THE AFL-CIO
A Year of Change
Events in 1952 had profound effects on the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the country's two large federations of labor unions, which together represented 14.5 million of American workers. The election of President Eisenhower in November of that year brought an end to twenty years of Democratic, prolabor control of the national government. Within a
THE AMERICAN WORKER IN THE 1950s
Most Americans had moved off of the farm by 1950. Nonagricultural workers, numbering almost 52 million, constituted 83 percent of the work-force. Manufacturing led the nonfarm employers, with more than 15 million laborers. Wholesale and retail trade exceeded 9 million to hold second place. Average earnings in manufacturing in 1957 climbed above $2 per hour, almost double the 1945 level. The average family income reached $5,976 by the end of the decade. Worker productivity rose 48 percent between 1950 and 1960. More women than ever worked, with 23.2 million in the labor force in 1960. The number of married women in the workforce also increased by 2 million.
Source:
U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975).
month labor also experienced a change in leadership when the longtime leaders of both the AFL and the CIO died. The AFL's secretary-treasurer, George Meany, became its president, and United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther was elected head of the CIO.
An End to Rivalry
Meany and Reuther almost immediately began discussions on merging the two federations. Doing so would mean overcoming the long-standing and sometimes bitter rivalry between industrial unions (CIO) and craft unions (AFL), which had prompted eleven unions to split from the AFL and form the CIO in 1935. In the changing political climate of 1953, however, the rivalry began to seem less important than working together to protect labor's interests. "There's too much effort wasted in competition between unions," Meany said in an interview six days after his election.
Unity
Although many in labor thought the union was desirable, it was not going to be easy. "Raiding"—when a CIO union attempted to steal membership from an AFL union, or vice versa—had created some bad feelings between the two federations. Jurisdictional disputes between local chapters of AFL and CIO unions had complicated matters further. Reuther was concerned that the AFL, the larger and more conservative of the two unions, would dominate the merger. To resolve the various conflicts, a unity committee, made up of leaders from both federations, was formed in April 1953. Over two years the committee drafted the charter of the AFLCIO. Raiding was forbidden; jurisdictional disputes would be settled fairly; the tradition of autonomy—each affiliate union controlling its own internal affairs—was maintained; and craft workers and industrial workers were recognized as equally important to American industry. At the AFL-CIO's first convention, in December 1955, Meany was elected president and Reuther vice-president.
Cleaning House
One of the chief priorities of the new federation was to rid itself of corrupt elements. The leaders of several AFL unions—most notably the powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the trucking union—had well-publicized relationships with known criminals and lived luxuriously off of stolen union funds, Their improprieties threatened to tarnish the reputation of organized labor in general. In a break from the tradition of autonomy, an AFL-CIO ethics committee adopted a set of guidelines for union officials in 1956; unions whose officers were corrupt could be expelled from the federation. When the Senate's McClellan committee began its investigation of labor racketeering in 1957, the AFL-CIO cooperated fully. Based on the committee's revelations of corruption within the Teamsters union, the federation first suspended Teamsters president Dave Beck and then voted at its 1957 convention to expel the trucking union completely. The decision was not a painless one: losing the Teamsters cost the federation almost two million members.
A Significant Defeat
The AFL-CIO's attempts to police itself were not enough to satisfy labor's congressional opponents. A coalition of Republicans and conservative southern Democrats passed the Landrum-Griffm Act over the federation's objections in April 1959. The act was designed not only to elminate labor corruption but also to place new restrictions on organizing and picketing. The federation protested that labor's enemies had taken the opportunity to weaken all unions, honest as well as crooked. Passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act was a significant political defeat for the AFL-CIO, the worst for labor since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
New-Membership Drives
Nor did the federation make the membership gains it had hoped for. At the first AFL-CIO convention Reuther had set a goal of doubling the federation's membership in ten years. Labor leaders hoped that a united federation could support stronger organizing drives in the South, for example, which was traditionally antiunion, and among white-collar workers. But by the end of its first decade the AFL-CIO's membership had actually declined, from 15 million in 1955 to 13.5 million in 1964. Although the expulsion of the Teamsters accounted for much of the loss, industrial unions were also losing membership as workers migrated to the less unionized "sun belt."
Sources:
Arthur J. Goldberg, AFL-CIO: Labor United (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956);
Archie Robinson, George Meany and His Times: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981).
