INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS BELOW! Click on "Show More" A podcast about the history, strategy, and significance of the Congress of Industrial Organizations from the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University and Jacobin Magazine. All clip, song, and quote references, as well as links to individual interview transcripts, at soundcloud.com/organizetheunorganized. Interview with Jeremy Brecher: https://jacobin.com/2024/01/organize-the-unorganized-congress-of-industrial-organizations-labo ...
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This final episode of Organize the Unorganized is devoted to key lessons of the CIO moment. All of the guests on this program were asked about this basic question, and we try to represent all of their answers on this episode. The negative lessons, points where guests were keen to note the differences between the 30s and the present moment, focused …
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Episode 8: Is There an Ending to the CIO?
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This penultimate episode of Organize the Unorganized concludes the story of the CIO. We cover first the communist purge in the late 1940s, as well as Operation Dixie, the failed campaign to organize the south. We then get to merger with the AFL in 1955, and the afterlife of the CIO in the Industrial Union Department and its contributions to the Civ…
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The early period of the CIO could be said to have ended with the Little Steel strike in 1937, when the limits of the New Deal order were dramatically illustrated in the brutal repression and failure of the strike. But the CIO continued to grow through the 40s, and it was the war escalation that provided the context for it to do so. This episode wil…
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Episode 6: From the Docks to the Killing Floors
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https://jacobin.com/2024/05/organize-the-unorganized-cio-episode-6On this week's episode of Organize the Unorganized, we cover some of the key CIO unions not yet discussed in great detail, including the UE, ILWU, TWOC and PWOC. There were many other unions that formed the CIO - unions in oil, printing, transport, retail - but the four that we’re co…
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https://jacobin.com/2024/05/organize-the-unorganized-cio-episode-5-little-steelThis episode is devoted to the Little Steel strike in the summer of 1937, a tragic failure for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee and the CIO, and one that illustrated the limits of the New Deal order. It might appear excessive to devote an entire episode of the podc…
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https://jacobin.com/2024/04/cio-organize-podcast-left-unityHow was it that the CIO was finally able to make good on the decades-old dream of industrial unionism? In this episode, we outline four factors that were the keys to the CIO’s success. First, there was a political opportunity that the CIO took advantage of. Second, there were militant and d…
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https://jacobin.com/2024/04/cio-organize-podcast-sit-down-strikes/On the third episode of Organize the Unorganized, we examine the three initial major victories of the CIO in rubber, auto, and steel. We begin by recounting the story of the “first CIO strike” at the Goodyear complex in Akron, Ohio, a victorious strike that put the CIO on the map. We…
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https://jacobin.com/2024/04/cio-organize-podcast-hillman-lewisOn the second episode of Organized the Unorganized, we kick things off with an account of the institutional formation of the CIO, and then get to the organization’s key personalities. John L. Lewis, the founding president of and driving force behind the CIO, unsurprisingly gets a fair am…
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https://jacobin.com/2024/04/organize-cio-podcast-bridges-trucker-strikesThe first episode of Organize the Unorganized sets the stage for the story of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, first getting into the history of the organization from which it broke off, the American Federation of Labor, and then describing three developments that rais…
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There have been many moments of labor upsurge in America, including the influx of members into the Knights of Labor in 1886, the dramatic growth of unions during and in the immediate aftermath of World War I, and the great public sector unionism surge of the 1960s and 70s, but none matches the scale of the 1930s, when millions of workers were union…
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