Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

VII. BREAKTHROUGH OF
THE C.I.O.
It is a revealing comparison that during the 1930s
the European imperialists could only resolve the social
crisis in Italy, Germany, Spain, Poland, Finland,
Rumania, and so on, by introducing fascism, while in the
U.S. the imperialists resolved the social crisis with the New
Deal. In Germany the workers were hit with the Gestapo,
while in Amerika they got the C.I.O. industrial unions.
In that decade the white industrial proletariat
unified itself, pushed aside the dead hand of the old
A.F.L. labor aristocracy, and in a crushing series of sitdown
strikes won tremendous increases in wages and
working conditions. For the first time the new white industrial
proletariat forced the corporations to surrender
their despotic control over industrial life.
The Eastern and Southern European immigrant
national minorities won the "better life" that
Americanization promised them. They became full citizens
of the U.S. emtire. and, with the rest of the white industrial
proletariat, won rights and privileges both inside
and outside the factories. In return, as U.S. imperialism
launched its drive for world hegemony, it could depend
upon the armies of solidly united settlers serving imperialism
at home and on the battlefield. To insure socia!
stability, the new government-sponsored unions of the
C. I .O. absorbed the industrial struggle and helped
discipline class relations.
1. Unification of the White Workers
The working class upsurge of the 1930s was not ac- Iron and Steel Workers, whose 24,000 members in 1891 accumulated
discontents. This is the common, but shallow, counted for 2/3rds of all craftsmen in the industry, had
view of mass outbreaks. What is true is that material con- dwindled to only 6,500 members by 1914. (4)
ditions, including the relation to production, shape and
reshape all classes and strata. These classes and strata then
Mechanization also wiped out whole sections of
express characteristic political consciousness, the very bottom factory laborers, replacing shovels with
characteristic roles in the class struggle.
mechanical scoo~s. wheelbarrows with electric trollevs and
cranes. Both top and bottom layers of the &ctory
workforce were increasingly pulled into the growing middle
stratum of semi-skilled, production line assemblers and
machine operators. In the modern auto plants of the 1920s
some 70% were semi-skilled production workers, while only
10% were skilled craftsmen and 15% laborers.(5) The
political unification of the white workers thus had its
material roots in the enforced unification of labor in the
modern factory.
The unification of the white industrial workforce
was the result of immense pressures. Its long-range
material basis was the mechanization and imperialist
reorganization of production. In the late 19th century it
was still true that in many industries the skilled craftsmen
literally ran production. They - not the company -
would decide how the work was done. Combining the
functions of artisan, foreman, and personnel office, these
skilled craftsmen would directly hire and boss their entire
work crew of laborers, paying them out of a set fee paid by
the capitalist per ton or piece produced (the balance being
their wage-profit).
The master roller in the sheet metal rolling mill,
the puddler in the iron mill, the buttie in the coal mine, the
carriage builder in the early auto plant all exemplified this
stage of production. The same craft system applied to gun
factories, carpet mills, stone quarries etc. etc. (1) It was
these highly privileged settler craftsmen who were the base
of the old A.F.L. unions. Their income reflected their lofty
positions above the laboring masses. In 1884, for example,
master rollers in East St. Louis earned $42 per week (a then
very considerable wage), over four times more than
laborers they bossed.(2)
This petit-bourgeois income and role gradually
crumbled as capitalists reorganized and seized ever tighter
control over production. A survey by the U.S. Bureau of
Labor found that the number of skilled steel workers earning
606 an hour fell by 20% between 1900-1910.(3)
Mechanization cut the ranks of craftsmen, and, even
where they remained, their once-powerful role in production
had shrunk. The A.F.L. Amalgamated Association of
The 1929 depression was also a great equalizer and
a sharp blow to many settlers, knocking them off their
conservative bias. During the 1930s roughly 25% of the
U.S. Empire was unemployed. Office clerks, craftsmen,
and college students rubbed shoulders with laborers and
farmers in the relief lines. Many divisions broke down, as
midwestern and Southern rural whites migrated to the industrial
cities in search of jobs or relief. In 1929 it was
estimated that in Detroit alone there were some 75,000
young men (the "Suitcase Brigade") who had come from
the countryside to find jobs in the auto plants. (6)
The depression not only helped unite the settler
workers, but the social catastrophe pushed large sections
of other settler classes towards more sympathy with social
reform. Small farmers were being forced wholesale into
bankruptcy and were conducting militant struggles of their
own. Professionals, intellectuals, and even many small
businessmen, felt victimized by corporate domination of
the economy. Militancy and radicalism became teinporarily
respectable. When white labor started punching out it
would not only be stronger than before, but much of set-
76 tler society would be sympathetic to it.