Labor studies scholar Dorothy Sue Cobble challenges many of the typical ways in which the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations is typically understood. She specifically pushes back on the idea that the organization from which it emerged, the American Federation of Labor, was a solely regressive and blinkered organization — a too-tidy story that diminishes our understanding of the origins and dynamics of the CIO. In the following interview, Cobble offers a capacious and balanced understanding of what made the CIO work, and what its limitations were.

Dorothy Sue Cobble is a distinguished professor emerita of history and labor studies at Rutgers University and the author of multiple books, including Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century.