unions and the building trades that formed the first permanent worker organizations in this country.
Although unions have been around since the earliest days of the Republic, they were usually short-lived and inchoate efforts. Often, the focus was more on passing wage and hours legislation on a city or state basis, and so labor unions looked more like labor parties.12 As modern capitalism and large corporations took shape and the world of work was restructured, unions’ definition of who was a worker and who was a boss evolved slowly. The most prominent union of the 1870s and 80s, the Knights of Labor, extended membership to “all who labor.” For the Knights, this included small business owners and supervisors (but excluded saloonkeepers and lawyers!).
This was a boom-and-bust era of labor organizing. Union ranks would swell during good economic times as worker demands for a fairer share of corporate profits frequently led to substantial strike waves. When the economy crashed, as it did about once a decade, employers would target the loudest union activists for layoffs and blacklisting, and the unions would be smashed.
The craft unions were able to form more permanent organizations by being deliberately smaller. The carpenters’ union, for example, didn’t want “all who labor” to join the union. They wanted all who labor as carpenters. They wanted to define the skills of the carpentry trade, control the training of new apprentice carpenters, and force employers to come to them when they needed skilled workers on a job site.
And employers needed the crafts. During economic downturns, they had little ability to fire union activists or recruit scabs because the craft unions functionally controlled the jobs. So, while less construction might mean fewer carpenters working, those who were working were doing so on a union basis. And when construction picked up during the next economic recovery, it too would be done on a union basis.
These unions would survive. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters was formed in 1881. It still exists today. It was one of the unions that formed the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as an umbrella organization of all the various craft unions. For decades, these craft unions were the labor movement. It shouldn’t be surprising that the industrial unions and public sector unions that eventually followed longed to emulate the model in which everyone on the job site has to belong to the union as a defining characteristic of a union shop.
But a craft union shop is actually a closed shop, and it is a model that is very difficult to emulate. Union membership in a craft or trade union precedes the job. You join the union. The union trains you in the craft. The union gets you hired on a job site where a contractor has signed a collective bargaining agreement with the unions for the duration of the construction. Of course, it’s reasonable that the building trades unions demand that only union members get hired for the job and that everybody on the job is fully paid up in their union dues.
But that’s not how most of the economy is structured. Consider the fate of one of the other founding affiliates of the AFL. The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was a craft union that functionally controlled steel production for a brief time in the 1880s. They defined the smelting process for making iron and steel. They controlled the training and supply of workers. They controlled the quality of the product. They controlled the pace of work, they controlled who worked, and they controlled prices.
This amount of worker control was unacceptable to the new captains of industry. Andrew Carnegie, who was buying up major steel mills and metal works factories in order to gain monopoly control of the industry, forced a confrontation at the Homestead Steel Works in 1892. He locked out the union and hired a private army of Pinkertons to wage armed warfare against the union men. In the entire bloody, violent, and murderous history of American class warfare, the Homestead strike still stands out for its barbarism.13
Bosses gave Carnegie’s new economic model the ironically bloodless name “the open shop,” and later and more sinisterly, “The American Plan.” What this meant was that union members were not welcome. The company would choose who gets hired, take control of training, and de-skill the jobs to the greatest extent possible.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the new methods of mass production that would come to define the “American Century” were designed to thwart the craft model of worker organization. It would not be the last time that corporations restructured the economy to counter the way that unions are organized and, in the process, avoid unions altogether.
Exclusive Representation and the Modern Labor Movement
The model of one union exclusively representing and bargaining on behalf of all the workers in a bargaining unit is a product of the law, but it was probably an unintentional development.
With bosses that would literally rather wage armed warfare on their workers than deal with a union, it became clear to the Roosevelt administration that crawling out of the Great Depression would require government intervention to legally force employers to recognize and bargain with unions. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 had bare-bones procedural requirements. A union proves that it has members in a shop. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) then directs the employer to meet with union representatives and bargain “in good faith.” The Act was much more focused on preventing and forbidding common union-busting tactics called unfair labor practices.
In his book The Blue Eagle at Work, Charles J. Morris argues that there was never an intention that a union would have to win a majority of votes in a certification election. There was a clear understanding by the Act’s authors and the early administrators of the National Labor Relations Board that in so-called open shops, there would be, at best, a militant minority of union activists but more likely a few scared and secret members of a union.14 The purpose of the Act was to force employers to deal with these incipient unions, and the legitimacy that the union would achieve by actually meeting with management and negotiating over workplace issues might help the union attract more members and grow in power.
There were at the time also multiple unions in a lot of shops, competing for workers’ loyalty, activism, and dues money. The nature of their competition, however, would ultimately result in the exclusive representation framework, particularly once the Congress of Industrial Organizations split from and began competing with the American Federation of Labor.
The CIO began as a committee of unions within the AFL that advocated for new unions to organize workers on the basis of the industry they worked in instead of by job classification. They wanted the Federation to charter a new union of autoworkers to represent all of the workers at Ford and GM, regardless of whether they welded the frame, installed a fuse, or swept the floor.
The craft unions of the AFL entered the 1930s still trying to make organizational sense of the mass production industries. They saw each of the tiny, timed movements on the assembly line as devalued crafts that they should represent individually and re-skill. The AFL granted a temporary charter for autoworkers only while the crafts debated how to divvy up the members.15
The decisive split between the CIO and the AFL arose over the question of what the unions’ strategic orientation should be regarding the new labor law and the Roosevelt administration that signed it.16 The craft unions were wary of involving the government in collective bargaining and inclined to stick with their traditional “reward your friends and punish your enemies” approach to electoral politics.
The CIO unions, led by the legendary Mineworkers president John L. Lewis, saw the labor board as essential to organizing auto, steel, and the steel industry’s non-union “captive” mines. They feared losing the opportunity of the moment if Roosevelt did not win reelection, and they wanted labor to be a full-throated member of the New Deal coalition.
Once independent, the CIO began creating new unions for the auto factories, steel mills, textiles mills, and a host of other mass production industries. Thanks to a lot of brave organizers, creative job actions, and an interventionist federal government that forced employers to deal with unions, the CIO grew rapidly. Faced with the threat of political irrelevance, the AFL began organizing in earnest, forcing the NLRB to conduct elections to determine which union the workers preferred.17
The last thing the CIO wanted was to see its powerful