CIO Expels United Electrical Workers and Farm Equipment Workers, Beginning Purge of Communist-Led Unions

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) holds its eleventh annual convention in Cleveland and expels two member unions, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) and the Farm Equipment Workers, for alleged “disloyalty to the CIO” and support for the Communist Party. The expulsions begin a systematic purge that removes eleven unions representing approximately one million members within a year. CIO President Philip Murray charges that the expelled unions direct their policies “toward the achievement of the program and purposes of the Communist Party rather than the objectives and policies set forth in the CIO constitution.” The purge follows the CIO convention in Portland in 1948, which initiated the process of expelling unions accused of Communist leadership in response to mounting political pressure.

The expulsions represent the culmination of McCarthyism’s takeover of the labor movement, as the CIO’s right-wing leadership caves to pressure from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Walter Reuther and his “Reuther Caucus” gained control of the United Auto Workers in 1946, purged UAW leftists, and then used Reuther’s position on the CIO executive board to actively foster the broader purge. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 accelerated the anti-communist campaign by requiring union leaders to sign affidavits swearing they were not and had never been Communists, denying non-compliant unions access to National Labor Relations Board protections. The expelled unions include some of the CIO’s most militant and effective organizing forces, built by Communists who “threw themselves into organizing workers with great enthusiasm” based on ideological conviction that working-class mobilization was essential to social transformation.

The purge devastates the CIO’s radical wing and fundamentally alters American labor’s political orientation. The Second Red Scare impacts Communist-led unions “to the same degree as the First Red Scare harmed the IWW,” according to historians. The expulsions halt the CIO’s growth, make its ideological orientation “increasingly similar to that of the craft-union oriented AFL,” and pave the way for the AFL-CIO merger in 1955 that consolidates conservative labor leadership. The destruction of left-led unions eliminates the most aggressive advocates for anti-capitalist politics, militant strike tactics, and broad social transformation, leaving a weakened labor movement focused on narrow business unionism. Anti-communist clauses remain in AFL-CIO and constituent union constitutions until the late 1990s, institutionalizing political exclusion for decades.