Word: cio
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...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...
...CIO faced the central problem of direction. Was the only job of the CIO to organize industrial workers to bring them a "piece of the pie"? Or would the CIO provide the organization for an independent international labor movement...
...cannot deny the importance of the accomplishments of the CIO-UAW campaigns of the thirties. Before these victories, when a worker discussed unionization, he was liable to immediate dismissal from work and a livelihood was precarious struggle subject to the whims of the employer or a rampant economy. Unionization brought job security, a true seniority system, unemployment compensation, severance pay, pensions, and Social Security...
These struggles were all preceded by the initial fight for union recognition as a sole bargaining agent for workers. The GM sit-down strike broke this barrier, which business swore would never fall. The flood tide brought non-union workers to the doors of every CIO affiliate no matter what local. Mortimer found himself negotiating for strikers from power to aircraft industries under the auspices of the UAW because, as he put it, "it was the only CIO union thereabouts...
...THOSE in the CIO who envisioned the movement as the future stronghold for labor solidarity, the combined forces of FED, business, and selfish divisive labor leaders destroyed this goal. Despite Lewis's enormous contribution to organized labor, he was incapable of forging real working-class Independence. DeCaux, his close ally, admits, "He had no clear idea of such a goal," Lewis basically played a power politics game within the rules of this system. While on the one hand he responded, almost instinctively to desires of workers, he also dealt with Roosevelt when the need arose...