Realizing Solidarity

Abstract

In a time of economic depression and racism more overt than anything we now experience, the unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the 1930s and 1940s forged a lasting interracial solidarity within the industrial working class. The authors tell the stories of how three CIO organizing drives achieved interracial solidarity. In 1933, the United Mine Workers (UMW) adopted the “UMW formula” for placing Black workers in positions as union officers and organizers. Adopted from more radical unions, the formula institutionalized racial inclusion, which proved to be a major tactical innovation in realizing class solidarity across racial lines. Faced with similar conditions, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in 1937 and the United Auto Workers in 1940 adopted variants of the UMW formula to overcome racial barriers to organizing. The authors analyze narratives of these three drives using the following two qualitative methods: event-structure analysis (ESA), a diachronic method, and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), a synchronic method. Both approaches reveal the importance of three main factors: tactical innovations, political context, and labor market conditions. The first two factors are explained by political process theory, and the third is predicted by split labor market theory. Among these findings, ESA highlights path dependence of tactical innovations and QCA emphasizes structural conditions in the labor market.