A History of Everything Leftist Unionism (full series)
The Old Left and the Reds | Labor and the New Left
The Rise of the SEIU | Labor’s New Coalition
Summary: American labor radicalism has come a long way from Soviet agents in the Congress of Industrial Organizations through the UAW-funded Students for a Democratic Society to today’s SEIU purple-shirted demonstrators and red-shirted UAW anti-anti-Hamasniks. As Big Labor has declined, what independence the labor movement had from the progressive Left has diminished to the point where, with rare divergences, it effectively has ceased to exist.
The causes of the Long Decline are many, and the causes of Big Labor’s leftism are also many, ranging from financial incentive structures of union officials to the structure of collective bargaining. Today, organized labor is a full member of the Everything Leftist coalition, not just in economic issues and labor organizing but also in social and foreign policy.
In 2024, organized labor (or what’s left of it, as it sits at its all-time low in proportion of workers who are unionized) is a full member of the Everything Leftist coalition, not just in economic issues and labor organizing but also in social and foreign policy. Unions assist in organizing anti-anti-Hamas protests targeting Israel that frequently involve clearly anti-Semitic activity. Unions support environmentalist policies that directly target members’ jobs, so long as their coalition partners make promises of new unionized jobs to replace them, however unrealistic those promises may be. And unions’ financial reports show direct payments to Democratic political-consulting firms, left-wing identity-politics groups, and left-wing coalitions, even by unions that may profess neutrality in some electoral races.
Earlier in its history, Big Labor had independence within the liberal coalition. Unions had a tense relationship with the 1960s New Left. While some like the United Auto Workers (UAW) led by the social democrat Walter Reuther supported and midwifed it, others balked. In 1968, the New York City teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, fought a bitter strike against a “local control” pilot program devised with the aid of the left-wing Ford Foundation, with the mostly Black district supporting the program and the largely Jewish union members alleging unfair labor practices and widespread anti-Semitism. Most famously, when left-wing U.S. Senator George McGovern (D-SD) won the Democratic nomination for president in 1972, George Meany and Lane Kirkland worked to deny the AFL-CIO union federation’s endorsement to him, even as Kirkland was on the (then-secret) “enemies list” of McGovern’s opponent, President Richard Nixon.
The rise of Everything Leftism within Big Labor has been fitful. In the early 20th century, liberals (most prominently the Screen Actors Guild’s Ronald Reagan, who turned his fight into a conservative political career) fought Communist efforts to take over labor unions, and Hollywood studio productions were weakened by the strategic inconstancy of their Soviet masters.
By the 1960s, foreign-backed Reds were replaced by domestic radicals. The United Auto Workers funded the formation of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). After the radical group’s fall, ex-SDSers like Paul Booth and Wade Rathke of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), whose Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was closely tied to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), burrowed in or were brought into the leadership class of American labor organizations.
After the Berlin Wall’s collapse took down organized labor’s center, John Sweeney, a card-carrying DSA radical, would come to take Kirkland and Meany’s old office. Little about organized labor’s ideological orientation has changed since he took office in 1996 except actions to further codify the Everything Leftist alliance. In the 2000s, the SEIU was closely involved in the creation of the Democracy Alliance, even housing the liberal donor collective’s headquarters for a time. By 2013, the AFL-CIO federation had proposed formally admitting environmentalist, identity politics, and other “progressive” groups like the Sierra Club, the National Council of La Raza (now UnidosUS), and MomsRising.
While formal admission never came, coalition politics keep Big Labor tightly within the Everything Leftist faction. Activist staff flow freely between labor organizations and other liberal-coalition groups, including at the highest levels. And Big Labor uses its power over workers’ pension funds to participate in the left-wing “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) activist-investing campaign. These proposals often seek to aid union organizing, but they also can aid broader Everything Leftism, such as a Teamsters resolution against Amazon that demanded a “just transition” report on progress toward and the effects of switching to environmentalist-supported weather-dependent energy. When activist energy on the left pushes radical policy, as with the Black Lives Matter movement’s call to “defund the police” or with Palestinian-interests activists demanding to “Globalize the Intifada,” one can expect to find Big Labor somewhere nearby supporting the extremist movements.
The Old Left and the Reds
Early American labor unionism had a radical streak. Around the turn of the 20th century, Socialists like Eugene Debs and radicals like Big Bill Haywood joined together (briefly) to form the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical organization that would unite the working class into “one big union.”
That early radicalism collapsed after the U.S. entry into World War I. The IWW and early Socialist movements were undone by a combination of WWI-era patriotism and jingoism, the Woodrow Wilson administration’s notorious disregard for civil liberties, and the desire for “normalcy” promoted by the Jazz Age Republicans, who succeeded Wilson’s capital-P Progressive Democrats. Haywood was sent into a Soviet exile and Debs was forcibly retired from politics.
But the Jazz Age Republicans would not define the next half-century because the stock market crash of 1929 happened on their watch, resulting in mass unemployment and economic devastation. Among the consequences of the crash was that the 1930s would be the high-water mark of American Communism. The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its cadres would waste the first half of the “red decade” following a strategy of “dual unionism,” seeking to supplant the progressive-liberal American Federation of Labor with a Communist Trade Union Unity League.
But a change in strategic direction from Moscow and a split in domestic Big Labor would later open the door for serious capital-R Red infiltration in mainstream labor unionism. By the mid-1930s, the Soviet Union looked out on a hostile strategic situation. Germany under the Weimar Republic had cooperated militarily with the Soviets, as both states were international semi-pariahs after the Treaty of Versailles and Russian Revolution. But in 1933, the Nazis discarded the Weimar Republic constitution, began to seize control of all state organs, and initiated the coordination (Gleichschaltung) of all non-state associations under Nazi control.
The new Nazi regime sought confrontation with so-called Jewish Bolshevism and a Soviet Russia that the Nazis contended sought to export it. As a result of Germany’s change of regimes, the Communist International (Comintern), the Moscow-directed international network of Communist parties, changed policy from combat with the mainstream center-left to a “Popular Front” under which Communist parties (including the CPUSA) would make common cause with major center-left factions including mainstream trade unions in the name of opposing fascism and Nazism.
CPUSA cadres took advantage of a split in American organized labor that emerged at the same time as the “Popular Front” strategy. In the mid-1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) split from the AFL in a dispute over the proper manner of organizing workers under the new National Labor Relations Act. The CIO and its unions—which advocated broad, class-based “industrial unionism”—proved ripe for Popular Front Communist infiltration as the CIO leadership sought to recruit organizers ready to start work immediately and on the cheap. Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, scholars of the history of American Communism, characterized the situation: “Communists were not the only radicals recruited by the CIO, but they were among the most numerous.”
During the late 1930s, a number of major CIO unions were Communist-influenced or Communist-dominated. Klehr and Haynes identify the United Auto Workers, then expanding its ranks with its “sit-down strike” campaign against the Detroit automakers, as divided between Communist and non-Communist factions. The United Electrical Workers had Communists in the union leadership. The Transport Workers Union was Communist-dominated, and other unions, perhaps most notably the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, were led by Communist-aligned cadres. Klehr and Haynes contend that “about 40 percent of the CIO’s unions had significant Communist connections by the end of the 1930s,” though few union members joined or sympathized with the Communist Party.
The Communist mobilization in the labor union movement collided with the reality of the Communist Party in August 1939. The CPUSA, unlike many radical factions that would rise in future decades, was directed in spirit and practice by a foreign power, the Soviet Union. Consistently throughout the existence of the USSR, the CPUSA followed its foreign policy. U.S. government surveillance material declassified after the end of the Cold War would show extensive formal contacts between the CPUSA and Soviet intelligence services.
In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany (through Foreign Ministers Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop) concluded a treaty of non-aggression with secret protocols carving up Eastern Europe into spheres of influence and occupation. The Popular Front against Nazism and fascism ended. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland provoking war with the United Kingdom and France, the CPUSA denounced the Western Allies and their “imperialist war.” Liberals, who had joined the Popular Front to oppose Hitler, quit Communist-aligned groups like the National Lawyers Guild and League for American Writers en masse.
But the CIO-Communist alignment was less immediately affected. Klehr and Haynes argued that the CIO, led by Franklin Roosevelt critic John Lewis of the United Mine Workers, was sympathetic to the CPUSA’s position of war neutrality and the Communists’ support for strikes in war industries.
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and another flip-flop in Soviet foreign policy did not break the CIO-Communist alignment either. After the U.S. entered the European War in December 1941, the CIO’s political chief, Sidney Hillman, welcomed Communists into the union’s new “political action committee,” the CIO-PAC, which pushed strongly for President Roosevelt’s third re-election in 1944.
The end of the war in 1945, and the end of the U.S.-Soviet alliance, proved to be the critical point in American Communism’s relationship with mainstream labor unionism. The 1946 strike wave and economic dislocation caused by general military demobilization brought Congressional Republicans the party’s first taste of federal power since the 1932 elections. Those Republicans, with the aid of union-skeptical Democrats, passed the Taft-Hartley Act regulating labor union conduct within the parameters set by the New Deal Democrats’ Wagner Act.
The Taft-Hartley Act had two effects on Big Labor’s tacit alliance with the postwar Communists. First, the law itself contained a provision requiring union officers who wished to have recourse to the National Labor Relations Board to sign affidavits that they were not Communists. This provision split the CIO, with non-communist unionists (among them Walter Reuther of the UAW) proposing that the federation comply with the rule to prevent a break in federal legal protection of its member organizations.
The second effect was hardening the CIO’s alliance with the Democratic Party of then-President Harry Truman, who had cynically vetoed the act and vowed to support its repeal if re-elected in 1948. But Truman was not a favorite of Moscow because of his anti-Communist instincts. On the direction of the Soviets, the CPUSA broke the wartime Popular Front and backed the Progressive Party candidacy of former Vice President Henry Wallace, which led CIO leaders like Philip Murray who had previously made common cause with Reds to oppose their continued influence in the labor movement.
Wallace’s campaign proved a strategic fiasco for Moscow and its domestic allies. Truman won re-election despite Wallace pulling 2.37 percent of the popular vote. Democrats retook Congress, but Taft-Hartley supporters retained a cross-party majority, so the law was not repealed. Truman led the beginning of the American Cold War policy opposing Communism, and domestic Communism was driven into the shadows.
In the next installment, organized labor’s flirtations with leftist radicalism did not end with the collapse of American Communism.
