A new podcast, Organize the Unorganized, tells the story of the CIO

Despite an exciting year of strikes and labor activity, union density more or less stayed flat in 2023 at 10%, and it remains at a dismal 6% in the private sector. As unions have declined in size and influence over the past decades, workers’ incomes have stagnated even as productivity has soared. A country without strong unions is one with enormous wealth inequality, but it’s also one where working people lack political representation, and so one where politics is unmoored from the concerns of most Americans. If we’re going to lessen inequality and reinstill faith in American democracy, the best thing we could do is get millions of workers into the labor movement.

Labor upsurges tend to come in spurts. In the 1880s, workers poured into the Knights of Labor, which grew into an organization of 700,000 almost overnight, and then just as quickly fell apart. Unions also grew rapidly during and in the immediate aftermath of World War I, but the big post-war confrontations in steel and elsewhere were lost to the employers. Then, in the 1930s, something of a miracle happened: millions of workers sought and gained recognition from some of the biggest corporations at the time—General Motors, US Steel, Goodyear. And not only that, but their gains stuck and laid the foundation for the most prosperous time for working people in American history.

This would not have been possible without the birth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the great labor federation that broke from the narrow craft orientation of the American Federation of Labor and spent enormous sums on organizing the unorganized. On their watch, steel, auto, rubber, meatpacking, electrical manufacturing, and many other industries went from non-union to almost fully organized in the space of a few years. To get some sense of the scale and rapidity of the transformation in labor relations the CIO was able to enact, imagine Amazon, Fedex, and Walmart becoming fully unionized by 2028.

In Organize the Unorganized, a limited-run podcast from the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University and Jacobin magazine, I’m telling the story of the CIO with the help of prominent labor historians and experts. I’m also including clips of songs from the period, as well as archival material of speeches and oral histories from key CIO leaders. Why did the leaders of the CIO choose that particular moment to invest in hiring a huge organizing corps? How were these organizers able to succeed in the face of employer hostility and backlash? Why did the collective bargaining compromises settle in the way they did? It’s these questions and more that I hope to tackle in the podcast.

In addition to exploring the basic history, strategy, and significance of the CIO, my hope is also to draw out lessons for the present moment. CIO organizers were able to channel militant and strategic disruption toward huge gains in a relatively friendly political-economic context. Today, the context is quite different, but with a progressive National Labor Relations Board and an incumbent president needing to win back working-class votes, the present moment is also an opportune one for labor to strike. And though there aren’t anything like concentrated manufacturing facilities to occupy, with reshoring and limited reindustrialization, as well as the increasingly sophisticated but fragile distributional processes in the country, the possibilities for organized labor to seize strategic chokepoints are still numerous.

Among the many stories I recount on the podcast is that of the birth of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in the dramatic confrontation on the west coast in 1934. The genesis of the ILWU is a testament to what disruptive activity and multiracial solidarity can accomplish when skillfully channeled toward union recognition and gains. The ILWU was never one of the bigger unions in the CIO, but it was always one of the strongest and most influential. When CIO leaders looked to expand their reach west, there was really one key union to look to, and that was the one with a charismatic leader able to marshal the will of the rank-and-file in coordinated and militant action. The bravery and success of the ILWU captures well the heroic nature of the CIO moment, and I hope you’ll tune in to Organize the Unorganized to hear its story, which is available on Jacobin radio or at soundcloud.com/organizetheunorganized.

– Benjamin Y. Fong