Congress Of Industrial Organizations Research Articles

New Deal and Postwar Era Labor Collections At The Catholic University of America

ABSTRACT The Special Collections at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, is home to a large archive of records and documents related to the Catholic Church and social justice. These include the papers of several notable Catholic lay labor leaders, such as Philip Murray and John Brophy, as well as several “labor priests,” in particular Msgr. John A. Ryan and Bishop Francis J. Haas, who articulated Church support for workers’ rights. Additionally, there are the organizational records of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) prior to their 1955 merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to form the AFL-CIO. Many Catholics, including Murray and Brophy, were significant CIO leaders.

Anti-Communist Solidarity: US-Brazilian Labor Relations during the Dictatorship in Cold-War Brazil (1964–1985)

The last decade has witnessed a crusade by the Brazilian Right, losers of four consecutive presidential elections, to seize power through extralegal means. At the center of this was Operação Lava Jato, which used politicized corruption allegations to discredit the center-left Workers' Party and culminated in the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the imprisonment of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the election of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro. Although it has only gradually become clear, the United States played a key role through efforts to influence Brazilian prosecutors and judges via training programs and informal collaborations.Larissa Rosa Corrêa's monograph on US efforts to influence Brazilian trade unionism during the 1964–85 military dictatorship is thus remarkably timely. Anti-Communist Solidarity sheds light on the softer forms of power used by US empire. In the 2010s, US efforts to influence the Brazilian judiciary had little to do with eliminating corruption and everything to do with restoring US hegemony in an emerging oil-producing and diplomatic power. Similarly, as Corrêa conclusively demonstrates, efforts to bring collective bargaining to Brazil were less about empowering the Brazilian working class than weakening communists. These efforts were carried out by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and its American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), whose goals under George Meany were inextricably linked to those of US empire.Despite their history of mobilization against the military coups of the 1960s and the Central American wars of the 1980s, in recent decades US Latin Americanist scholars have de-emphasized explanations focused on empire. Thus, it is unsurprising that this vital book was written by a Brazilian, as Brazilian scholars have remained more attuned to the deleterious effects of US imperialism. This focus on US policy by a non-US historian is the book's greatest strength, not only in terms of theoretical orientation but also in terms of the sources consulted. As Alex Lichtenstein points out in his perceptive foreword, through her close examination of Portuguese sources produced by Brazilian trade unionists Corrêa complicates narratives that might assert a unidirectional flow of power from North to South. Despite AIFLD attempts to convince Brazilians of the superiority of the US model of collective bargaining, even some of the most conservative Brazilian trade unionists continued to assert the superiority of their own corporatist labor structure, particularly the labor courts.This final point emerges clearly over the course of the narrative, whose chapters unfold roughly across the administrations of four Brazilian presidents. Chapter 1 demonstrates how the AFL-CIO sought to promote a US trade union model as an antidote to the perceived communist sympathies of the labor movement during the turbulent years preceding the 1964 coup. Chapter 2 shows how US labor ideals were given their fullest expression under the pro-American government of Humberto Castelo Branco, the first military president. In chapter 3, we see how AIFLD began to clash with more nationalist currents in the Brazilian regime that questioned the assumption that a US model was directly applicable to Brazil. After a close analysis of Brazilian labor leaders' oft-critical reactions to the US labor model in chapter 4, chapter 5 shows how AFL-CIO influence in Brazil diminished in the 1970s, as the repression of the “years of lead” closed off opportunities for even capitalism-friendly, US-style labor mobilization.Despite the title, which indicates that Corrêa's book covers 1964–85, the narrative closes in 1974. This decision can be attributed to the fact that US influence over Brazilian unionism waned under more nationalist Brazilian governments. In addition, one set of sources vital to the book—the records of the US Department of State—had, as of the time of Corrêa's research, only been declassified until 1976. However, this means that the most obvious question—the relationship of North American “free and democratic unionism” to Brazil's “new unionism” that appeared in 1978—ultimately remains unanswered. How to explain the fact that Lula and a new generation of left-wing unionists advocated for direct collective bargaining and a weakening of corporatist labor relations—precisely the values AIFLD attempted to inculcate among Brazilian unionists? To what extent did the United States attempt to influence the new unionism led by Lula? These provocative questions will have to remain for future scholars.In addition, two issues may limit the book's impact on an Anglophone audience. First, while the original edition of the book is written in excellent academic Portuguese, the excessively literal translation results in awkward, clunky English that is not particularly readable. Second, the $97.99 price point may be prohibitive to all but the most dedicated specialists. This would be unfortunate because Anti-Communist Solidarity is a must-read not only for historians of Brazilian and Latin American labor history but also for those interested in US labor history, US–Latin American relations, and the strategies of modern-day empires to protect their interests.

Federal Court Changes NLRB Election Rules

In implementing any strategy, it is vital to know the rules. This is true in a variety of contexts, including union organizing. An employer must understand the rules in play between the time a petition is filed and an election is held. A recent decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations v. National Labor Relations Board, Docket No. 20‐5223 (January 17, 2023), changed the rules again.

Jenny Carson. A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice.

In A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice, Jenny Carson puts Black women laundry workers and union organizers at the center of US history. Both hand and “power” laundries saw their heydays in the United States from the 1910s to the 1950s, in the years before household washing machines became the norm. “Mini-hells,” power laundries were massive factories where women sorted through disgusting dirty laundry; lifted heavy, wet piles of clothing; ironed sheets, drapery, bedding, and other hard-to-handle items; then sorted it for delivery—all in hot, humid conditions for ten or more hours per day. Although the work was extremely difficult, Black women preferred it to domestic work. The anonymity provided by the factory setting—becoming “proletarianized,” in Joe Trotter’s terminology—was better than working under white women’s microscopes. Carson tells us that the 1930s proved the pinnacle of what was a cross-race union movement. Building on the grassroots efforts of the communist Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), the National Negro Congress under A. Philip Randolph’s leadership, and a burgeoning Left-leaning, Black-oriented labor network, Charlotte Adelmond, Dollie Robinson, Jessie Taft Smith, Beatrice Shapiro Lumpkin, and Noah Walter, among others, pushed the larger labor movement to recognize the connections between race and economic exploitation and to organize purposefully to combat them. In doing so, Carson corrects the narrative that the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) was “the driving force behind the unionization of New York City’s laundry workers” (6). This alone is an important contribution to the literature, but Carson’s detailed study explains how Black women worked with white men at the local and national levels; how they “pursued a civil rights agenda that included equal pay for equal work”; and how, despite its shortcomings, industrial unionism proved a better model than craft unionism for organizing laundry workers (7). By the end of the 1940s, the white men who led the ACWA opted for labor “stability,” as historians have argued about other Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions. Carson claims that that choice privileged white working-class men over the more radical organizing drives that were crucial to building cross-race alliances, bringing Black workers into the labor movement, and keeping the focus on the economic component of racism. By 1950, the very architects of those more radical, left-wing, race-focused drives, including Adelmond and other Black activists, were ousted from the ACWA.

Senator Elbert Thomas and the Hope for Industrial Equity

Senator Elbert Thomas and the Hope for Industrial Equity

A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice by Jenny Carson

Reviewed by: A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice by Jenny Carson Eric Arnesen (bio) A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice. By Jenny Carson. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 289. $125.00 cloth; $28.00 paper) Over the past half century, historians of race and labor have produced a substantial body of scholarship on various occupations, unions, and race relations that collectively reveals the complexity of working-class race relations, traditions of Black activism, and labor movement practices. While fewer such studies have appeared in recent years, Jenny Carson's new book reminds us that this historiographical genre continues to have much to offer. Focusing on the greater New York City laundry industry, A Matter of Moral Justice brings to life the on-the-job conditions experienced by a largely female labor force and its struggles for dignity and economic advancement. It also explores just how profoundly unionization transformed life on the job for the better and, at the same time, underscores just how limited that transformation proved to be. [End Page 436] New York's early twentieth-century laundry industry relied on a heterogeneous labor force that became increasingly African American and female. Despite low wages, poor working conditions, and abusive treatment, unionization efforts were sporadic and unsuccessful. Only in the late 1930s and early 1940s did sustained trade unionism finally take off, the result of efforts of Black women shopfloor activists, women reformers, and various Communist and Socialist organizers. Under the banner of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW) during the upsurge of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), laundry worker unionization brought significant improvements to workers' lives. But, Carson insists, those gains were limited—laundry work remained poorly paid, racial and gender inequality persisted in the workplace, and the disproportionately male and white union bureaucracy resisted sharing power with women or African Americans. Advances notwithstanding, Carson argues that the outcome proved "disappointing" (p. 8). At the heart of her story is the activism of Black workers like Charlotte Adelmond, a Trinidadian immigrant, and Dollie Robinson, a migrant from North Carolina, whose aspirations and struggles Carson carefully reconstructs. As leaders of the "democratic initiative," they tenaciously but only sometimes successfully challenged their employers and union leaders with an agenda centered on racial and, to a lesser extent, gender equality (p. 127). Her considerable attention to intra-union battles that pitted these Black women activists against ACW officials makes clear that the union prioritized the preservation of "white male privilege in all its forms" (p. 197). As important as the "democratic initiative" was, however, the degree of rank-and-file Black workers' participation in this oppositional culture remains unclear, as does the extent to which the civil rights unionism pursued by these activists extended beyond union affairs. The story Carson tells is an important one that highlights the obstacles to successful organization and the role played by grassroots activists in overcoming them. She effectively draws out the complexities of [End Page 437] a powerful CIO union which, while ostensibly committed to interracialism, often blocked the efforts of its Black women activists to overturn entrenched racial and gender hierarchies. Her restoration to the historical narrative of the previously little-known efforts of Adelmond and Robinson suggests that the ranks of Black grassroots activists is larger than historians generally realize and that their inclusion into the history of American labor genuinely enriches our understanding of race, civil rights, and protest in the first half of the twentieth century. Eric Arnesen ERIC ARNESEN is the Teamsters Professor of History at the George Washington University. He is currently completing a biography of A. Philip Randolph. Copyright © 2021 Kentucky Historical Society

Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950

Poor Man's Fortune examines the white working-class men who labored in the lead and zinc mines along the boundaries of Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Because these miners opposed social-democratic labor unions and politics in the period leading up to the New Deal, they have not typically received attention from labor historians. They stood apart from the idea of a class-based solidarity, particularly as practiced by the Western Federation of Miners and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, often doing so with what Jarod Roll calls “a powerful animus” (p. 1). They worked as strikebreakers, objected to government attempts to impose health and safety regulations despite the dangers of lung disease, and resisted government encouragement to organize for better pay and working conditions. Over the past few decades, new labor historians have focused on how men and women collectively struggled to improve their working conditions through unions and social movements, and how they challenged their employers, the state, and capitalism. This approach to the study of labor was best exemplified by David Montgomery, who argued that workers in America “developed ‘an ideology of mutualism’” that embraced collective action as critical to their organizing success and to their ability to transcend differences of race, ethnicity, and gender (p. 3). Roll's intervention into this historiography is as significant as it is richly detailed, thoughtfully argued, and a joy to read.

Workers against the City: The Fight for Free Speech in Hague v. CIO

Workers against the City: The Fight for Free Speech in <i>Hague v. CIO</i>

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

Labor Unions and Democracy: A Long View

This essay historicizes some of Stephen Ashby's findings, and elaborates on a thesis that union democracy is weak in the United States because capitalist opposition was so strong in a formative stage of union development. It introduces a brief survey of the first major U.S. industrial union, the United Mine Workers of America, to show that leadership cordoned off more radical alternatives in service to capital and to middle class and political operatives influence. It introduces a brief survey of the first major industrial union, the United Mine Workers to show that leadership cordoned off more radical alternatives in service to capital and to middle class and political operatives influence. Union leadership responded to that challenge with highly centralized control that blocked more democratic and struggle-based unionism. This had long term consequences through the next insurgency the Congress of Industrial Organizations. These historic influences are operative in the present, when workers seek power to build a counter to the growing inequality of wealth.

Advocacy Journalism, Labor Feminism, and the Timber Worker, 1936-1940

ABSTRACT Julia Bertram worked as a journalist for the Timber Worker, the newspaper of the International Woodworkers of America, from 1936–1940. For three of those years, she also served as the president of the women’s auxiliary of her local union. This study examines Bertram’s work in both of these roles as crucial to the union’s success, and argues that Bertram’s combination of union activism and journalism embedded working-class feminism within the developing progressive labor agenda represented by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s. Bertram’s work offers an example of how working-class White and immigrant women shaped the labor movement prior to World War II by expanding the scope of appropriate political activities in which women participated. As a journalist for the Timber Worker, Bertram frequently reminded her readers that women were unionists and equal members of the working-class struggle. This combination of activism and journalism has been overlooked in discussions about the rise of labor feminism, which tend to focus on female-dominated industries and unions rather than on the press. Female journalists in the labor press and in union auxiliaries deserve more attention if historians hope to understand the rise of labor feminism in the 1930s, as women carved out space in the fledgling CIO and its unions.

The Ordeal of the Jungle: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903–1922

The Ordeal of the Jungle: Race and the Chicago Federation of Labor, 1903–1922

To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice by Michael K. Honey

Reviewed by: To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice by Michael K. Honey Marcia Chatelain To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice. By Michael K. Honey. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2018. Pp. xii, 241. $34.99, ISBN 978-1-4328-5047-0.) Each January, scholars and activists alike prepare to refute superficial and simplistic tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. The widespread celebration of the King holiday—from churches to schools to corporations—makes this difficult. King's legacy is invoked to promote empty multiculturalism and facile ideas of change, and it reflects erasures in civil rights history. Historian Michael K. Honey rights some of these wrongs in To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice. With clear writing and a thoughtful voice, Honey guides readers through pivotal movements of King's life by foregrounding his tense and symbiotic relationships with the labor movement. Honey adds texture to King's journey from being a descendant of people who "experienced deep poverty in the countryside" to the supporter of striking sanitation workers in Memphis the day before his assassination (p. 22). Honey emphasizes that King's path was sometimes cleared, and sometimes muddied, by an interracial, but not always harmoniously integrated, labor movement. Honey provides a biographically driven look at how the labor movement formed King's leadership style and strategies. King's class consciousness emerged early, with his having lived in Jim Crow Atlanta, and grew sharper during his years at Morehouse College, when he partially financed his education by doing manual labor jobs. King wrote, "I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro" (p. 28). King's belief that economic injustice knew no color and demanded solidarity did not always resonate with working-class whites in labor unions. King not only had to overcome the racism within union hierarchies but also had to contend with virulent red-baiting. Honey notes that the 1955 merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) led to barriers for King. "These tragic developments of the Cold War era," Honey writes, "cut short hopes that civil rights and labor organizing would move forward together" (p. 35). Although the movements unfolded at different speeds, labor unions such as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and AFL-CIO affiliate the United Packinghouse Workers of America continued to provide support for King. The tensions between King and the AFL-CIO extended into other realms of Cold War politics, including King's support for a "third way" approach to reconciling impulses toward "capitalism and communism," in newly independent nations around the world (p. 61). While chronicling King's relationship to the labor leaders who supported efforts like the March on Washington, Honey connects King's work with the other signs of growing hostility toward organized workers. For instance, King was indicted in Alabama for violating "a state antiboycott law," a measure that had been passed to curtail union mobilization; and the 1964 Civil Rights Act ensured workers of color rights to "union apprenticeships" and provided other worker protections (pp. 41, 62). The second half of the book traces the years from the height of labor–civil rights coalition building, epitomized in the United Auto Workers' support of the Selma-to-Montgomery [End Page 548] march, to the day of King's death, the day after his speech that demanded a "dangerous unselfishness" in behalf of workers (chap. 6). Honey's book ends in the present, with an overview of failures to realize King's vision. Yet the sober and optimistic tone of the narrative continues as Honey describes the electoral victories and continued work of racially progressive labor organizing, and he recognizes Coretta Scott King's labor activism after her husband's death. Honey concludes the book by wondering if we are closer to King's hope for a world where "'resources are held not for ourselves alone but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity.'" "Are we moving in that direction?," Honey asks. And, with King, he...

Asserting Their Voice: A Brief History of Independent Steelworker Retiree Clubs and the United Steelworkers of America, 1946 to 1990

Asserting Their VoiceA Brief History of Independent Steelworker Retiree Clubs and the United Steelworkers of America, 1946 to 1990 Henry Himes (bio) At the close of World War II, employers in the immediate postwar era worked to advance their political power at all levels of government. Business leaders developed a host of strategies to promote the virtues of free enterprise, and they vigorously pushed to reassert their “right to manage” in workplaces throughout the nation. Thus, to advance the immediate economic and long-term security needs of active workers and retirees within the new postwar order, the United Steelworkers of America (USWA), like many other Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions, came to rely heavily on their economic power as manifested through collective bargaining and labor’s right to strike, even as labor looked to strengthen its political power through organizing drives and the CIO-Political Action Committee (PAC).1 These postwar realities were at the heart of the USWA’s decision to secure pensions and social insurance through collective bargaining starting in the late 1940s, especially after the inability of labor to pressure lawmakers to pass comprehensive public healthcare as found in the World War II–era Wagner-Murray-Dingell [End Page 78] Bill.2 Moreover, the USWA’s decision to bargain for security was heavily influenced by a retiree crisis beginning in 1946. In that year, Inland Steel, and many other steel firms to include US Steel, began arbitrarily retiring steelworkers at age 65, ultimately dismissing them without a company pension or with a pension that did not provide subsistence level income. The only means of subsistence for these retirees was Social Security, which at that time had failed to keep pace with inflation, leaving many retirees in a state of poverty and reliant on their children or their extended family to make ends meet. It was within this postwar retiree crisis that we see the first efforts of retired steelworkers to organize in an attempt to better their condition. The result of their organizational efforts during World War II and the immediate postwar era were short-lived retiree organizations called “65-Clubs.” Although little documentation exists on these clubs, the sources that are available show that 65-Clubs fought against the practice of forced retirements and actively encouraged the union in its bid to bargain for security in 1949. Although the 65-Clubs supported and backed their former union, the unsettling fact remained that retired steelworkers were no longer dues-paying members of the union, and the USWA constitution did not provide any formal recognition of steelworker retiree associations. Thus, the development of independent retiree clubs such as the 65-Clubs raised some unsettling questions for both union leaders and retirees. For instance, how would union leaders represent the interests of retirees who, upon retirement, lost their rights as “industrial citizens” in the union? Would independent organizations be a threat or a liability to the union? How would retirees be represented and find a voice within the union over matters such as pensions and healthcare if they were not formally recognized? For the 65-Clubs, the issue of formal representation in the late 1940s was not yet a driving concern. The 65-Clubs advocated for stronger retirement security, which the USWA delivered to them via collective bargaining in 1949 and beyond. The issue of independent retiree organizations and formal representation within the union receded throughout the postwar “affluent era” due to a strong economy, rising living standards, contractual pensions, and healthcare—as well as various forms of public welfare protection.3 However, [End Page 79] as the economy transformed and slowed in the 1970s and 1980s, the unresolved legal relationship between retired union members and their independent organizations vis-à-vis the USWA reemerged as corporate decline and bankruptcy threatened to undermine the private security system built at the bargaining table from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s. Beginning in the 1970s, conflicts between the USWA and independent retiree clubs began to emerge; however, conflicts within industrial unions were not just confined to retirees nor the USWA. Many industrial unions in the 1960s and 1970s experienced a host of rank-and-file revolts as industrial union...

Interpreting the Communist Party USA’s Historical Role in the US Trade Unions: Insights from the Early Institutionalist Theory of Industrial Relations

ABSTRACTFrom 1935 to 1945, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) trade unionists were indefatigable and dedicated organizers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The objective of this article is to analyze the CPUSA’s role in the US trade union movement through applying the early institutionalist theory of industrial relations. This theory was selected because it provided the intellectual underpinning for New Deal trade union policy when the CIO was formed and continued to be the foremost US industrial relations theory for more than half a century. Based on institutionalist criteria, the CPUSA-led unions were much more effective in creating a dynamic trade unionism than the business unionists backed by the institutionalists. When the party actively organized the CIO’s industrial unions, it embraced a reformist viewpoint, adopting the Popular Front through its defense of democracy and its vigorous anti-fascism. If the CPUSA had not utilized this approach, it is uncertain if the early institutionalists’ New Deal trade union policy would have been achieved. In order to revitalize US trade unionism, twenty-first century left trade unionists can profit from studying the CPUSA trade unionists’ role in functioning as the CIO’s militant minority’s largest and most critical segment.

Beyond the Cold War: American Labor, Algeria’s Independence Struggle, and the Rise of the Third World (1954–62)

Abstract During the late 1950s, trade unions came to be vital actors in the solidarity movements of the Global South, especially in pan-African initiatives. The case of the Union générale des travailleurs algériens (UGTA) is particularly illustrative of this development. Algeria’s long and brutal independence struggle was championed throughout the Afro-Asian bloc, and the UGTA became an important auxiliary in the bloc’s campaigns to secure that end. In this essay, the case of Algeria and the UGTA serves as a prism through which to study how some of the most powerful Western trade union federations of the day—especially the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)—responded to the “subaltern” internationalisms engendered by decolonization and the “spirit of Bandung,” whether in the guise of positive neutrality or the project for pan-African unity. In this way, this essay sheds new light on the nature and role of labor internationalism in the context of the global Cold War. The case of Algeria is emblematic of the ways in which decolonization and the “spirit of Bandung” came to challenge traditional understandings of labor internationalism, whether as an identity or a practice. What is more, the case of Algeria allows us to reconceptualize AFL-CIO attitudes and designs vis-à-vis the decolonizing world. In highlighting American weakness when confronted by non-Western agency, this essay argues that the polarized view of the federation as an anticommunist crusader with an imperialist agenda is flawed.

Possibility and Peril: Trade Unionism, African Cold War, and the Global Strands of Kenyan Decolonization

Abstract Trade unionism was at the leading edge of African freedom struggle in the 1940s and 1950s. It was an incubator where different visions of decolonized futures vied for ascendency after WWII. This article analyzes international labor networks and trade union activism in Kenya to explore the entanglements of decolonization and Cold War from Africa in the 1940s to 1960s, an era when competing modes of anticolonial internationalism laid paths to independence. This story is told in two phases. Through Makhan Singh, the article assesses the influence of Indo-African connection, Marxism and the radical left on labor organization over the 1940s. Then, through Tom Mboya, the article charts Kenyan affiliation to the anticommunist International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) from the early 1950s. It shows how this internationalist volte-face transformed Kenya’s trade union landscape, propelled anticolonial agitation and, by the late 1950s, wrought irreparable fractures in fledgling pan-African institutions over the very nature of postcolonialism. The article argues that mobile African labor leaders coproduced, domesticated, and molded Cold War networks—that the conduits of early global Cold War agency ran both ways. Singh and Mboya were interlocutors in pluripotent world conversations marshaled for African decolonization. They also helped delineate the terms of global dialogue at a moment of neocolonial peril and decolonizing opportunity. This calls on historians to define alternative chronologies of globalist possibility masked by the tighter constraints placed on African states in the later twentieth century.

Challenging Dissemblance in Pauli Murray Historiography, Sketching a History of the Trans New Negro

Challenging Dissemblance in Pauli Murray Historiography, Sketching a History of the Trans New Negro

From colony to oil producer: US oil companies and the reshaping of labor relations in Libya during the Cold War

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the labor relations the US government and American oil companies introduced in Libya between the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the rise of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in 1969. It argues that labor policies played a crucial role in American Cold War efforts to place Libya in the Western bloc and assure access to its oil resources. Like in other contexts, the American government relied on anti-Communist trade unions, in particular the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), to oppose radical forms of labor organizing. Bini examines the ways in which Libyan oil workers resisted the forms of segregation and discrimination introduced in oil camps and company towns, by demanding the right to redefine labor relations through trade unions, and establishing ties with other trade unions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. This article shows that despite American efforts to repress Libyan trade unions, in the second half of the 1960s oil workers were a crucial force in redefining international oil politics. During the Six Day War of 1967, they constituted one of the main forces behind Libya’s support of oil nationalism and set the stage for the emergence of Qaddafi’s regime in 1969.

Heywood Broun, Benjamin Stolberg, and the Politics of American Labor Journalism in the 1920s and 1930s

Between the First and Second World Wars, Heywood Broun (1888-1939) and Benjamin Stolberg (1891-1951) were labor journalists when the newspaper industry was consolidating into chains and industrial unionism was gaining in American society. A comparison of their lives and writings in the 1920s and 1930s illuminates the politics behind news coverage of labor. Suspicious of the Communist Party, Stolberg ultimately clashed with Broun, the quintessential Popular Front left-liberal, over the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The two were similar, however, in framing labor positively, unlike much of the rest of the press, while eschewing any journalistic ethos of “impartiality.”