Word: uaw
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Since 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...
...tens his life story in a simple, modest account in Organize! My Life as a Union Man. His unique capacity for personalization may fool the reader into discounting Mortimer's role in the UAW. No one should be mistaken: Wyndham Mortimer was a giant of the labor movement. He was so effective an organizer that his so-called allies in labor had to silence him. His fighting spirit shines in Organize! He recalls an incident when he first arrived in Flint, Michigan, to organize the GM plant there and was greeted by a phone threat on his life. "How would...
...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 UAW...
...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...
...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...