Take It Easy, But Take It

"Chicago: Members of the United Packinghouse Workers Local 28, CIO, carry signs picket-style advertising the union's new food store. Union members and their families can purchase food at cost price. The store was established to help combat the rising cost of living. 9/26/47"

This is a new member packet from UE-CIO. I believe this was printed in 1947. One year later the UE was expelled from the CIO and remains independent and left wing to this day. This first group of pictures is the packet folder. What follows are the contents. 3 small one page foldovers... "UE News", "You and Your Steward" and "People In Action" UE News You and Your steward People In Action

1947 Pamphlet issued by FTA-CIO addressing the tactics of HUAC, who would use the sensationalism of anti-communism and "reds" in the capitalist press to discredit union organizing and the CIO. The pamphlet asks "Who is unAmerican?" and discredits members of the committee who in Congress have voted against the right of American serviceman to vote overseas and against the Fair Employment Practice Commission (FEPC) that would have banned discrimination in Federal employment and wartime industries for African-Americans and other minority workers. "FRONT FOR THE BOSSES That [same] fall of 1938, the unAmerican committee heard testimony against Harry Bridges, head of the CIO Longshoremen and warehousemen Union. Chief witness was one Harper Knowles. Harper Knowles swore bridges was a "red," should be deported. This is what Knowles did not tell the committee about himself: 1. Knowles was executive secretary of the Associated Farmers, Inc...

"WAYS TO FIGHT BACK One way is not to use the law, and many CIO unions have already decided to take this course. The Steelworkers, the United Electrical Workers, the Auto Workers, the Longshoremen and Warehousemen and many other international unions of the CIO have stated they will have no part of the new National Labor Relations Board. You will see when you read this booklet they have good reason. The Board is no longer the guardian of workers rights, but a tool in the hands of the employers. Labor's Bill of Rights, the Wagner Act, has been replaced. A new 'Bill of Rights for Employers' has been put in its place. Another way is to ignore the law, and this the CIO intends to do in certain instances. There are higher and better laws than the one dreamed up by Mr. Taft and Mr. Hartley and one of them is the Constitution of the United States. Where laws conflict - and some of the provisions of the Taft-Hartley law certainly conflict with the C...

United Farm Equipment & Metal Workers of America C.I.O. - Dues + Stewards pins spanning the years 1940-1949. FE was one of the 11 unions expelled from the C.I.O. in 1950 for refusing to kick radicals and communists out of their union leadership. They are part of a proud C.I.O. tradition of non discrimination along political and religious lines and held true to the end. 

Workers who contributed to the C.I.O. PAC received these pins. By this time C.I.O. leadership was firmly entrenched in the Roosevelt / Democratic Party machine, with several top C.I.O. leaders sitting on government councils and boards. The bureaucracy established the necessary apparatus to make business unionism viable again, paving the way for the 1955 AFL-CIO merger.