Emil Rieve (June 8, 1892 – January 24, 1975) was an American labor leader. He was president of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) from 1939 to 1956, a vice president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) from 1939 to 1955, and a vice president of the AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1960.
Emil Rieve was born in Poland and moved to Pennsylvania as a child. He left school early and first became a union member at age fifteen, quickly rising within the union hierarchy. He organized his first strike in 1930 in Reading, Pennsylvania. His aggressive drives to unionize the region's textile workers and achieve union recognition led to the Reading Formula of 1933 in negotiating with the National Labor Board, a precedent which resolved large numbers of other labor disputes. Rieve was a major figure in the unsuccessful textile workers strike of 1934. When the Congress of Industrial Organizations formed the following year, Rieve received international recognition for his efforts to avoid a rift with the American Federation of Labor.
In 1937 Rieve pioneered a successful sit-down strike of 50,000 textile workers that resulted in wage increases. He became acting chairman of the Textile Workers Organizing Committee in 1938 and organized the Textile Workers Union of America in 1939. The union was quite strong under Rieve's stewardship and he played a role in the merger of the AFL with the CIO in 1952.
Early life.
Rieve was born in Żyrardów County in Congress Poland in 1892 to Fred and Pauline (née Lange) Rieve. The family was Lutheran, and Fred Rieve was a machinist who tended textile machines.
Rieve attended a local elementary school. But the family emigrated to the United States in 1904, interrupting Rieve's education. The Rieves settled in central Pennsylvania, and Emil found work in a hosiery mill. He married Laura Wosnack in July 1916. They had a son, Harold.
Early union career.
In 1907, at the age of 15, Rieve joined the American Federation of Hosiery Workers (AFHW), a semi-autonomous division of the United Textile Workers of America (UTW), an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. His rise in the union was meteoric: At the age of 22, he was elected a vice president of the AFHW, became the division's president in 1929 at the age of 35, and joined the national UTW executive board in 1934.
Organizing and the Reading Formula.
Rieve was committed to organizing new members in the hosiery industry. In November 1930, Rieve authorized a strike among hosiery workers in the mills around Reading, Pennsylvania. The strike collapsed after heavy employer opposition. Rieve then tried a new tactic: The union agreed to a 30 percent wage cut in the expectation that non-union mills would lower their wages below the new union level. This would trigger a massive strike, enabling the AFHW to move in and organize the workers. Roughly 3,000 workers, or about a third of the total number in the industry, struck. Rieve purposefully withheld strike aid to the workers in an attempt to increase the radicalism of the workers and raise the demand for a union. But employers were content to idle plants in the depths of the Great Depression, and the strike lingered for nearly a year. Admitting defeat, Rieve signed a new contract in September 1932.
Just three months later, Rieve led his division in approving yet another large organizing drive. Again aimed at workers in the Reading area, Rieve declared war "against industrial slavery [and] starvation wages". The organizing drive began in the summer of 1933. The employers refused to recognize the union, and 10,000 workers went on strike. On August 10, 1933, the National Labor Board mediated a settlement which established the "Reading formula." The "Reading formula" was a major step forward in the conceptualization of American labor law, for it established the principle of secret-ballot elections as a means of determining union support among workers at a plant.
1934 national textile strike.
By 1934, despite Rieve's organizing drive and conditions favorable to union organizing created by the depression, the UTW still had only 80,000 paying members (making it one of the smaller unions in the AFL).
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 had authorized the establishment of "industry codes" to regulate wages, hours and working conditions in every industry in the United States. But employers not only heavily influenced the writing of the code, they also dominated the board adjudicating alleged violations of the code. The code led to few improvements in the textile industry. For example, when workers won shorter hours, employers made an end-run around the restriction by speeding up work.
Newly elected to the UTW executive board, Rieve was one of several national union leaders who pressed for the union to threaten a nationwide strike in order to win improvements in the NIRA code. The strike was a mere threat, as UTW had no resources to undertake a nationwide strike. Nevertheless, the National Recovery Administration agreed to provide UTW leaders with a voice on the code adjudicatory board. UTW agreed to cancel the strike.
Local UTW leaders, however, refused to call off the strike. Locals in northern Alabama struck on July 18, and the strike swept through the Deep South. UTW was forced to call a special convention on August 13 to address the crisis. The UTW drew up a list of demands, which mill owners ignored. Nevertheless, the strike enjoyed initial success. In many counties, 80 percent of workers walked out. Nationwide, almost 400,000 textile workers left their jobs, an astonishing number in the middle of the depression.
Mill owners and state and local government officials worked together to put down the strike. State and local officials hired hundreds of "special deputies" to guard plants, prevent strikers from closing plants, protect replacement workers from harassment and intimidation, and (in some cases) to beat strikers and break up picket lines. The governors of Connecticut, Maine, North Carolina, Rhode Island and South Carolina ordered out the National Guard. The governors of Georgia and Rhode Island also declared martial law. In Georgia, the governor ordered the arrest of all picketers and held hundreds in a former World War I prisoner of war camp.
Violence also broke out. Three picketers and mill guard were shot to death in Georgia. Six picketers were killed and more than 20 wounded in South Carolina. A picketer was murdered in Rhode Island when National Guardsmen fired into a crowd attempting to storm a rayon knitting mill.
After a mere 22 days, the strike was over. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had established a mediation board in the first week of the strike. The board recommended further study, that workers return to work, and that employers rehire workers without discriminating against strikers. With the UTW able to provide staff, financial resources and strike benefits in only a few places and for a small number of workers, the strike collapsed. Employees attempted to return to work, but mill owners refused to rehire the strikers. Although the 1934 textile strike was a major defeat for Rieve and the UTW, the union did sign up thousands of new members and declared victory nonetheless.
Other activities.
Rieve was also active in politics. In 1932, he led a successful push to get the UTW to call for the establishment of a new political party beholden solely to the labor movement. A socialist, Rieve resigned his membership in the Socialist Party of America and supported the new American Labor Party.
Rieve also was a committed industrial unionist. The UTW itself was an amalgamated union, a form of industrial union. Rieve's experiences in attempting to organize new members had convinced him that industrial unionism was the key to building the labor movement. In 1934, Rieve convinced UTW delegates to approve a resolution supporting industrial unionism. This philosophical commitment would prove to be pivotal in Rieve's life.
Textile Workers Organizing Committee.
In 1935, the American labor movement split over the question of craft versus industrial unionism. The Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) formed on November 9, 1935, and UTW president Thomas McMahon was one of the Committee's charter members.
Rieve and McMahon refused to surrender their principles. The two leaders secured passage in December 1935 of a UTW executive council resolution supporting the CIO. In July 1936, Rieve and McMahon gained additional support when the UTW convention approved the formation of the CIO and the UTW's membership in the organization. The AFL executive council "tried" the members of the CIO from July 8 to July 15, 1936, and expelled the UTW and the other CIO member unions on September 5.
Rieve, however, continued to hold out an olive branch to the AFL. In September 1936, he won AFHW support for a resolution asking the AFL to reconsider the expulsion of the CIO unions. Rieve was unable to organize many new members. Despite meetings with John Brophy, the CIO's organizing director, the CIO did not consider any major organizing effort in textiles. The UTW's finances were in such poor shape that the union actually cut the number of staff organizers by 20 percent. And despite conditions conducive to organizing, the union established only nine new locals between September 1936 and February 1937. Nevertheless, Rieve became known internationally for his efforts, and was appointed to the national committee of the International Labour Organization.
Collective bargaining.
For most of the next three years, Rieve attempted to fend off a series of attacks on the division's collective bargaining agreements. About a third of the UTW's membership came from the hosiery division in early 1937, and Rieve was in many ways the UTW's true leader. In the spring of 1937, Rieve led 15,000 Pennsylvania hosiery workers out on strike for a new contract. Pioneering use of the sit-down strike, the strikers successfully closed the mills. The strike's success spread until more than 50,000 union workers were on strike. Rieve eventually signed an agreement giving workers wage increases of 8 to 10 percent.
In early 1938, however, Rieve was forced to act against his own union members. The recession of 1937 had led to a significant worsening of economic conditions. Union members in Philadelphia demanded a pay increase. Rieve argued that the union had only managed to stop a wage giveback; there was no possibility of securing a wage increase. Nevertheless, workers at more than 50 hosiery plants in the Philadelphia area struck on March 1, 1938. Rieve declared the strike to be "illegal" and actively supported employer and government efforts to end the job action. When the new union contract was signed in mid-July, Rieve and the AFHW had successfully resisted employer demands to cut wages but were forced to agree to a contract clause barring strikes and lockouts for the term of the three-year agreement. Rieve rose to national prominence through his astute leadership of the AFHW. After passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in June 1938, Rieve was appointed to a federal committee to determine minimum wages in the textile industry.
Formation and leadership of TWOC.
In February 1937, McMahon resigned the presidency of UTW to take a state government job in Rhode Island. He was succeeded by Francis J. Gorman. Meanwhile, the CIO had achieved sudden and large organizing victories in steel, automobile manufacturing and the rubber industry. The organizing victory in steel had come after the CIO had co-opted the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (the AA), using the long-established but moribund union as a means of legitimizing the CIO's efforts in organizing the steel industry. CIO leaders had forced the AA to become part of a new, centrally-run, and efficient organizing project, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC).
CIO leaders had little confidence in Gorman or the UTW. Gorman had overseen the ill-fated 1934 textile strike. The UTW staff was considered incompetent, and politically behold to McMahon's relatively conservative policies. Rieve coveted the presidency of UTW, and worked to undercut Gorman at every turn—even when that meant disagreeing with actions he himself would otherwise support. Worst of all, UTW was practically bankrupt. Only the hosiery and dyers divisions were self-supporting, and Gorman was actually seeking a $5,000 loan from the CIO to keep the national union afloat.
From a strategic perspective, UTW was ill-equipped to organize in textiles. Although there were more than 1 million workers in the industry, "textiles" was actually more than 10 distinct industries. Each had its own markets, technology, and labor force. Workers rarely moved between segments