History

From THE FIGHTING MACHINISTS, A CENTURY OF STRUGGLE
by Robert G. Rodden

The Wagner Act presented the American labor movement with the greatest opportunity in history. Wharton and other IAM leaders exhorted staff and members to take full advantage of the law. Nevertheless the IAM's leadership remained fearful of any organizing that was not along strict craft lines. Other AFL craft unions felt the same way. By the summer of 1935 production workers in the rubber factories of Akron, auto plants around Detroit, and steel mills in Pittsburgh wee practically beating down the doors to get into the old AFL unions. They found they were more welcome in theory than in practice. The ghosts of the Knights of Labor, the American Railway Union and the IWW still haunted the leaders of the old line craft unions. In 1933 and 1934, 100,000 steelworkers applied for membership in the AFL-chartered steel union. But the mediocrity at the head of the union , a character aptly called "Grandmother" Tighe, was determined to keep his union to safe manageable numbers. In the auto industry the cautious and conservative AFL leadership actually managed to reduce union membership on the assembly lines.

At this point enter John L. Lewis--one of the most significant and charismatic of all the colorful characters who ever thundered and fought for the cause of organized labor. As president of the United Mine Workers Lewis was idolized by generations of men who dug coal in the bowels of the earth. In peace or war, for almost half a century, mines closed down all over America when John L. issued a strike call.

Lewis could be awesome. With little formal education but the self-taught eloquence of Shakespeare and the Bible, he skewered his opponents with righteous and wrathful rhetoric. He once described Vice President John Nance Garner as "a labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking, evil old man." He also dubbed AFL President William Green as "Sitting Bill", adding "I have done a lot of exploring of his mind and I give you my work there is nothing there." 

In the heat of a parley with top management during the rash of assembly line sitdowns in the auto industry, Lewis gave voice to decades of suppressed working class hostility when he pulled himself to the full height of his impressive bulk and told a contemptuously scornful company official, "I am 99% of a mind to come around the table right now and wipe that damn sneer off your face."

By the time the AFL Convention met in 1935 Lewis was convinced that the AFL hierarchy was standing still, "Its face to the past." As a member of the Committee on Organizing he brought in a minority report urging an all-out campaign to organize America's mass production industries from top to bottom, by industry rather than by craft. He argued that this could be done with the Wagner Act but he could not dent minds that had been molded and set in the cement of Gompers' philosophy of business unionism. The debate became heated, so heated, in fact, Lewis actually punched Carpenter's President William Hutcheson in the nose.

Wharton was prominent among those who opposed Lewis' minority report. Appalled by the prospect of unions with what he called "unrestricted charters to organize workers without recognizing the jurisdictional claims of established internationals," Wharton defended the craft concept as realistic and dismissed industrial unionism as a pipe dream.

Voicing his doubt that workers in mass production industries really wanted to be organized, Wharton asked,

Having spent his life dealing with the problems of railroad machinists Wharton rarely tried to see beyond the roundhouses where he learned his craft. While he headed a union that now included a wide range of industries and occupations, Wharton's monthly "President's Page" in the Journal, seldom strayed from the concerns of skilled railroad journeymen. Only rarely did he address himself to matters of interest to the tens of thousands of auto mechanics, construction and erection machinists or tool-and-die makers in job shops who were a significant part of his union. To the end he remained suspicious of efforts to recruit members who had neither training, nor skills, nor any sense of pride in being machinists.

For a brief moment the IAM had a chance, never to return, to become a dominant in America's metalworking industries, as is I. G. Metall in West Germany.* The moment passed because Wharton failed to see the extent to which the Wagner Act shifted the balance of power in industrial relations. As Wharton faced the past, John L. Lewis and the Committee (later Congress) of Industrial Organizations moved into the future, organizing millions of eager workers in auto, steel, aluminum, electrical manufacturing, rubber, glass, oil, chemical, textile, clothing, communications and other industrial occupations.

The IAM vs. the CIO

When CIO organizers began fanning out across the country in early 1936, the Journal fairly crackled with indignation. Articles and editorials warned against industrial unionism and condemned the CIO as "dual unionism." In a fervent defense of craft unionism, GVP Harvey Brown reminded IAM members that a skilled machinist was a skilled machinist whether employed in "a chemical plant, a rubber products factory, a washing machine factory, a tobacco factory or a textile mill, a newspaper or a brewery." He warned that industrial unionism would force skilled machinists to join different unions every time they changed jobs. Worse, wages and working conditions of skilled machinists would be determined by unskilled and semi-skilled laborers who would always be the majority.

 Organizing the Aircraft Industry

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