Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike of 1934, one of the key union recognition battles in the struggles mentioned in the book under review.
Book Review
Labor’s Giant Step:1936- 1955, Art Preis, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1972
Recently I reviewed in this space a book by 1930s labor organizer, Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion. In that book Dobbs, one of the central union organizers of the Minneapolis truckers and later the over the road drivers, recounts the details of the 1934 events that led up to the hard fought battle for union recognition in that town. Those actions, along with those in San Francisco and Toledo were the precursors of the later tremendous wave of union struggles in American basic industries. Those events are also essentially the starting point for 1930s labor organizer Art Pres’ book, Labor's Giant Step, alook at the overall labor struggles and especially the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) that was the central organizing body of the time. The rise and fall, as it were, of the CIO which eventually merged with the old-time craft-centered American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1955 is what drives the narrative of this book.
Under ordinary conditions most labor militants are in favor of two things. First, following the old principle established by the Industrial Workers of The World (IWW) and early Socialist Party, that all workers who work in the same industry combine their strength into one industry- wide union. (As opposed to individual crafts within an industry.) Secondly, that all of organized labor unite their strength in one giant labor federation. (As opposed to one federation for crafts and another for basic industries, or some such combination.) That first idea is what drove the early days of the CIO, the struggle to get previously ignored (by the AFL) industries, whose workers were clamoring for unions, organized. The second idea had to be discarded when the AFL essentially refused to organize basic industry and the CIO broke off (led by mine workers leader John L. Lewis) in order to organize those workers.
Brother Preis’ valuable labor history book outlines in detail both of the above propositions from the dark days of the early Great Depression when work was scarce and worker scared to the radical days of the great strikes of 1934 (Minneapolis, San Francisco, Toledo) onward to the fierce sit-down strikes of the later 1930s (Detroit, Flint and one hundred other places). He also deals with the downside efforts like the Little Steel organizing disaster. Moreover he has his pulse on what the rising labor leaders, including the radicals, socialists, and communists were up to and far they could be pushed, if they could be.
Preis’ story of the CIO, as noted above, was not just about its rise but also its fall back into some of the same labor skate notions of the AFL, especially during the “no strike” pledge World War II period, the lull before the storm immediate post-war period when labor strikes were a dime a dozen, and then into that cold war, red scare, throw the militants out of the unions, step in line with the capitalists’ foreign policy death dark night. And at that point as Preis (and others) makes clear the basis for separate federations was no longer clear. Thus labor militants in 1955 would have had a “no dog in that fight” attitude on the question of unification just as is our attitude today with the two separate major labor federations. Read this well researched book and learn about our common, unsung working class history.
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