The Unions

The unions, particularly those affiliated with the CIO, were at the core of the Popular Front along with the Communist Party, with which there was considerable overlap in 1946. The year saw a wave of strikes, particularly from the CIO unions. Wages had been frozen during the war but the cost of living had risen. Overall economic prosperity was greater, however, because of the increase in employment and overtime during these years. Union members wanted their wages to go up at least as much as prices had to maintain their buying power. Employers were firmly resistant to increasing wages while adamant in their insistence on their need for higher prices and increased profits. The CIO also launched a drive at this time to organize workers in the South, the region that had proven most resistant to unionization.

The CIO had been formed by dissidents from the AFL in 1935. They wanted to transform society not just act as a collective bargaining agent.

Initially the largest groups within the CIO were the Mine Workers under John L. Lewis, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America led by Sidney Hillman and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union under David Dubinsky. In many occupations there were competing AFL and CIO unions and sometimes an independent or company union as well.

The Communists had formed their own unions in 1929 under the Trade Union Unity League banner in response to the Comintern policy formulated that year mandating that the various national parties abandon their efforts to "bore from within" existing unions and instead establish their own. These Communist unions were dissolved in 1935 when the Comintern reversed itself again and initiated the policy of the Popular Front, calling for the Communist parties to form alliances with other left-wing groups, including unions. Many of the leading union organizers and leaders of the TUUC went over to the newly formed CIO where they assumed leadership positions. They were welcome because of their fervor and organizing experience.

In 1938 the ILGWU left the CIO and rejoined the less radical AFL, in large part because of Dubinsky's displeasure over the role of the Communist Party in the CIO. The same concern led Dubinsky to abandon the American Labor Party in 1944 to form the anti-Communist Liberal Party. In 1942 the autocratic Lewis withdrew the Mine Workers from the CIO for reasons of his own but briefly rejoined in 1946. Most CIO members were the children of migrants and immigrants who came of age during the Depression and lived in the nation's industrial core of the Northeast and Upper Midwest.B y the early 1940s ,the CIO was dominated by the metalworking unions, including the UAW, United Steel Workers and United Electrical Workers, centered in the Great Lake's Rust Belt and with a heavily Slavic membership. In The Cultural Front. Michael Denning noted a clash between the cultural pluralism advocated by the Popular Front and the white ethnic nationalism of some of the CIO's right wing union members.

The CIO also was active in the organization of white collar workers through the American Communications Association (mosty telecommunication employees), the United Office and Professional Workers of America (many of whom worked in the insurance industry), and the teacher's union (Local 555, affiliated with United Public Workers). Many of these members were from working class families. Denning characterized them as people who had graduated from high school and maybe had put themselves through city college or night school, or at least taken some courses. They might have dreamed of becoming lawyers, doctors or professionals, but had ended up stuck in dead-end clerical office jobs. It is groups like these, people who have been educated to seek a higher status in society but who have been unable to achieve their heightened expectations who classically have formed the ardent nucleus of most radical groups on both the Left and Right. The Party and unions sought to convince these clerical workers that they were structurally part of the proletariat and not the middle class.

A number of CIO unions and locals, such as New York's very active Local 65, Wholesale and Warehouse Workers Union were Communist Party dominated but there were also members of dissident Communist factions and social democrats in the leadership of other CIO unions and locals. Most of the rank-and-file did not belong to the Communist Party/ The non-Party members were growing stronger in the umbrella organization and were increasingly hostile to the Communists not only for ideological reasons but also on the pragmatic grounds that the role of the Party in the unions was becoming an albatross in the postwar years. The racial politics of the 1940s produced additional problems for the unions as white and black southerners flooded into blue collar jobs during the war. Although the left wing of the CIO supported racial equality some of the rank-and-file on the assembly lines openly objected, at times violently, to the integration of the work place. Meanwhile the Communist Party, reflecting the latest shift in Comintern policy, was less interested after 1945 in promoting the Popular Front culture that the unions had fostered than in rallying support for Stalin's foreign policy. The conflict was evident in the May Day parade that year, the first since the war, when the Communist-led unions supplied sizable contingents to hear Communist Party head William Z. Foster denounce Truman and the British and praise Stalin, while many of the city's most prominent union leaders stayed home and the AFL unions boycotted the event.