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A membership booklet for the International Workers Union, which includes the constitution as well as the by-laws of the organization. The booklet includes a second title page which lists the publishers as the Algemeiner Executive Board A.A.A. The reverse of that title pages lists U.O.P.W.A. 12 C.I.O, U.O.P.W.A. 18 C.I.O. and I.T.U. A.F. of L. (these are various labor unions -- the United Office and Professional Workers of America, and the International Typographical Union of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.)
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in Columbus, Ohio in 1886 by Samuel Gompers as a reorganization of its predecessor, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. Gompers was the president of the AFL until his death in 1924.
The AFL was the largest union grouping in the United States for the first half of the twentieth century, even after the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) by unions that left the AFL in 1938 over its opposition to organizing mass production industries. While the union was founded and dominated by craft unions throughout the first fifty years of its existence, many of its craft union affiliates turned to organizing on an industrial basis to meet the challenge from the CIO in the 1940s.
The AFL represented a conservative "pure and simple unionism" that stressed foremost the concern with working conditions, pay and control over jobs, relegating political goals to a minor role.[1] Unlike the Socialist Party or the even more radical Industrial Workers of the World, it saw the capitalist system as the path to betterment of labor. The AFL's "business unionism" favored pursuit of workers' immediate demands, rather than challenging the rights of owners under capitalism, and took a pragmatic, and often pessimistic, view of politics that favored tactical support for particular politicians over formation of a party devoted to workers' interests.
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