Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

Roosevelt’s New Deal administration had been very pro-union, seeing organized labor as a key plank of recovery from the Depression. The year 1935 saw passage of the Wagner Act, which strengthened the right to engage in collective bargaining. This resulted in an immediate increase in union membership and also emboldened more politically radical working-class activists. A new federation called the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was formed to compete with the long-established American Federation of Labor (AFL), Samuel Gompers’s organization. Compared to the AFL, which was still organized into skill-intensive craft unions, the CIO was more politically progressive, more confrontational, and also more inclusive. It welcomed women, African Americans, and other ethnic minorities into its ranks. Tactically speaking, it abandoned the idea that workers’ skills were their best form of leverage; instead, it concentrated on cohesion across multiple trades within a given industry.