Labor in Wartime: LABOR'S WAR AT HOME: THE CIO IN WORLD WAR II
Lichtenstein, Nelson
Labor in Wartime LABOR'S WAR AT HOME: THE CIO IN WORLD WAR II by Nelson Lichtenstein Cambridge University Press. 319 pp. $29.95. Labor militancy is a sometimes thing. It reached a modern peak in...
...This second wave of militancy was scotched by the union brass as it turned to the Government for relatively minor concessions in return for moderating rank-and-file mil-itance...
...From the point of view of numbers it was a momentous success: the UAW grew from 165,000 in 1939 to more than a million in 1944, the steelworkers' union from 225,000 to 708,000, and so on...
...Lichtenstein's pen lacks passion for such a tale, but this study is amazingly erudite and informative...
...For those who can afford $30 and have the time for rumination, it is the best book published on the subject in years...
...There were thousands of wildcat strikes, calls for rescinding the no-strike pledge, and a campaign to form a national labor party...
...But it petered out during the depression of 1938 and as America prepared for war...
...It reached a modern peak in the 1930s with the strike wave of 1934, the birth of the CIO, and the sitdown strikes of 1936-1937...
...We can see the effects decades later in the recent wave of union "givebacks...
...But by 1943-1944 the rank and file, smarting under wartime inflation, was again chafing...
...When hostilities began, the union leadership, abetted by the pro-Soviet communists, traded away the right to strike for a measure of union security, the maintenance-of-membership clause...
Vol. 48 • January 1984 • No. 1
