The Association of Catholic Trade Unionists, or ACTU, formed in founded in February 1937.
[citation needed] The ACTU encouraged Pope Pius XI's March 1937 anti-communist encyclical Divini Redemptoris and promoted mainstream Catholic teachings in the United States labor movement.
[1] While not a union itself, the ACTU sought to "educate, stimulate, and coordinate on a Christian basis the action of the Catholic workingmen and women in the American labor movement."
It played a particularly important role in building the International Union of Electrical Workers, which split from UE.
In late 1939, the ACTU described the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a "breeding nest of American Communism.