Lost Ways of Organizing: Reviving the AFL's Direct Strategy

From its founding in 1886 to the merger with the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1955, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) chartered some twenty thousand directly affiliated local unions. This article reevaluates the Federation's role in organizing by detailing the ways in which the direct affiliate strategy allowed for a wide range of representational strategies and facilitated the organizing of marginal sectors of the workforce. Reviving the direct affiliate strategy today would enable the Federation to expand jurisdictional boundaries, redefine the criteria for union membership, initiate alternative representational approaches, and boost the resurgence of labor's economic and political power at the subnational level.