Word: unionism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Thus was established what newly elected President Homer Martin called "a democratic, autonomous, clean union." His inference was that the other part of the United Automobile Workers of America which in the recent split (TIME, Feb. 6) remained with C. I. 0. has none of these qualities, although it undoubtedly has a clear majority of organized autoworkers...
Homer Martin's one chance of survival outside both C. I. 0. and A. F. of L. is to sell his wobbly minority to automakers who, now that they must have some union, ask nothing more than an orderly one. For selling talk, Mr. Martin had his delegates pledge themselves to observe their contracts, keep out Communists, Nazis and Fascists, and debar all such gentry from office. In doing so Homer Martin alienated radicals who have stood loyally by him and supplied the bulk of his administrative brains...
Followers of Communist Oppositionist Jay Lovestone yelped that they had been sold out to the most reactionary elements in the union, threatened to desert en masse. Meantime Henry Ford's unionized competitors resigned themselves to battle not with a union but between two unions claiming the same name, same contracts, same prerogatives under the Wagner...
With the bravery of youth two young Socialists, Harry Leland Mitchell and Clay East from eastern Arkansas, set out in 1934 to do something for Southern sharecroppers. What they did, with the help of No. 1 Socialist Norman Thomas, was to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Having bearded many a planter and even bettered matters a little for its poverty-stricken membership, S. T. F. U. in 1937 tried to affiliate with C. I. O. as an autonomous union. Because the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing & Allied Workers of America was already in the farm field...
...according to Messrs. Butler and Mitchell used to be a central committeeman of the Communist Party. If Mr. Henderson is no longer a Communist, as he tells his C. I. 0. superiors, he smells like one to Socialists Butler & Mitchell. Last week they accused him of deliberately wrecking their union to subordinate it to the Communist Party. They declared that he confused simple Southern Negroes and "poor whites" with red tape, refused to support S. T. F. U.'s roadside sit-down in Missouri, finally suspended all its officers without a hearing and called a reorganization convention...