In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded as an explicitly communist organization. At least one of its leaders, Bill Haywood, permanently relocated to the Soviet Union, and worked for the rest of his life to promote Stalinist oppression.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the pro-Soviet and pro-communist factions within the labor movement faced successive difficult situations. First, Stalin’s atrocities (e.g., the deaths of millions of Ukrainians when Stalin discontinued their food supply) made it awkward for them to exuberantly support Soviet Socialism. Second, Stalin’s alliance with Hitler placed them in the position of opposing America’s support of England. Third, Hitler’s eventual betrayal of Stalin made them appear to be enthusiastic followers of a dupe. Fourth, they anti-industrialist postures made them seem as if they were undermining the U.S. war effort.
By late 1940 and early 1941, a large segment of America’s industrial base was manufacturing products to fuel England’s war efforts. When the CIO struck, and the factories were idled, this was perceived as an attack on England, especially when the strikes were not for higher wages, but rather for procedural reasons related to competitions between unions.
Several manufacturers had been the targets of strikes: Vultee Aircraft, Ford, Allis-Chalmers, International Harvester, and others. Because a number of these strikes were not for higher wages, the workers weren’t benefitting, but the reduced output translated directly into deaths on the battlefield and in the air, as historian Arthur Herman writes:
For those associated with the Communist-dominated CIO, there were also political issues involved. The official party line was that the war raging in Europe was still a bourgeois struggle and the working class had nothing to gain by getting involved. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact hadn’t made the Soviet Union Hitler’s ally exactly, but Stalin and his Communist followers had no desire to help Britain or its Dominion allies win. As labor historian Max Kampelman has shown, the Communists’ goal was to halt or at least hamper the American war effort, and strikes were one way to do it.
The strikes from the communist-oriented unions didn’t obtain bigger paychecks for the workers. Instead, they were part of competition between different unions, and part of a larger scheme to aid Stalin’s war effort.
By the end of World War II, changes were in the making. As the new postwar, Cold War alignments emerged globally, labor unions in the United States moved toward a pro-liberty, anti-communist stance.
A freedom-oriented, anti-Soviet mood governed most of organized labor from the late 1940s through the end of the Cold War in 1990.
After the Cold War, the labor movement, like most things in the West, had to re-contextualize itself. Neither pro-Soviet nor anti-Soviet sentiments had relevance in a post-Soviet world. Since 1990, and especially in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, labor unions are seeking identity. Some have drifted into a Leninist-Stalinist progressivism, endorsing socialist and communist policies. Others have kept themselves away from the globalist power struggle entirely.
