Unions In The 1930s Essay

Klarizsa Padilla Prof. Joseph A. McCartin Hist Focus: Great Depression - HIST 099 – 01 11 November 2014

A Critical Moment for the Rights of U.S. Labor: 1930s Unions

Although the future of labor unions looked grim in the early 1930s, their fortunes would soon change. The tremendous gains labor unions experienced in the late 1930s was in part from the result of the Roosevelt administration’s pro-union stance and from legislation enacted

By the end of the 1930s most Americans realized that unions were one of the keys to genuine democracy because it provided a voice to workers and the inclusion of the racial minorities and industrial workers in collective bargaining opportunities. Business owners in the 1930s unleashed the greatest period of social disruption that has ever taken place in the United States as they slashed wages and showed no sympathy for the starving masses that worked for them. Most employers flatly refused to bargain with any union, and used the economic crisis as an excuse to slash all employees’ wages. When the working-class opposed them, they often responded with violence. This violence discouraged many from joining unions. In Julius Fry’s case, who worked in a textile mill, this was his primary reason for not having joined a union. He explains "… when we joined the union in the '30s...I never

The workers believed the union voice and its collective bargaining power could realize an extensive reform agenda. Cary Joseph Allen Jr., who was an aluminum worker in the 1930s remembers, the promotion of "…better working conditions, for one thing. A higher wage, possibly, if it could be negotiated, was another…a clean-up modification campaign in the houses…” as gains the union could potentially make. When the CIO formally became as a section of the American Federation of Labor industrial workers flooded in. The groups of workers who were already at the forefront of struggle for a greater voice in their workplace, such as the auto and aluminum workers, quickly affiliated their unions with the CIO. This was true for Cary Joseph Allen Jr.’s union, where according to him "… they could see the advantages of being in one bargaining unit; whereas when the union was divided up into activities, then the company could play the machinists off against the electricians … So we agreed to switch over to the CIO." During the tumultuous times of the 1930s, the CIO and unions became a highly bureaucratic machine, that organized any and all workers, Black and white, skilled and unskilled, on an equal basis united under the belief that collective bargaining as a democratic right. The newfound commitment to ending racial discrimination in some unions like the CIO