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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.