Congress of Industrial Organizations

The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, was a federation of unions that organized industrial workers in the United States and Canada in the 1930s through the 1950s. Originally known as the Committee for Industrial Organization, it was founded in 1935 by eight international unions within the American Federation of Labor to pressure the AFL, which had either opposed or given only lukewarm support to organizing mass production industries, to change its policies. After failing to change AFL policy from within, five of these eight unions split from the AFL to found the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a rival federation in 1938. The CIO rejoined the AFL, forming the new entity known as the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), in 1955.

External Links

• The CIO's Integration & Imperialist Labor Policy part 4 of Chapter VII of Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat (by J. Sakai, Morningstar Press 1989) - a history lesson from the first half of the 20th century showing that 'The integration of the CIO, therefore, had nothing to do with increasing job opportunities for Afrikans or building "working class unity.' It was a new instrument of oppressor nation control over the oppressed nation proletarians."