Labor Dis-Unity: A 1920’s Source of Left-Wing anti-Communism

Abstract

The Communist Party’s (CP) “Third Period” shift in labor policy from the Trade Union Education League (TUEL) effort of “boring from within” mainstream unions to the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) effort to create new independent “revolutionary” unions is dismissed in much of the literature. In a close study of New York’s independent hotel workers, we see a more complex story. The CP and TUEL thwarted leftwing unionists’ efforts to organize a federation of independent, amalgamated industrial unions called the Labor Unity Council in the early 1920’s. Activists who resented the hasty directive to recreate an independent “Unity” federation of radical unions a few short years later became an early pocket of left-wing anti-communism. We also see how one union, the Amalgamated Food Workers, negotiated and resisted CP directives, as well as how its breakaway TUUL competitor, the Food Workers Industrial Union, was divisive until the New Deal National Recovery Administration labor codes forced the unions into a degree of coordination and eventually merger that preceded the CP shift toward the “Popular Front.”