Left Out
Reds and America's Industrial Unions
Judith Stepan-Norris, Maurice Zeitlin
£19.95
December 2002 | Paperback (Hardback) | 392 pages 2 line diagrams 22 tables |
ISBN: 052179840X
>From the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO) brought together America’s working men and women under a
united class banner. Of the 38 CIO unions, 18 were ‘left-wing’ or ‘Communist-
dominated’. Yet the political struggle between the CIO’s ‘Communist
dominated’ and right-leaning unions was immensely divisive and self-
destructive. How did the Communists win, hold, and wield power in the CIO
unions? Did they subordinate the needs of workers to those of the Soviet
regime? The authors provide testable answers to these questions with
historically specific quantitative analyses of data on the CIO’s origins,
internal struggles, and political relations. They find that among the CIO
unions, the Communists were more egalitarian, the most progressive on class,
race, and gender issues, and leading fighters in struggles to enlarge the
freedom and enhance the human dignity of America’s workers.
I found it this morning at Borders. Zeitlin is a very solid sociologist. Wrote a very early book on the Cuban Revolution with Robert Scheer that came out after C. Wright Mills, "Listen, Yanqui!" Michael Pugliese