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machinists employed who might individually belong to their unions. However, they were only a handful in the whole industry. The oil workers, for instance, were a growing group and they weren't organized at all. The automobile workers were not organized at all. There were a number of big growing industries that the AF of L had made no effort to organize. Hillman began to talk about how they should be organized and a number of others agreed with him.

You got the beginnings of this idea that the AF of L should undertake some special activity to organize the unorganized in the mass production industries. They all more or less agreed that you could only organize them effectively in an industrial type of union - that is, a union that is not broken up into crafts, but makes a contract for the whole industry.

Of course, the employers bit on that right away. They all agreed that that was the case. They couldn't make contracts with all these little craft unions, but they could deal with one union that was for their whole industry. They more or less encouraged that, I think. I've often wondered if they knew what they were doing when they did that. I think they didn't really foresee that there would be such an important outcome as the actual permanent organization of the CIO.