Trade Union Educational League

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The Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) was an organizational union of left American trade unionists founded in Chicago in November 1920 , which acted as a faction within the individual trade unions of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

Most of the TUEL protagonists had not only been radicalized by the First World War and the October Revolution , but came from the tradition of the “militant minority”, which had established itself after 1900 as an identifiable branch of the US labor movement. After the leadership group around William Z. Foster had joined the communist party in the late summer of 1921 , the TUEL implemented its union policy - which was mainly conceived by Foster. However, there was no formal connection to the KP; Foster himself kept his membership secret until 1923 and initially had great difficulty following the party's destructive course on the trade union issue - in the Communist party journal it was described as “one of the tasks of the Communist Party”, the “destruction of the existing trades union organizations” “To bring about - to give a more productive character.

Founded by only about 20 activists and initially with almost no financial means (the organization did not raise membership fees), the TUEL nevertheless quickly gained some influence, especially among unionized miners, textile workers, seafarers and the mostly African-American sleeper car conductors (see Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters ). The TUEL gave a handout to stand at a high level magazine laboratory Herald out and published locally within a number of other periodicals, including in New York the Yiddish freedom .

With the leadership of the International Ladies 'Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), TUEL fought a guerrilla war for years for control over the locals in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston from 1923 onwards . In New York in particular, these clashes were also violent, with both sides - as well as the entrepreneurs - sometimes resorting to the help of rival Mafia groups. After the collapse of the New York textile workers' strike triggered by TUEL members in July 1926, ILGWU President Morris Sigman initiated a wave of exclusions at the end of 1926 that, within two years, brought most of the left-wing functionaries in New York, Baltimore , Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco fell victim. The relatively small International Fur and Leather Workers Union , which after 1925 was actually controlled by a TUEL group around Ben Gold and from 1927 onwards was severely hampered by ongoing administrative interventions by the AFL leadership, was the only AFL union in which communist trade unionists also belonged could still exert a decisive influence at the end of the 1920s (and for a long time afterwards).

In the course of implementing the resolutions of VI. At the World Congress of the Comintern , TUEL was dissolved in September 1929. Foster also considered the TUEL concept to be partially outdated at this point, as it was not possible to break out of the AFL's conservative organizational policy on this basis. Individual successes achieved in the spirit of the new “left” line - including in particular the spectacular Loray Mill Strike led by the communist National Textile Workers Union in the previously union-free Gastonia , North Carolina (April – June 1929) - seemed to confirm this assessment. The TUEL was replaced by the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), which in the following years functioned as the umbrella organization for the “revolutionary” unions organized by CPUSA activists and in competition with the AFL associations.

literature

  • Barrett, James R., William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism , Urbana-Chicago 1999.
  • Bernstein, Irving, The Lean Years. A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 , Boston 1960.
  • Foner, Philip S., The TUEL to the End of the Gompers Era. History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 9 , New York 1991.
  • Foner, Philip S., The TUEL, 1925-1929. History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 10 , New York 1994.

Individual evidence

  1. Jump up ↑ Barrett, James R., William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism, Urbana-Chicago 1999, p. 115.
  2. ↑ Quoted from Barrett, Foster, p. 105.
  3. ↑ See Barrett, Foster, p. 103.
  4. ↑ See Barrett, Foster, pp. 126ff., Pp. 151f.
  5. ↑ See Bernstein, Irving, The Lean Years. A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Boston 1960, 137).
  6. ↑ See Bernstein, Lean Years, p. 138 and Barrett, Foster, p. 139ff.
  7. ↑ See Bernstein, Lean Years, p. 139.
  8. ↑ See Barrett, Foster, pp. 159ff.
  9. ↑ See Bernstein, Lean Years, pp. 20ff. and Tindall, George Brown, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945, Baton Rouge 1967, pp. 344ff.