Today In Labor History

November 09
1935: Committee for Industrial Organization founded by eight unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The eight want more focus on organizing mass production industry workers.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was founded in response to the failure of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to organize unskilled workers in mass production industries. At the 1934 afl convention, a move to organize these workers lost when only 30 percent of the members voted for the measure. After failing again in 1935, John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, Sidney Hillman, leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and representatives of the Textile Workers and the Typographers unions formed the Committee for Industrial Organization. It was expelled from the afl in 1936 and became the cio in 1938.

The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, section 7A, which gave workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, provided an impetus to unionization in the 1930s. The cio's major organizing tactic was the sit-down strike, which was quite successful: cio membership reached 2,654,000 by 1940.

John L. Lewis was the first president of the CIO. Responding to the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and the election of a Republican president in 1952, the afl and the cio merged in 1955.