organized labor during WWII

I'm looking for a material about the activities of organized labor during WW II. i am especially interested in the strikes called by or threatened by people such as John L. Lewis. I am also interested in the reaction by the serving military as well as the reaction by the general public. I would appreciate any book or website information. Thanks in advance. Ron P

: people such as John L. Lewis. ...

I believe 'No Ordinary Time,' by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which focuses on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the White House during World War II, would cover this material.

kinda OT, but how did the labour unions react to the non-aggresion pact between USSR and germany. Since they basicaly suported every thing the 'workers paradise' did. And how did they react when Britain and France declared war on germany, an 'allied' of the USSR

At least in the U.S., there was a distinction between unions and the Communist Party. Most of labor didn't care a whit what happened in Europe, so long as it increased jobs.

I would suggest that the larger influence was not labor but left-wing academics and others of the intelligenzia. It became especially pervasive, almost to the point of political correctness, in 1942, when 'Second Front Now!' became a ubiquitous slogan.

all the best

There were Communist and crypto-Communist elements in some American unions (notably the Longshoremen and some of the Hollywood craft unions).

But the Communists had been pushed out of most of the major unions and union organizations. Sidney Hillman of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union fought a huge battle with Communists for control of the ILGWU (which the anti-Communists won).

There were strong anti-Communist elements in the Left at the time, and even anti-Soviet Communists (such as the followers of Tratsky). So it is wrong to say that the labor unions were solid supporters of the USSR.

The Hitler-Stalin pact shocked many supporters of the USSR, and caused some to break with the party. The invasion of Finland had an effect, too.

However, the True Believers among the Communists rationalized these actions and stayed firmly loyal.

I don't know that the unions, as such, had anything much to say about all this, though. It was Europe's business, and most Americans just wanted to stay out of it.

The Communist-dominated Left sneered at the Allied war effort as a mere imperialist plot, which the workers should have nothing to do with. There were efforts by Communist agitators to stir up labor trouble at factories producing war materials for the Allies.

great reply/article Chris, but I thougth more of the labour unions in the UK. And specialy before barbarossa

Communists had to a very large extent alienated themselves from the American working man (and woman) long before WW2, through a variety of actions which need to be recalled to understand the situation during the war. Chief among these was the Communist's sabotaging of the attempt to create an American Labor Party, patterned after the British Labor Party, in the early 1920s. This embittered the radical railroad brotherhoods in particular, with their plan for the creation, via the Plumb Plan, of a 'coooperative commonweath' of 'production for use, not profit.' The Second Comintern's 21 Theses set the Communists to destroying democratic socialist aspirations and shattering solidarity among left-wing political movements that refused to submit to direction from Moscow. It was not until 1935 and the Seventh Comintern's ordering of communists to cooperate with all antifascist groups that enabled them to begin making inroads into American labor groups. This change in strategy happened to coincide with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which recognized labor's right to organize and provided federal protection to workers as they organized. This led to efforts to unionize unskilled industrial workers, spearheaded by John L. Lewis of the UMW, who organized the CIO to do just that. Communists, which at this time controlled 135 AFL locals and two central labor councils and had organized caucuses in 500 other locals, were proven labor organizers and so Lewis, warily, allowed them into the CIO, where they became firmly