Maggie's Farm

Which Side Are They On? American labor unions and how they got that way. It begins:

Labor unions in the United States were not always tied to the Democratic party and to a leftist ideological agenda. Once upon a time, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) stood at odds with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); the former resisted statist labor law changes and leftist union policies beginning in the 1930s and the latter supported them.

The AFL and the CIO united in 1955, but two decades before, William Green, president of the older AFL movement, denounced the CIO in terms familiar to present-day tea party critics of the Obama administration. On September 7, 1937, as reported in the Washington Post, Green assailed CIO leader John L. Lewis for “subordinating the welfare of workers to personal political ambitions .??.??. and encouraging communistic support.” Green warned that CIO ambitions could “pave the way to a fascist dictatorship.”