AFL-CIO

The AFL-CIO, a federation of over 50 labor unions and more than 13 million members as of 2005, was formed in 1955 with the merger of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to become the largest labor organization in the United States representing 85% of the country's unionized workers. This merger renewed an old but tenuous alliance between trade unions and industrial unions that had fractured in a bitter confrontation at the height of the Great Depression in 1935 at the AFL annual convention in Atlantic City. At issue was the failure of the AFL to support the organizing efforts of industrial workers who had become the engine of a national economy increasingly built on mass production.

Originating with the craft and trade unions of skilled workers, such as shoemakers, typesetters, and metal workers, the AFL was slow to recognize the value of cheap, unskilled workers—minorities, immigrants, and women—who threatened the livelihoods of its membership base of mostly white, Englishspeaking men who built small businesses as they moved up the ranks from apprenticeship to master tradesmen. The AFL unions were more concerned with the competitive position of small businesses than with creating a platform of rights for industrial workers. Tensions increased as some organized labor leaders urged solidarity and support for industrial unions as well as elimination of racist and ethnic barriers within the trade unions. At the time of the Atlantic [Page 36]City convention in 1935, when one fifth of American men were out of work, there was little sympathy among skilled trade unions for the plight of unemployed or underpaid factory workers.

The AFL leadership was itself split, with the majority steadfastly loyal to the trade union interests. Frustrated when AFL leaders rejected his efforts to expand the AFL agenda to include industrial workers through a new AFL Committee on Industrial Organizations, John L. Lewis led eight industrial unions in forming the independent Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1938, which quickly succeeded in organizing workers in several large mass production industries, including automobile, mining, steel, and rubber, to build a membership of 6 million by 1945. Building on initial victories won by strike strategies in the auto industry, CIO leaders went on to organize strikes in other industries to secure salary and benefit concessions in addition to labor-organizing rights. Both the AFL and the CIO worked successfully to gain political support for American workers and organize American labor, enabled in part by the Depression that highlighted the vulnerability of American workers and a booming World War II and postwar economy that provided ample work opportunities for both skilled tradesmen and industrial workers who began to see their common interests in relation to an emerging class of white-collar professional and technical workers with specialized knowledge in an economy oriented more toward service and technology than toward material production. Both organizations came to share the basic union agenda of promoting worker benefits through collective bargaining, political action, legislative initiatives, and strikes. When the presidents of both unions died in 1952, with many of the initial disagreements diminished, both organizations sought the 1955 merger under the leadership of George Meaney (AFL) and Walter Reuther (CIO).

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