no right, and any advances of the CIO were because of worker militant action that forced them to do right by the radical movement.

While there is some truth to that, he tends to see things from the Trotskyist point of view that workers themselves were not allied with one side or another of those factions, instead seeing them as a sort of mythic all-knowing wise prole that is being held back by the CP or conservative bureaucrat, and Trotskyist language throughout reminds the reader that he still was basically a writer for the SWP's The Militant. With that in mind, he does bring valuable points to understanding the CIO, in that the CP almost certainly discredited itself through its various party-line changes, especially the no-strike enforcement during WWII and its overly cautious response to the post-war strikes, which enabled its conservative rivals to grab ahold of the anti-communist momentum, fueled by resentment by militant rank and file workers. He makes a few other good points, in that the CIO's drive to organize the unorganized was rather short, and its expansion was fueled by the growth of war industries in which it became major players, rather than it stepping into other unorganized industries.

He is somewhat confusing in both blasting the CIO union bureaucracy yet noting its rapid growth from a mere 3 million AFL members in 1929 to 30 million AFL-CIO members by 1955, which he sees only as workers demanding inclusion rather than real choices by top union leadership. The AFL expanded rapidly during that time as a response to the CIO's energy, feeding off it and borrowing tactics, at times presenting itself as the ration union to the "radical" CIO and others as the labor federation out militanting the militant CIO. He attacks Reuther's "Treaty of Detroit" without noting the actual material advances for members of the UAW, and notes that the Communist Party had the larger number of militant energetic and creative organizers (only disoriented by Stalinism, which is a point ahead of its time.) It's been noted that this history came out before the rise of "New Labor History" in the late 1970s, and still carries much of the weight of the Old Left, where the battles of sectarianism never really stopped. The CIO was its main battlefield.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Labor's Giant Step is a thrilling history of U.S. rank and file union militancy in the period 1934-1957.

The "giant step" of the title was industry-wide organizing, a break with insular and atomizing craft structures epitomized by the American Federation of Labor.

The sucesses that built the CIO were not unique strokes of genius by international union presidents or government officials. They were the product of rank-and-file initiative and leadership putting its stamp on events, reaching broadly outward for solidarity and creating a mass social movement in the process.

Art Preis, a young leader of the unemployed movement and the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike, covered most of the struggles in Labor's Giant Step as a reporter for The Militant newspaper. He was an expert on both the making and writing of working class history.

[Peter Carr · Rating 5 out of 5]

We used to be a real country. We used to throw bricks at strikebreakers :(

[Marc Lichtman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The AFL and CIO when they reunited in 1954 had around 20 million members. This book, often an eyewitness account, gives one insight into both the strengths and weaknesses of that labor movement, which will help in examining why it's only a shell of its former self today. At a book launching for this volume, author Art Preis gave a speech (now included) where he says, "I don't want to knock the writing of history--but making history is what really counts." This is a book about how millions of ordinary people made history and how they can again. The book begins with three strikes that led the way to the founding of the CIO, one of which Preis was a leader of--the Toledo Auto-Lite strike. He also discusses the Minneapolis Teamsters' strike (which if you want to read more about you can read Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs) and the West Coast Longshore strike (see the last section of American Labor Struggles: 1877-1934 by Samuel Yellin).

You will learn about how the sit-in strike (occupying factories) started in France, but soon caught on here, especially among the autoworkers. Despite the limitations of the CIO in fighting racism, it did organize millions of Black workers, whose militancy contributed to the Civil Rights Movement. It's not surprising that a local leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, E.D. Nixon, was a central figure in the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56. He convinced a young minister named Martin Luther King to join in. (See 'Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power.

For a book on labor strategy and tactics from a Marxist perspective, see Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions. For what's happening today, see The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward.

This book contains within it whole sections on the American Stalinists of the Communist Party, McCarthyism and its effect on the US working-class....

[Mitch · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting book from a Trotskist perspective on the CIO.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another amazing, depressing, cudgel of a book that makes me want to just leave the country