Emil Rieve
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.
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.
A picketer was murdered in Rhode Island when National Guardsmen fired into a crowd attempting to storm a rayon knitting mill.
[10][11] 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.
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.
Rieve's experiences in attempting to organize new members had convinced him that industrial unionism was the key to building the labor movement.
Rieve declared the strike to be "illegal" and actively supported employer and government efforts to end the job action.
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.
The geographic spread of the industry encompassed 29 states, with nearly 75 percent of all textile employment in the virulently anti-union Deep South.
Now, two years after the victories in steel and automobiles, Hillman pressured CIO leaders to force the UTW into an agreement similar to that which had created SWOC.
[1] Meanwhile, TWOC opened its organizing drive in the Deep South, but its efforts against the "fortress of southern cotton" proved fruitless.
The council, a federation of seven textile unions in New Bedford, Massachusetts, had been confronted by an employer demand in January 1938 to cut wages by 12.5 percent.
Hillman distrusted Gorman, and clearly favored Rieve as the leader of the union which would emerge once TWOC's organizing drives concluded.
[9][11][19][20] Hillman and the TWOC leadership branded Gorman a traitor and replaced him with George Baldanzi, president of the UTW's dyers division.
[9][11] Realizing that the March 9 agreement might not survive court scrutiny, Hillman, Rieve and Baldanzi called a convention of UTW and TWOC locals for May 15, 1939.
[1][9][11][19][21] Emil Rieve's tenure as president of the TWUA saw the union's prestige and importance soar during World War II and falter in the 1950s.
[1][9] Rieve also kept the union politically active, making the TWUA one of the first labor organizations to endorse Franklin D. Roosevelt for president for reelection in 1940.
[9][19] In March 1941, President Roosevelt created the National Defense Mediation Board, and appointed Rieve as an alternative labor representative.
The board had been created to help resolve collective bargaining disputes in defense production, transportation and raw materials industries.
The United Mine Workers were fighting for the closed shop when the board's public and employer representatives voted that the issue should be submitted to binding arbitration.
American Labor Party (ALP) leader Sidney Hillman felt that the 1944 presidential election would be a close one in New York state.
Nevertheless, Hillman's proposal won the approval of ALP delegates, and Roosevelt easily carried New York in the general election.
[28] Rieve then tried to amend the TWUA constitution to remove the executive vice-president from the line of succession if the president should fall ill or die.
For the next four months, the TWUA was roiled by the firing, with the Baldanzi faction attempting to overturn Baron's dismissal and drive Rieve from office.
[30] Six weeks later, the Baldanzi faction announced a "democracy movement" within the TWUA and submitted a full slate of candidates to challenge Rieve for leadership of the union.
The union's finances were significant affected by the disaffiliations, forcing members to raise dues to cover a budget shortfall.
The dissension within the TWUA led to a series of "no-raid" pacts between the AFL and CIO, agreements which helped pave the way for eventual merger of the two labor federations.
He excoriated Soviet labor union officials for being puppets of the Communist regime and attacked Khrushchev as a dictator and war-monger.
[1][40] Faced with rapidly declining membership, the 63-year-old Rieve retired as TWUA president at the union's ninth biennial convention in 1956.
Although Rieve had pushed for his successor, William Pollock, to be elected to the AFL-CIO executive council, Reuther supported Ralph Helstein, the president of the United Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers.
