Philip Murray

Philip Murray (1886-1952), American labor leader, helped organize America's mass-production workers into industrial unions through the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Philip Murray, John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman, and David Dubinsky built the American labor movement as it now functions. During the Great Depression and the New Deal of the 1930s, they brought trade unionism out of the doldrums and, through the creation of industrial unions, into a position of power whereby labor influenced big business and national politics.

Murray was born on May 25, 1886, in Lanarkshire, Scotland, to Irish immigrant parents. His father was a coal miner active in the Scottish trade union movement. When Philip entered the mines at the age of 10, he was already a novice trade unionist knowledgable about strikes. In 1902 the Murray family emigrated to America. They settled in the western Pennsylvania mining district of Westmoreland County, where they had relatives.

Early Union Career

Within 2 years Murray had become a union militant, leading a strike against the coal company for which he worked. As a result, the Murray family was evicted from a company house and Philip was banished from the county. From that moment he decided to devote his life to the labor movement.

Murray rose rapidly within the ranks of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). By 1912 he was a member of the international executive board, and in 1916 he won election as president of District 5, the powerful Pittsburgh bituminous region. In 1920 John L. Lewis, the UMWA president, appointed Murray vice-president.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, when the UMWA was racked with factionalism and suffered a sharp membership decline, Murray remained unshakably loyal to Lewis. Because Murray proved so knowledgable about the economics of coal and other major industries and because of his proven negotiating ability, when Lewis formed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in 1936 he appointed Murray chairman.

Ideas and Programs

By then Murray had firm ideas about the place of the labor movement in American society. Devout Catholicism and the family tradition of unionism combined to form his own vision of social justice. Unionism led him to espouse the workers' case against employers; Catholicism caused him to oppose all so-called revolutionary "isms" and, in accord with the papal encyclicals on labor-management relations, to see the employers' as well as the workers' rights in the industrial and social systems. He expounded these ideas in a book he coauthored with industrial engineer Morris Llewellyn Cooke, Organized Labor and Production. The book asserted that if employers recognized trade unions and engaged in productive collective bargaining, the result would be justice for the worker, harmonious industrial relations, security for private ownership of property, increased productivity, and higher profits and wages.

Congress of Industrial Organizations

As chairman of SWOC, Murray sought to put his ideas into action. Financed by Lewis and the UMWA, SWOC succeeded in February 1937 in winning a collective bargaining agreement from United States Steel and from many smaller companies. But later that year the "Little Steel companies" defeated SWOC in a brutal and bloody strike.

Murray's patience, warmth, and negotiating skills kept SWOC alive and vital until conditions once again favored union growth. When World War II erupted and America moved into defense and war production, Murray succeeded in 1942 in breaking down Little Steel's barriers to trade unionism. That same year he transformed SWOC into the United Steelworkers of America (USA) and became its first president.

As president, Murray demonstrated what he had learned as Lewis's loyal lieutenant. Other industrial unions that emerged during the 1930s had democratic union constitutions and rank-and-file participation, but the USA was controlled from the top down. At the 1942 founding convention Murray demanded and won a constitution that vested almost complete power in the leadership, meaning in this case Murray, who was also president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as well as a vice president of the UMWA.

Relations with Lewis

Despite his debt to Lewis, Murray could not avert a break. When Lewis repudiated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, Murray remained committed to the President and the New Deal. As a result, Lewis retired as president of the CIO and was replaced by Murray. Lewis called Murray before the UMWA executive board in 1942, charged him with disloyalty, and stripped him of his union vice presidency. Murray, however, retained his presidencies of the CIO and the USA until his death.

Always a moderate attuned to the climate of the times and eager to make the labor movement more respectable, Murray rode the tide of anticommunism after the war. At the 1949 CIO convention he declared that, while there was room within the organization for all varieties of thought, there was no room for communism. He then led the convention delegates to expel 11 allegedly Communist-dominated unions from the CIO. He died in San Francisco on Nov. 9, 1952.

Further Reading

There is no substantial biography of Murray. The best place to find information on him is in two long and detailed histories of labor by Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (1960) and The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (1970). For Murray's part in the struggle for industrial unionism with the American Federation of Labor see the dry, objective account by Philip Taft, The A.F. of L. from the Death of Gompers to the Merger (1959). The best study of Murray's role in the SWOC and CIO organizing drives in the mass-production industries is Walter Galenson, The C.I.O. Challenge to the A.F. of L. (1960). □

MURRAY, PHILIP 1886-1952

President of the congress of industrial organizations and labor leader

Early Years

Born in Blantrye, Scotland, in 1886, Philip Murray arrived with his family in the United States on Christmas Day 1902. At the time of their arrival he was a coal miner and a union member like his father, who was president of a local coal miners' union in Scotland. He remembered attending union meetings at age six. He began working in the mines when he was ten and as a result had little formal education. His family was Roman Catholic and tutored him on both religious and social issues.

Early Involvement

Working as a coal miner in western Pennsylvania, Murray became a labor activist because, as he explained, a "coal miner has no money. He is alone. He has no organization to defend him. He has nowhere to go. It is not inadequacy of the State law. The law is there, but the individual cannot protect himself because he has no organization. He has no one to go to." He joined the United Mine Workers (UMW), and in 1905 he was elected president of his local. He quickly moved up through the UMW bureaucracy by hard work and making contacts with labor leaders such as John L. Lewis. From 1919 to 1940 Murray served as a vice-president of the UMW under Lewis.

Labor Leader

Murray also served on a variety of government agencies that dealt with labor issues. During World War 1 he served on the War Labor Board, and in the 1930s President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the Labor and Industry Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration. Although he was involved in government activities, Murray did not give up his union activities. He served as Lewis's right-hand man and helped in the creation of the Committee (later Congress) of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935-1936. Lewis placed Murray in charge of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. He successfully organized the steelworkers and became the president of United Steel Workers of America. In 1940 Murray was elected president of the CIO, a position he would hold throughout the decade.

Class Warfare

Like other union leaders, Murray gave a no-strike pledge during the war years, and following the war he successfully gained two wage increases for the steelworkers. Throughout the 1940s he also feuded with former CIO president Lewis. Murray enthusiastically supported Roosevelt and his efforts to prepare the nation for war; once war came, he shared the attitudes of rank-and-file members when he supported the war effort completely. He declared, "This is our war!" and suspected that business leaders were more interested in profits than in defeating fascism.

A Proposal

Murray proposed his own plan for mobilizing the economy for war, the Industrial Council Plan, in 1941. He wanted to create councils for every major industry. The council would consist of an equal number of representatives from both labor and management and would be chaired by a federal official. Roosevelt and other leaders considered the plan radical because it treated the industry, not the particular business, as important and elevated union leaders to an equal status with business leaders.

Dealing with Strikes

Following the war Murray fought public backlash against organized labor's strikes in 1946. After the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which restricted the powers of labor unions, he began to argue that labor should not be so entangled with the government, even as he increasingly relied on the intervention of the national government in negotiations with management. In 1946 and 1949 the CIO struck entire industries rather than one company in order to prompt federal intervention. President Harry S Truman's intervention in the 1949 dispute between the United Steel Workers and the steel industry was particularly beneficial to the CIO. Murray also purged the CIO of all Communists or people with left-leaning politics. In 1942 he stopped a movement at the CIO convention to add "or political behavior" to a clause in the United Steelworkers' constitution prohibiting discrimination based on "race, creed, color, or nationality." To bring the CIO into mainstream Cold War politics further, he often publicly denounced the Soviet Union.

Source:

Nelson Lichtenstein, Labors War at Home: The CIO in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Philip Murray 1886–1952, American labor leader, b. Blantyre, Scotland. He emigrated to the United States in 1902 and worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines. After he was discharged for fighting with a foreman, 600 miners struck, formed a local of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW), and elected (1904) Murray local president. A skillful negotiator, he rose to the vice presidency of the union by 1920. When the CIO was formed (see American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations ), he became a CIO vice president and headed (1936) its successful steel workers' organizing campaign. He broke with John L. Lewis , whom he succeeded as CIO president (1940). For supporting President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's reelection in 1940, Lewis forced Murray out of the UMW. (Lewis supported the Republican Wendell Willkie). However, Murray was elected president of the United Steel Workers of America in 1942 when that union was formed. Retaining the presidency of both the CIO and the United Steel Workers of America until his death, Murray was active in expelling (1949–50) Communist-dominated unions from the CIO.