Why History May be a Bad Guide to What's Happening this Week at the AFL-CIO Convention

Seventy years ago this October, the American Federation of Labor met in Atlantic City to resolve two years of brewing "discord, dissension, division, and disunion," in the words of historian Irving Bernstein. The tension was palpable at the Chelsea Hotel in 1935, where the forces demanding a massive push to organize basic industry—steel, auto, rubber, electrical—squared off with the lords of craft unionism who sought to defend craft skill, status, and skin privilege that had become the hallmarks of the AFL. While the dissident advocates of industrial unionism had the arc of justice on their side, the defenders of the status quo could point to the graveyard of labor history, which was strewn with the failures of industrial unionism from the Knights of Labor through Eugene Debs's railway workers and onto the failed massive strike wave of 1919.

The convention finally reached its dramatic peak when John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers, launched his famous right jab straight across the chops of Big Bill Hutcheson, President of the Carpenters' union. After Hutcheson crashed across a collapsing table, Lewis famously straightened his tie, lit a cigar, and walked out of the convention. Taking along key allies in the cause of industrial unionism, he went on to launch the CIO—an acronym that would forever be connected in to the unprecedented growth of membership, power, and mission of organized labor.

Although the AFL and CIO merged in 1955, the thirties CIO analogy is alive and well in the buzz about the AFL-CIO Convention in Chicago this week. There four key unions comprising one third of the federation are boycotting the convention in a move that will likely lead to another great division within the house of labor. Although both the rhetorical and, I suspect, pugilistic skills of the leaders of the "Change to Win" coalition lack the power of John L. Lewis's, the basics of the fight today seem similar to those seventy years ago. The fundamental rub is the same: the federation and its constituent union are not doing enough to organize the unorganized. The symbol of the labor movement's failure in 1935 was that the biggest employer in the nation, General Motors, remained unorganized. Today, that same symbol of failure is also the biggest employer in country—and the world—Wal Mart. Similarly, today's dissidents are being accused of sabotaging the labor movement, just as the CIO was back in the day.

The differences between our time and the Great Depression, however, may readily make the historical analogy useless—and even dangerous. The convergence of issues in the 1930s that led to "labor's giant step" may not only have been rare, they may have been unique in all of American history.

One of the most important differences is the legal context. The CIO enjoyed the recent passage of National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), which put federal force behind the right to organize for the first and only time in American history. The Change to Win coalition, in contrast, must face the more typical historical situation of a labor law framework that is more than useless—it is hostile—to workers. By any measure, as David Brody has recently put it, the Wagner Act today must be considered little more than a tool for management to be wielded against employers rather than a vehicle for their betterment.

Politically, of course, the eras could not be more different. FDR was no labor radical but he helped to create—and was created by—a national narrative that envisioned the citizenry fighting the Depression and climbing out of it together. Today, in contrast, we inhabit a remarkably fragmented political economy, in which the fact that wages have stagnated for working people since the 1970s is the untold story of the day. With the culture wars having eclipsed the class wars, the degradation of occupational life continues unchecked. As long as Wall Street is doing well, the presumption goes, so must the nation. The Democrats have become pale versions of their opponents, offering voters no substantive plans to ameliorate the economic savageness of the global economy nor a plausible narrative for an alternative vision. Even the realm of political ideas has become rather thin gruel compared to the thick boiling stew of the Great Depression with everything from the followers of Father Coughlin to the communists of the Popular Front long vying for voice. All beyond the confines of today's "Washington consensus" is lost.

On the surface, there would appear to be parallels with regard to immigrant labor between both eras. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, immigrants were becoming national economic citizens rather than solely members of their ethnic groups. Ethnic institutions had been weakened through mainstream commercial culture and the collapse of ethnic social safety networks. Fordism helped narrow the gap between the skilled and unskilled. All of this fostered what historian Lizabeth Cohen called the "culture of unity" in her Making a New Deal. Whatever we have today, with vigilantes rounding up immigrants on the border and aliens inhabiting an economic underground, it is certainly not unity. While the working class achieved a sort of economic citizenship under the New Deal, today we have management's dream of labor power without citizenship.

Perhaps the biggest difference between what's happening in Chicago and what happened in Atlantic City is in the workers themselves. In the mid thirties, the CIO could not hand out union cards fast enough. Workers were hungry for representation, voice, and a route out of economic misery. Armed with the new tool of the sit-down strike, the unions marched through major industry facing down goons, street battles, plant occupations, and court fights until they triumphed in nearly all of basic industry. Today's battles are clearly in the service sector, the hope is that similar upheavals might follow a breakthrough at the top of the labor hierarchy. Such a victory would, however, have to be a social movement of unimaginably gargantuan proportions that would have to overcome tremendous odds and work in close harmony with other social movements. The unions would have to enroll more than a million members a year in order to see a single percent up tick in union density. That would have to be achieved among workers who, however demonstrably unhappy they may be with the terms of their employment, seem only to have a modest interest in the vision put forth by the labor movement.

As historian Jack Metzgar recently put the comparison, sociologically the CIO was a spark that lit up an enormous drought in the 1930s; "whereas what we need today is a flamethrower in a rain forest." The urgency evident in the Change to Win coalition's move to secede from the AFL-CIO is very real. Labor needs to move quickly and dramatically in order to avoid irrelevancy and to retain its claim to be the most significant vehicle for economic justice in the last century. Whatever happens, however, it won't look like the historically unique coming of the CIO.