December 12 - We Disaffiliate!

On this day in labor history, the year was 1947.

That was the day United Mine Workers leader, John L. Lewis wrote the AFL, stating: “We Disaffiliate.”

Lewis had had a stormy history with the American Federation of Labor.

He was central to the 1935 split that soon led to the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

By 1942, he led the UMW out of the CIO.

Reasons included disagreements over labor’s relationship to President Roosevelt and US entry into World War II, and the running of the CIO itself.

For a brief time, the UMW re-affiliated with the AFL 

By the fall of 1947, Lewis found himself in fundamental disagreement with the Federation over its response to the recently passed Taft-Hartley Act.

At the October AFL convention, the discussion centered on the signing of anti-communist affidavits, as required by Taft-Hartley.

Lewis was virtually alone in his refusal to comply with the act.

He noted the act would have been stillborn if labor leaders had stood tall and refused to sign the affidavits.

Further, he said, “This Act is a trap, a pitfall for the organizations of labor... This Act was passed to oppress labor, to make difficult its current enterprises for collective bargaining, to make more difficult the securing of new members for this labor movement, without which our movement will become so possessed of inertia that there is no action and no growth, and in a labor movement where there is no growth there is no security for its existence, because deterioration sets in and unions, like men, retrograde.”

Despite the split the UMW would remain a powerful, independent union for more than 40 years.