To Whom the Organizers Answer
Why some organizers built movements that lasted and others did not
From Militancy to Reversals
On June 9, 1941, some 2,500 Army troops entered the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California, and broke a strike. United Automobile Workers (UAW) Local 683 had called the strike over wages that had not kept pace with the defense boom.
One of its organizers was Wyndham Mortimer, a founding vice president of the UAW and a member of the Communist Party. The strike was legal under the union’s constitution, though it defied directives from CIO president Philip Murray and Sidney Hillman to hold off striking in defense plants while federal mediation ran its course. In the spring of 1941, the party held to the line that the war in Europe was imperialist, that American workers had no stake in it, and that defense production was a legitimate field for militant action. Mortimer had organized the strike on that premise.1
Thirteen days later, German armored columns crossed the Soviet frontier.
The party line reversed overnight. The workers at Inglewood were told that the conditions that had made their strike a mistake had existed all along, and that they were now to be led back in without a contract or a concession. The reversal was not debated in the membership meeting but simply announced, a fact the workers did not fail to notice.
The strike at Inglewood was no outlier. By 1941, the Communist Party had spent a decade building the largest left presence in the American labor movement since the IWW, with major influence in the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), the National Maritime Union (NMU), the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), and parts of the UAW. These organizers were, for the most part, serious unionists. They led the Flint sit-down, built the NMU out of the wreckage of the old International Seamen’s Union, and organized Black workers and female workers in industries the AFL had neglected or refused to organize. They won contracts, led strikes, and survived.2
Over the course of the 1940s, the membership of those unions came to understand that their leaders were implementing a series of reversals in union strategy that mirrored decisions made in Moscow. The Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 required the party to abandon the Popular Front and recast the war as imperialist. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 required the reverse. The wartime no-strike pledge was then enforced against rank-and-file grievances with an intensity many non-party organizers did not match.3 The 1948 endorsement of Henry Wallace over Truman, against the near-unanimous position of the CIO leadership, was the reversal that finally forced the conflict inside the unions into the open. To see how such conflicts take shape inside unions, it helps to start with the basic form they often take: the caucus.4
A caucus is an organized group within a union that works to shift its direction. It puts forward candidates for office, takes positions on contracts, and makes its case in union meetings and elections. A caucus is not a separate union and holds no formal power; it succeeds only by persuading members. Where such a group wins the union’s offices, it is no longer a caucus but a leadership; the question of accountability follows it there. What follows traces how organizers came to their positions—whether from the members they organized or from organizations outside the union whose priorities the members never voted on.
Each of these strategic shifts could be defended on its own terms. The real problem, however, was the cumulative pattern: over time, members came to see that the union’s direction was being set elsewhere. By then, the question of to whom the organizers answered was no longer an abstraction; the membership knew.
The Price of Expulsions
In 1949 and 1950, the CIO expelled 11 of its member unions. Expulsion was not a symbolic censure. The federation revoked each union’s charter, cut it off from CIO organizing, legal, and financial support, and chartered a rival union with a mandate to take its members. The unions expelled were those charged with answering to the Communist Party rather than to their own memberships.
Philip Murray and the CIO leadership led the purge under pressure from the Truman administration, the Catholic Church, and the emerging anticommunist consensus in the press. The expulsions are usually remembered as Cold War events, and they were. But the pressure succeeded for a reason internal to the unions themselves: the members whose loyalty would decide the outcome no longer believed their union’s direction was truly its own.
The decision was formalized at the CIO’s 1949 convention in Cleveland. By that October, the outcome was already clear: the UE, the federation’s third-largest union, was to be expelled as a Communist instrument and replaced by the newly chartered IUE under James Carey.5 Over the following year, 10 more unions were expelled or forced out, representing some 900,000 members, about a fifth of the CIO at its peak.6 Some were folded into larger unions; a few, like the ILWU, survived. Most did not.
The standard account often glosses over how readily the expelled unions’ memberships accepted the split. UE officers expected members to rally against the IUE raid. They did not. The IUE began as a shell, but by 1950 and 1951 it was winning plant after plant, taking about half the UE’s membership over the following years.7 That outcome required CIO money, government backing, employer support—and members who no longer resisted.
The UE’s failure to hold its members was no accident; it was a cumulative result of a decade of reversals. By 1949, rank-and-file members had lived through a decade of reversals. Explanations for the union’s shifts on the Marshall Plan, Henry Wallace, or the wartime no-strike pledge no longer sounded like positions workers had reached together. They sounded like positions they had been told to adopt, then abandon, then adopt again. When the IUE came raiding, the UE asked its members to defend a direction they had never chosen. Many declined. By then, the question of to whom the organizers answered was being decided in the union elections.
The damage the expulsions did to the American labor movement was severe. Left-led unions had been among the most militant in the CIO and among the most willing to organize workers the AFL had abandoned. Their removal did not pass those capacities to the remaining unions. It destroyed many of them. After 1950, the CIO was a smaller and more cautious federation, and the 1955 merger with the AFL completed a shift already underway: away from organizing the unorganized and from the expansive premise on which the CIO had been founded.
Yet those losses alone do not explain why some left-led unions did not survive while others did. The ILWU helps explain why. Under Harry Bridges, the union operated more independently on questions of union strategy than the UE did, and its members recognized its positions as their own. The ILWU also had advantages in structure and position that the UE lacked: concentration on the West Coast waterfront and a stronger defensive position against raids.8 Any adequate explanation of its survival must include both how democratically the union was run and where and how it was situated in the economy.
Forms of Political Entry
To understand how outside organizations related to unions, it helps to distinguish several forms of political entry. The Communist Party was not the only entity to wrestle with organized entry into unions, only the most consequential one. The Trotskyist tradition matters here because it named the tactic, openly debated its purposes, and developed a vocabulary that the Communist case often blurred. In 1934, Trotsky urged his followers in France to enter the Socialist Party as a disciplined but temporary faction. The point was tactical: to enter where workers were radicalizing, recruit, build influence, and eventually reemerge as a stronger, independent force.
American Trotskyists tried their own version in 1936, when the Workers Party entered Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party. By their own standards, it worked: they recruited substantially from the left wing, especially the youth section, and, after the expulsion in 1937, emerged with a larger organization. James Cannon, the movement’s leading figure, later described it as what it had been: a planned entry to recruit and withdraw.9
The Socialist Party was a smaller organization than the CIO unions, and its internal dynamics are harder to reconstruct. Even so, the Trotskyists’ uneven record of entries helped give organizers a shared vocabulary for the different ways political groups could enter unions.
One form of entry is maneuver: a group enters a larger organization to recruit and later departs. Another is a colonizing entry: a cadre enters, intending to remain and gradually steer the host organization toward an outside program. A third is deep entry: over time, the cadre become inseparable from the rank and file around them, accountable to the union’s internal life rather than to directives from elsewhere. These are distinct forms. The Communist Party’s work in the CIO often resembled the second. The more enduring examples—Bridges and the ILWU, some UE locals, and later TDU—came closer to the third.
TDU and Deep Entry
Organizers who owe their allegiance to an organization outside the union will eventually face a test. They can defend the outside line and lose the membership; they can side with the membership and break with the outside organization; or they can try to pass the outside line off as the union’s own. That strategy can work for a while. Over time, it usually fails.
Teamsters for a Democratic Union is the clearest modern American example of the more deeply rooted form of caucus politics. It was founded in 1976 amid anger over a weak freight agreement and over a union structure that had denied the rank-and-file meaningful control for generations.
The founding meeting brought together several political tendencies: International Socialists, independent socialists, Catholic workers, unaffiliated militants, and members whose politics began and ended with workplace concerns. A principle reaffirmed from the start distinguished TDU: its positions would be set by the Teamsters, not by any outside tendency acting as such.10
TDU enforced that commitment in practice. Its conventions were open, its officers elected, and its positions on contracts, elections, and strategy developed through processes in which an outside cadre could argue their case but could not impose a position decided elsewhere. Participating political groups could contribute their ideas, but they did not set the course in advance.
What made TDU different was not the absence of politics but the presence of accountability. It did not take positions inside the union that had been set elsewhere. It opposed the 1976 contract because its members thought it was bad, and it backed Ron Carey in 1991 because years of organizing had persuaded them he was the candidate their movement had been building toward. In that respect, TDU came closer to deep entry: a cadre shaped by the union they were organizing, not simply placed in it from outside.
The 1991 election marked the reform movement’s greatest breakthrough. A federal consent decree made direct election of Teamster officers possible for the first time, and TDU had a candidate in Ron Carey, a militant UPS local president with no ties to the old guard. He won. The decree made the election possible; 15 years of rank-and-file organizing made the victory the members’ own. Carey then led the 1997 UPS strike, still remembered as the most effective private-sector strike of the decade.
Carey lost the 1997 election to Hoffa’s son, who then took over the leadership of the union. The reform movement spent much of the next two decades on the defensive before the O’Brien-Zuckerman slate won in 2021 under conditions TDU had spent years helping to create.11 The reform movement endured because it had been built by a caucus answerable to the members it organized.
The Presence of Accountability
Taken together, these cases point to a distinction that does more to explain the outcomes than the specific ideology involved. Organizers rooted in the memberships around them built unions that could survive political tests. Organizers ultimately answerable to programs set elsewhere often built impressive unions and caucuses, too, but when those organizations were tested, they were harder to defend. Structure and circumstance determined which unions had any chance of withstanding a rival union’s raid at all. Among those that did, the decisive variable was the presence of accountability.
The question has never been whether workers can hold political convictions. The question is to whom the organizers answer when those convictions and the life of the union pull in different directions.
Endotes
[1] Wyndham Mortimer, Organize! My Life as a Union Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). The wildcat strike began the first week of June; roughly 2,500 Army troops seized the plant on June 9 and dispersed the picket line, and the workers voted to return the following day.
[2] Harvey Levenstein, Communism, Anticommunism, and the CIO (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981); Steve Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
[3] Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
[4] Roger Keeran, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
[5] Proceedings of the Eleventh Constitutional Convention of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Cleveland, Ohio, October 31–November 4, 1949.
[6] Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Eleven unions were expelled, representing a combined membership of roughly 900,000 to one million.
[7] Rosswurm, The CIO’s Left-Led Unions. Roughly 300,000 former UE members joined the IUE within three years; over the raiding decade the UE lost more than half its membership.
[8] Robert W. Cherny, Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023); Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
[9] James P. Cannon, The History of American Trotskyism (New York: Pioneer Publishers, 1944).
[10] Dan La Botz, Rank and File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (New York: Verso, 1990).
[11] Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition (London: Verso, 2007); “Teamsters United Takes the Wheel,” Labor Notes, November 2021. The O’Brien-Zuckerman slate won by roughly 67 percent to 33 percent, the first TDU-backed victory in the international union in nearly a quarter-century.