Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55

The story of the explosive labor struggles and political battles in the 1930s that built the industrial unions. And how those unions became the vanguard of a mass social movement that began transforming US society.

“The rise of the CIO was ‘the most significant event in modern American history’ in that it marked the emergence of class struggle by American workers on a massive scale.… The story… is one of ‘historic achievement for the working class’ in forging a ‘class organization never equaled in size or surpassed in picket-line and shop militancy.’ ” —Book News

Art Preis (1911–1964) was a member of Socialist Workers Party National Committee from 1940 to 1963 and longtime staff writer for the socialist newsweekly the Militant. A leader of the struggle of the unemployed in northern Ohio, he took part in the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike. That battle, together with strikes that year by truck drivers in Minneapolis and longshoremen in San Francisco, helped pave the way for the rise of the industrial unions across the US. Preis is the author of Labor’s Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the AFL-CIO (1964).