Both types have their place, and by the end of World War II, union membership in the United States was at an all-time high. Just about thirty percent of industrial workers across the country were members of a union. This was due, in no small part, to the efforts of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, which had established the right of workers to organize with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and creating the National Labor Relations Board to act as a mediator between labor and their employers. Wartime industry was also an important factor because any companies who wanted access to lucrative defense contracts were required to recognize unions. However, this membership was heavily concentrated in the North and Midwest, where there was more industrialization. The American South had retained much of the agricultural character which had been established in the colonial era, though factories became a more common sight by the early twentieth century and only increased with the nationwide industrialization of the war era. Even with the shift of labor, the remnants of the system of chattel slavery continued long past the institution’s abolition in 1865, meaning that workers in the South were much more likely to band together on the basis of race than by class or other commonalities. Despite the push toward unionization across the country, fewer than ten percent of workers in the South were members of a union. Even so, Black laborers, in both the North and the South, were generally more likely to be members of a union, getting all of the benefits, including better wages. In fact, Black union members’ wages were much closer to those of their white counterparts, shrinking the racial wage gap.

            As the country, and the world, moved away from wartime, the CIO, one of the largest coalitions of unions in the country, decided to make a push to increase union representation in the South. They had an uphill battle at best, as the governments of the southern states were vehemently anti-union and supportive of corporate union busting. Thus was born Operation Dixie, an effort by the CIO to improve worker conditions and wages overall and assure the area did not serve as an anti-union haven for companies who wished to pay their workers as little as possible. Since the CIO was a collection of unions, it was able to work in many places at once. They had representatives in unions of textile workers, canneries and meatpacking, and steelworkers, and these efforts also included members of the United Electrical Workers and the United Auto Workers. In May 1946, two hundred organizers set fanned out across the south. They were met with immediate pushback, most of which was illegal. Organizers were threatened, workers intimidated, and strikes (and strikers) broken. When the unionists asked for help from both local and federal law enforcement, they were generally ignored and often found the same people were actively working against them.

            The effort was further undermined by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which restricted union activities and was put into place over the veto of President Harry Truman. This allowed companies to obstruct organizing and prevented closed shops, which severely cut into the effectiveness of the union for its members. These were symptoms of the early Cold War, unions were seen by many as a first step toward socialism and communism. All of these issues, added to the area’s racism, led to an overall failure. Operation Dixie officially ended in 1953, though it had faded long before. Two years later, the CIO returned to its roots by merging with the AFL, combining their efforts and resources to assuring the best conditions and wages for both skilled and unskilled labor.

Operation Dixie
—Christina

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            Trade unions have existed for almost as long as human civilization in the form of guilds of skilled craftsmen and artisans. It was not until the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that serious consideration was given to organizing unskilled labor. This was a point of contention as unions developed through the nineteenth century; there were those, like the American Federation of Labor (AFL), who thought that organization should be done by trade and others, like the AFL’s offshoot The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), who argued that a common workplace or employer was a more effective element around which to organize.