Congress of Industrial Organizations Founded, Challenges AFL Craft Unionism

On November 9, 1935, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers met with leaders of eight unions—including Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union—to formally establish the Committee for Industrial Organization within the AFL, launching the most significant labor organizing campaign in American history. The founding followed Lewis’s dramatic October 19 confrontation at the AFL’s Atlantic City convention, where years of tension between craft and industrial unionists exploded when Lewis intentionally provoked Carpenters President William Hutcheson, then knocked him to the ground with a punch to the face. The blow symbolized the irreconcilable split between the AFL’s craft union elitism and the CIO’s commitment to organizing all workers in core industries regardless of skill level.

Lewis had concluded that the AFL’s craft union structure—which organized workers by trade rather than industry—was fundamentally incapable of challenging corporate power in mass production industries like steel, auto, rubber, and electrical manufacturing. The CIO embraced the principle that “an injury to one is the concern of all,” organizing unskilled and skilled workers together in single industrial unions. This approach directly threatened corporate control by unifying workers whom companies had long divided along skill, racial, and ethnic lines. Lewis served as CIO president from 1935 to 1940, leading successful organizing campaigns that won collective bargaining agreements with General Motors and U.S. Steel—two of the most viciously anti-union corporations in the United States.

The CIO’s success in building industrial unions demonstrated that democratic worker control could challenge concentrated corporate power when organizing transcended the artificial divisions that companies exploited. In 1938, the AFL expelled the CIO, forcing it to become an independent federation and triggering competitive organizing that strengthened the labor movement overall. The CIO and AFL merged in 1955 to form the AFL-CIO, but by then the CIO had fundamentally transformed American labor relations by proving that industrial unionism could organize previously “unorganizable” industries. The CIO’s founding represented a critical moment when workers built institutional power capable of extracting concessions from capital, temporarily checking the corporate capture of economic and political systems that would accelerate after labor’s post-1970s decline.