Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55

Rating:
Summary: We need this book for the struggles of today
Review: An explosion of working class militancy that created the CIO and other industrial unions, won whatever decent conditions working people have, medical benefits, social security, welfare, and other rights. Art Preis, a trade union militant and writer for the socialist newspaper The Militant wrote this book because he believed that the workers of his future, that is us today, would need this history to learn how to fight harder, better and more successfully than the workers of the 1930s. That's why he also explains how the trade union bureaucrats' policy of supporting government war polices and supporting the Democratic and Republican parties helped throttle these labor upsurges. This book tracks the story of the rise of the CIO and other industrial unions and the big strike battles they wages in the 1930s and 1940s. Here we see how millions of workers and their families and allies like farmers, African Americans, and women fought the big business class and won. We need this book because every day the government and the employers try to cut back our benefits, take away rights, and try to break the unions, just as every day we see rising resistance by working people. We need to use the lessons and example of the struggles explained here to launch bigger ones that can win not only union power, but political for working people.

Rating:
Summary: How workers changed history
Review: I really love this book because it shows what workers are capable of. It's a long book, but that's because there are so many great stories to tell of what working people accomplished in the 1930s and 40s. If you go by what you learn in school, you would think that anything workers ever got in this country is due to the generosity of Franklin Roosevelt. But this book shows how workers had to overcome the resistance of the "liberal" Roosevelt on many fronts, from the fraud of the NRA to the Minneapolis Teamster trials to FDR's open strikebreaking before and during World War II. Another amazing thing about this story is that, as the author explains, most people thought the labor movement was dead in the water right before this huge upsurge happened that created the CIO. It is a good lesson for today to remind us that big battles are coming and that workers can win.