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

ABSTRACT

From 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Communist Party USA
• trade unionism
• institutionalist theory of industrial relations

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Victor G. Devinatz is Distinguished Professor of Management and was the Hobart and Marian Gardner Hinderliter Endowed Professor (2014–2015) at Illinois State University. He teaches courses in labor relations, employee relations, and human resource management in the Department of Management and Quantitative Methods. He has published articles in a wide range of scholarly journals including Labour/Le Travail, Labor History, Industrial Relations, Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations, Journal of Labor Research and Labor Studies Journal. Dr. Devinatz’s scholarly book, High-Tech Betrayal: Working and Organizing on the Shop Floor (Michigan State University Press, 1999), is an industrial ethnography that chronicles his work as an assembler in a low-wage medical electronics factory. Dr. Devinatz currently writes a periodic labor column for StreetWise, a Chicago-based weekly newspaper, and in 2003, was a recipient of a Merl E. Reed Research Fellowship in Southern Labor History.