Word: afl
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...every movement has its leaders, the CIO cannot be understood devoid of John Lewis, or the UAW of Wyndham Mortimer. At first Mortimer, an auto worker and ex-miner, was willing to organize the industrial auto workers within the framework of the conservative "craft" orientated American Federation of labor (AFL), despite its resistance. It took Lewis's breakaway Committee (soon to become a Congress) in 1935 to lead the way for the UAW. Under the new CIO umbrella, Mortimer, responding to the auto workers' surge for unity, led the great General Motors sit-down strike...
...like Mortimer, but an upper-class British background. He too spent his life in the labor movement, mostly as a Labor reporter. His "personal history." entitled labor Radical, tells the story of the CIO, its creation as a force for an independent labor movement and its demise as another AFL...
...MOST significant failure of America's labor movement was the inability of the AFL to incorporate unorganized industrial workers. The phenomenon of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, in the early 1900's had already indicated that the AFL was incapable of expanding beyond it own craft orientation. Today, history has repeated itself in the AFL-CIO's fat complacency...
Mortimer strongly suspects that the AFL entered a "gentlemen's agreement" with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), mass production industries and in return NAM, would not molest AFL craft unions. From every level of activity Mortimer met resistance from the AFL Executive Council. Yet he realized, "While the shortcomings of the AFL were many, and very irritating, we recognized that it remained the center of union activity in the country. The 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City provided the opening for Lewis's CIO split and Mortimer's home for the new forming...
Anti-communism destroyed most of the progress of the thirties, leaving the rebellous CIO a docile partner of the AFL. Despite the political orientation of the leadership of the AFL-CIO. Mortimer remained forever optimistic...