When did AFL-CIO started?

U.S. federation of labour unions formed in 1955 by the merger of the AFL and the CIO. The AFL was founded in 1886 as a loose federation of craft unions under the leadership ofhttp://www.answers.com/topic/samuel-gompers. Member unions retained autonomy and received protection of their workers and jurisdiction over a certain industrial territory. The CIO was founded in 1935 as the Committee for Industrial Organization by a splinter group of AFL unions whose leaders believed in organizing skilled and unskilled workers across entire industries; at its first convention in 1938, it adopted its current name and elected http://www.answers.com/topic/john-l-lewis president. For two decades the AFL and CIO were bitter rivals for the leadership of the U.S. labour movement, but they formed an alliance in the increasingly conservative, antilabour climate of the postwar era, and in 1955 they merged under the leadership of http://www.answers.com/topic/george-meany.

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