"To Find Answers to the Urgent Problems of Our Society": The Alliance for Labor Action's Atlanta Union Organizing Offensive, 1969-1971

The Alliance for Labor Action (ALA) was created through the joint efforts of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and the Teamsters Union in July 1968, in opposition to the AFL-CIO's policies. The motivation behind the creation of this new labor federation, which lasted until 1972, was to organize the millions of unorganized workers and to promote the social concerns that the two founding unions felt had been ignored since the merger of the AFL-CIO in 1955. The ALA selected Atlanta for its pilot citywide organizational campaign in an attempt to organize workers and to link them with the building of community unions that the ALA envisioned would promote its social concerns among the urban and rural poor. Although the ALA ran an innovative organizing campaign and achieved success when compared to certain standard metrics, the ALA considered the campaign overall to be a disappointment. Lessons from this organizing drive are discussed within the context of union organizing drives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.