Cigar Makers' International Union
The first local Cigar Makers' Union was founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 1851 by craftsmen who were opposed to the importation of low-cost laborers from Germany.
This group quickly expanded in size to include about 160 of the city's 800 or so cigar workers before collapsing in an unsuccessful strike to avert a general cut in wages.
[1] The defeat proved temporary, as in 1859 another New York union was established in response to complaints about the business behavior of one manufacturer named Tom Little.
[4] During the Civil War, the revenue-starved federal government instituted an internal revenue tax on cigars and established a system of permits for employers and employees.
[1] This gathering decided to move forward with the establishment of a national union and called a foundation convention for the group for June 21, 1864, in New York City.
The years 1871 and 1872 saw the arrival of a substantial wave of immigrants from Bohemia, a region which now comprises the western two-thirds of the Czech Republic.
[6] Cigar manufacturers, seeking to realize larger profits from economies of scale using the new assembly methods would buy or rent a block of tenements and then sublet the apartments to cigar makers and their families — thereby technically fulfilling the government requirement of maintaining a physical facility.
[7] The CMIU concentrated its efforts on publicizing the abuses inherent in the so-called "tenement house system," ultimately forcing the New York Board of Health to take notice of the situation.
[1] The two sibling unions were in a position of competing with one another and they engaged in a bitter and destructive four year war, undercutting one another's contracts in order to gain recognition, until they once again reunited in 1886.
While the CMIU pressed for higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, and the right of collective bargaining, it restricted its organizing efforts to the skilled cigar roller or craftsman, requiring factory owners to reject any production of cigars by machine or to use non-union semi-skilled or unskilled labor, i.e. a closed shop.
Previously, local chapters issued their own stamps including white labels, used by the Cigar Makers' Association of the Pacific Coast to show that their cigars were made by white labor, in response to the growing use of low-wage, Chinese immigrant labor.
A "Sept. 1880" date was added top center to the label design in 1888 and appears on all CMIU cigar (not stogie) issues until 1974.
[13][14] As demand for cigarettes increased, consumption of hand-rolled cigars declined, which directly affected CMIU members.
[19] After World War II, the consolidation of cigar manufacturing in the United States continued; many of the remaining larger manufacturing concerns moved cigar production to Central America and South America, which only accelerated the loss of union jobs.
