Back“The Brooklyn Navy Yard is the graveyard for all CIO organizers.”
--Letter, from Jack Randolph, financial secretary, Local 102, IUMSWA, to Philip van Gelder, treasurer, IUMSWA, January 1941; Local 102, IUMSWA archives, U. of Maryland.
The CIO in the Brooklyn Navy Yard: IUMSWA and UFWA
Even though navy yards proved to be solid bastions of AFL power this did not stop various CIO unions from intruding on their territory. The generous government benefits and the panoply of unresolved internal grievances served as a lure for at least two major unions in the new labor federation. The CIO efforts to organize the navy yards proved futile for one and unfulfilling for another, in part due to the failure of the unions to develop an organizing model appropriate for organizing civilian naval workers, in part due to finding an organizing strategy that could challenge the AFL's power in the navy yards, and in part due to jurisdictional disputes between the two major unions that organized in the yards, which the CIO failed to resolve. One union was the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America which had originated in the private shipbuilding sector. The second union was the United Federal Workers of America, whose mandate encompassed all federal employees, of which navy yard employees, blue- and white-collar were only one small component. The Shipworkers ultimately failed to gain a hold in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Federal Workers eventually settled down into a small niche they could call their own, which they maintained until the parent union's demise. [There was a third CIO union in the BNY, FAECT, the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians, which was quite active among its named constituencies. The rivalry between the AFL and the CIO is one of the great episodes in American labor history and has it has been written about extensively. Some examples: Irving Bernstein, TheTurbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970); Robert H. Zieger, The CIO: 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina Press, 1995); Christopher Tomlins, “AFL Unions in the 1930s: Their Performance in Historical Perspective,” Journal of American History 4 (1979).]
The Industrial Union of Marine and Shipworkers of America
The United Federal Workers of America
The IUMSWA and the UFW in Competition, 1940-1942
John R Stobo © March 2004