The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by Senator Huey Long in 1932, was a federation of
unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The CIO was more aggressive
and militant than the American Federation of Labor (AFL); its leaders were
often younger and used more radical tactics until certain leaders within the organization, that are claimed to have been
Communists, were purged in the late 1940s and 1950s and the organization merged with the AFL in 1955. The CIO strongly supported
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal
Coalition, and was notable for being open to African Americans. The CIO grew
rapidly from 1936 to 1945, but so did the larger AFL. Battles for
control over industrial sectors such as meatpacking and electric machinery made for a bitter and often violent rivalry with the
AFL.
Originally named the Committee for Industrial Organization, the CIO was founded on November
9, 1935, by eight international unions belonging to the
American Federation of Labor. In its statement of purpose, the CIO said it
had formed to encourage the AFL to organize workers in mass production industries along industrial union lines. The CIO failed to
change AFL policy from within, and on September 10, 1936, the AFL suspended all 10 CIO
unions (two more had joined in the previous year). These unions subsequently formed Congress of Industrial Organizations as a
rival federation in 1938. The CIO rejoined the AFL, forming the new entity known as the
American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), in 1955.
Founding of the CIO
The CIO was born out of a fundamental dispute within the U.S. labor
movement over whether and how to organize industrial workers. Those who favored craft
unionism believed that the most effective way to represent workers was to defend the advantages they had secured through
their skills. In the case of skilled workers, such as carpenters, lithographers, and railroad engineers this meant maintaining as
much control as possible over the work their members did through enforcement of work rules, zealous defense of their jurisdiction
to certain types of work, control over apprenticeship programs and exclusion of less skilled workers from membership.
Craft unionists were therefore opposed to organizing workers on an industrial basis, i.e., into unions that represented all of
the production workers in a particular enterprise, rather than in separate units divided along craft lines. Many of the opponents
of industrial unionism were also motivated by a general disdain for industrial workers, whom they considered unorganizable, and
for the foreign-born and racial minorities who made up a large number of their ranks.
The proponents of industrial unionism, on the other hand, generally believed that
these craft distinctions may have been appropriate in those industries in which craft unions had flourished, such as construction
or printing, but that they were unworkable in industries such as steel or auto production. In their view, dividing workers in a
single plant into a number of different crafts represented by separate organizations, each with its own agenda, would weaken
those workers’ bargaining power and leave the majority of them, who had few traditional craft skills, completely
unrepresented.
While the AFL had always included a number of industrial unions, such as the United Mine
Workers and the Brewery Workers, by the 1920s
the most dogmatic craft unionists had a strong hold on power within the federation. They used that power to quash any drive
toward industrial organizing.
The debate over industrial unionism became even fiercer in the 1930s, when the Great Depression in the United States caused large membership drops in some
unions, such as the United Mine Workers of America and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. A number of labor leaders,
and in particular John L. Lewis of the Mine Workers, came to the conclusion that their own
unions would not survive while the great majority of workers in basic industry remained nonunion and started to press the AFL to
change its policies in this area.
The AFL did, in fact, respond, and added even more new members than the CIO. The AFL had long permitted the formation of
“federal” unions, which were affiliated directly with the AFL; in 1933 it proposed to use these to organize workers on an
industrial basis. The AFL did not, however, promise to allow those unions to maintain a separate identity indefinitely, meaning
that these unions might be broken up later in order to distribute their members among the craft unions that claimed jurisdiction
over their work. The AFL, in fact, dissolved hundreds of these federal unions in late 1934 and early 1935.
While the bureaucratic leadership of the AFL was unable to win strikes, three victorious strikes suddenly exploded onto the
scene in 1934. These were the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934
led by the Trotskyist Communist League of
America, the 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike led by the
Communist Party USA, and the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike led by the American Workers Party.
Victorious industrial unions with militant leaderships, this was the catalyst that brought on the rise of the CIO.
The AFL did authorize organizing drives in the automobile, rubber and steel industries at its convention in 1934, but gave
little financial support or effective leadership to those unions. The AFL’s timidity only succeeded in making it less credible
among the workers it was supposedly trying to organize, particularly in those industries, such as auto and rubber, in which
workers had already achieved some organizing success at great personal risk.
This dispute came to a head at the AFL’s convention in Atlantic City in 1935, when William
Hutcheson, the President of the Carpenters, made a slighting comment about a rubber worker
delivering an organizing report. Lewis responded that Hutcheson’s comment was “small potatoes,” to which Hutcheson replied “I was
raised on small potatoes, that is why I am so small.” After some more words Lewis punched Hutcheson, knocking him to the ground;
Lewis then relit his cigar and returned to the rostrum. The incident – which was also “small potatoes,” but very memorable –
helped cement Lewis’ image in the public eye as someone willing to fight for workers’ right to organize.
Shortly after the Convention, Lewis called together Charles Howard, President of the International Typographical Union, Sidney
Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of
America, David Dubinsky, President of the ILGWU, Thomas McMahon, head of the United Textile Workers, John Sheridan of the
Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, Harvey Fremming from the Oil Workers Union and Max Zaritsky of the Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers
to discuss the formation of a new group within the AFL to carry on the fight for industrial organizing. The creation of the CIO
was announced on November 9, 1935. Whether Lewis always intended to split the AFL over this issue is debatable; at the outset,
the CIO presented itself as only a group of unions within the AFL gathered to support industrial unionism, rather than a group
opposed to the AFL itself.
The AFL leadership, however, treated the CIO as an enemy from the outset, refusing to deal with it and demanding that it
dissolve. The AFL’s opposition to the CIO, however, only increased the stature of the CIO and Lewis in the eyes of those
industrial workers keen on organizing and disillusioned with the AFL’s ineffective performance. Lewis continued to denounce the
AFL’s policies while the CIO offered organizing support to workers in the rubber industry who went on strike and formed the
Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), in defiance of all of the
craft divisions that the AFL had required in past organizing efforts, in 1936; Lee
Pressman, affiliated with the far left, became the union's General Counsel.
Initial triumphs
The CIO met with dramatic initial successes in 1937, with the UAW winning union recognition at General Motors Corporation
after a tumultuous forty-four day sit-down strike, while the SWOC signed a
collective bargaining agreement with U.S.
Steel. Those two victories, however, came about very differently.
The CIO’s initial strategy was to focus its efforts in the steel industry and then build from there. The UAW, however, did not
wait for the CIO to lead it. Instead, having built up a membership of roughly 25,000 workers by gathering in federal unions and
some locals from rival unions in the industry, the union decided to go after GM, the largest car maker of them all, by shutting
down its nerve center, the production complex in Flint, Michigan.
The Flint Sit-Down Strike was a risky and illegal enterprise from the outset:
the union was able to share its plans with only a few workers because of the danger that spies employed by GM would alert
management in time to stop it, yet needed to be able to mobilize enough to seize physical control of GM’s factories. The union,
in fact, not only took over several GM factories in Flint, including one that made the dies necessary to stamp automotive body
parts and a companion facility in Cleveland, Ohio, but held on to those sites despite
repeated attempts by the police and National Guard to retake them and court orders threatening the union with ruinous fines if it
did not call off the strike.
While Lewis played a key role in negotiating the one-page agreement that ended the strike with GM’s promise to recognize the
UAW as the exclusive bargaining representative of its employees for a six months period, UAW activists, rather than CIO staff,
led the strike.
The organizing campaign in the steel industry, by contrast, was a top-down affair. Lewis, who had a particular interest in
organizing the steel industry because of its important role in the coal industry where UMW members worked, dispatched hundreds of
organizers, many his past political opponents or radicals drawn from the Communist-led unions that had attempted to organize the
industry earlier in the 1930’s, to sign up members. Lewis was not particularly concerned with the political beliefs of his
organizers, so long as he controlled the organization; as he once famously remarked, when asked about the “reds” on the SWOC
staff, “Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?”.
The SWOC signed up thousands of members and absorbed a number of company unions at U.S. Steel and elsewhere, but did not
attempt the sort of daring strike that the UAW had pulled off against GM. Instead Lewis was able to extract a collective
bargaining agreement from U.S. Steel, which had previously been an implacable enemy of unions, by pointing to the chaos and loss
of business that GM had suffered by fighting the UAW. The agreement provided for union recognition, a modest wage increase and a
grievance procedure.
The CIO also won several significant legal battles as well. Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization 307 U.S. 496 (1939), arose out of events late in 1937. Jersey City, New Jersey Mayor Frank
"Boss" Hague had used a city ordinance to prevent labor meetings in public places and stop the distribution of literature
pertaining to the CIO's cause. District and circuit courts ruled in favor of the CIO. Hague appealed to the United States Supreme Court, held in 1939 that Hague's ban on political meetings
violated the First Amendment right to freedom of assembly.
Early setbacks and successes
The UAW was able to capitalize on its stunning victory over GM by winning recognition at Chrysler and smaller manufacturers. It then focused its organizing efforts on Ford, sometimes battling company
security forces as at the Battle of the Overpass on May 26, 1937; but there were no concrete organizing successes.
At the same time, the UAW was in danger of being torn apart by internal political rivalries. Homer
Martin, the first president of the UAW, expelled a number of the union organizers who had led the Flint sit-down strike
and other early drives on charges that they were communists. In some cases, such as
Wyndham Mortimer. Bob Travis and Henry
Kraus those charges may have been true; in other cases, such as Victor Reuther
and Roy Reuther, they were probably not. Those expulsions were reversed at the next convention of
the UAW in 1939, which expelled Martin instead. He took approximately 20,000 UAW members with him
to form a rival union, known for a time as the UAW-AFL, later renamed the Allied Industrial Workers of
America.
The SWOC encountered equally serious problems: after winning union recognition after a strike against Jones & Laughlin Steel, SWOC's strikes against the rest of "Little Steel," i.e., Bethlehem Steel Corporation, Youngstown Sheet and
Tube, National Steel, Inland Steel
American Rolling Mills and Republic Steel
failed. The steelmakers offered workers the same wage increases that U.S. Steel had offered, In the Memorial Day Massacre on May 30 1937,
Chicago police opened fire on a group of strikers who had attempted to
picket at Republic Steel, killing ten and seriously wounding dozens. A month and a half later police in Massillon, Ohio fired on a crowd of unionists, resulting in three deaths, when one union supporter
failed to dim his headlights. The strike collapsed shortly thereafter.
The CIO found organizing textile workers in the South even harder. As in
steel, these workers had abundant recent first-hand experience of failed organizing drives and defeated strikes, which resulted
in unionists being blacklisted or worse. In addition, the intense antagonism of white workers
toward black workers and the conservative political and religious milieu made organizing even harder. On the other hand, some
independent left-wing unions, such as Mine, Mill and the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers
Union of America, that aggressively organized both black and white workers had more success than the more cautious Textile
Workers Organizing Committee founded by the CIO.
Adding to the uncertainties for the CIO was its own internal disarray. When the CIO formally established itself as a rival to
the AFL in 1938, renaming itself as the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the ILGWU and the
Millinery Workers left the CIO to return to the AFL. Lewis feuded with Hillman and Philip
Murray, his long-time assistant and head of the SWOC, over both the CIO's own activities and its relations with the
FDR administration. Lewis finally resigned as President of the CIO in 1941, after
endorsing Wendell Willkie for President in 1940, choosing
his protégé Murray to succeed him.
The doldrums did not last forever, however. The UAW finally organized Ford in 1941. The SWOC,
now known as the United Steel Workers of America, won recognition in Little Steel in
1941 through a combination of strikes and National
Labor Relations Board elections in the same year. Other CIO affiliates made progress during these years in organizing
workers in mass transit, packinghouses, tire factories, shipyards and electrical manufacturers while the UAW successfully
organized aircraft workers.
In addition, after the west coast longshoremen organized in the strike led by Harry Bridges in 1934 split from the International Longshoremen's
Association in 1937 to form the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, the ILWU joined the
CIO. Bridges became the most powerful force within the CIO in California and the west. The Transport Workers Union of America, originally representing the subway workers in New
York, also joined, as did the National Maritime Union, made up of sailors based
on the east coast, and the United Electrical, Radio and
Machine Workers, which represented workers in a range of electrical manufacturing facilities.
The AFL continued to fight the CIO, forcing the NLRB to allow skilled trades employees in large industrial facilities the
option to choose, in what came to be called "Globe elections," between representation by the CIO or separate representation by
AFL craft unions. The CIO now also faced competition, moreover, from a number of AFL affiliates who now sought to organize
industrial workers. The competition was particularly sharp in the aircraft industry, where the UAW went head-to-head against the
International Association of Machinists,
originally a craft union of railroad workers and skilled trade employees. The AFL organizing drives proved even more successful,
and they gained new members as fast or faster than the CIO. In some instances bloody confrontations took place between the rival
federations, each supported by their political allies.
The Dies Committee determined in 1938 that 280 salaried CIO
organizers, were members of the CPUSA.
Growth during the Second World War
See Homefront-United States-World War II
The unemployment problem ended in the United States with the beginning of World War II, as stepped up wartime production
created millions of new jobs, and the draft pulled young men out. The war mobilization also changed the CIO’s relationship with
both employers and the national government.
In spite of its strong opposition to fascism, in August 1939 the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany
in order to protect iself from possible attack. Because of this American Communists took the public position of being opposed to
the war against Germany. The Mine Workers led by Lewis, with a strong pro-Soviet presence, opposed Roosevelt’s reelection in
1940, left the CIO in 1942. After June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Communists became fervent supporters of
the war and sought to end wildcat strikes that might hurt war production. The CIO, and in particular the UAW, supported a wartime
no-strike pledge that aimed to eliminate not only major strikes for new contracts, but also the innumerable small strikes called
by shop stewards and local union leadership to protest particular grievances.
That pledge did not, however, actually eliminate all wartime strikes; in fact there were nearly as many strikes in 1944 as
there had been in 1937. But those strikes tended to be far shorter and far less tumultuous than the earlier ones, usually
involving small groups of workers over working conditions and other local concerns.
The CIO did not, on the other hand, strike over wages during the war. In return for labor’s no-strike pledge, the government
offered arbitration to determine the wages and other terms of new contracts. Those
procedures produced modest wage increases during the first few years of the war, but, over time, not enough to keep up with
inflation, particularly when combined with the slowness of the arbitration machinery.
Yet even though the complaints from union members about the no-strike pledge became louder and more bitter, the CIO did not
abandon it. The Mine Workers, by contrast, who did not belong to either the AFL or the CIO for much of the war, engaged in a
successful twelve-day strike in 1943.
But the CIO unions on the whole grew stronger during the war. The government put pressure on employers to recognize unions to
avoid the sort of turbulent struggles over union recognition of the 1930s, while unions were generally able to obtain maintenance
of membership clauses, a form of union security, through arbitration and negotiation.
Workers also won benefits, such as vacation pay, that had been available only to a few in the past while wage gaps between higher
skilled and less skilled workers narrowed.
The experience of bargaining on a national basis, while restraining local unions from striking, also tended to accelerate the
trend toward bureaucracy within the larger CIO unions. Some, such as the Steelworkers, had always been centralized organizations
in which authority for major decisions resided at the top. The UAW, by contrast, had always been a more grassroots organization,
but it also started to try to rein in its maverick local leadership during these years.
The CIO also had to confront deep racial divides in its own membership, particularly in the UAW plants in Detroit where white workers sometimes struck to protest the promotion of black workers to production
jobs, but also in shipyards in Alabama, mass transit in Philadelphia, and steel plants in Baltimore. The CIO leadership,
particularly those in more left unions such as the Packinghouse Workers, the UAW, the NMU and the Transport Workers, undertook
serious efforts to suppress hate strikes, to educate their membership and to support the Roosevelt Administration’s tentative
efforts to remedy racial discrimination in war industries through the Fair Employment Practices
Commission. Those unions contrasted their relatively bold attack on the problem with the timidity and racism of the
AFL.
The CIO unions were less progressive in dealing with sex discrimination in wartime industry,
which now employed many more women workers in nontraditional jobs. Some unions who had represented large numbers of women workers
before the war, such as the UE and the Food and Tobacco Workers, had fairly good records of fighting discrimination against
women; others often saw them as merely wartime replacements for the men in the armed forces.
The post-War era
The end of the war meant the end of the no-strike pledge and a wave of strikes as workers sought to make up the ground they
had lost, particularly in wages, during the war. The UAW went on strike against GM in November 1945; the Steelworkers, UE and Packinghouse Workers struck in January 1946.
Murray, as head of both the CIO and the Steelworkers, wanted to avoid a wave of mass strikes in favor of high-level
negotiations with employers, with government intervention to balance wage demands with price controls. That project failed when
employers showed that they were not willing to accept the wartime status quo, but instead demanded broad management rights
clauses to reassert their workplace authority, while the new Truman administration
proved unwilling to intervene on labor’s side.
The UAW took a different tack: rather than involve the federal government, it wanted to bargain directly with GM over
management issues, such as the prices it charged for its cars, and went on strike for 113 days over these and other issues. The
union eventually settled for the same wage increase that the Steelworkers and the UE had gotten in their negotiations; GM not
only did not concede any of its managerial authority, but never even bargained over the UAW’s proposals over its pricing
policies.
These strikes were qualitatively different from those waged over union recognition in the 1930s: employers did not try to hire
strikebreakers to replace their employees, while the unions kept a tight lid on picketers
to maintain order and decorum even as they completely shut down some of the largest enterprises in the United States.
The CIO’s major organizing drive of this era, Operation Dixie, aimed at the textile
workers of the South, was a complete failure, due both to the social and political backwardness of the region and the CIO’s
reluctance to confront Jim Crow. Although the Steelworkers' Southern outpost in the steel
industry remained intact, the CIO and the union movement as a whole remained marginalized in the Deep South and surrounding
states.
In 1946 the Republican Party took control of both the House and
Senate. That Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which made organizing more
difficult, gave the states authority to pass so-called right to work laws, and outlawed
certain types of strikes and secondary boycotts. It also required all union officers
to sign an affidavit that they were not Communists in order for the union to bring a case before the NLRB. This affidavit
requirement, later declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, was the first sign of serious trouble ahead for
a number of Communists in the CIO.
Purging the Communists
The Taft Hartley Act of 1947 penalized unions whose officers failed to sign statements that they were not members of the
Communist Party. Many Communists held power in the CIO unions (few did so in the
AFL). The most affected unions were the ILWU, UE, TWU and Fur and
Leather Workers. Other Communists held senior staff positions in a number of other unions.
The leftists had an uneasy relationship with Murray while he headed the CIO. He mistrusted the radicalism of some of their
positions and was innately far more sympathetic to anti-Communist organizations such as the Association
of Catholic Trade Unionists. He also believed, however, that making anti-Communism a crusade would only strengthen labor’s
enemies and the rival AFL at a time when labor unity was most important.
Murray might have let the status quo continue, even while Walter Reuther and others
within the CIO attacked Communists in their unions, if the CPUSA had not chosen to back Henry
Wallace's Progressive Party campaign for President in
1948. That, and an increasingly bitter division over whether the CIO should support the Marshall
Plan, brought Murray to the conclusion that peaceful co-existence with Communists within the CIO was impossible.
Murray began by removing Bridges from his position as the California Regional Director for the CIO and firing Lee Pressman as
General Counsel of both the Steelworkers and the CIO. Anti-communist unionists then took the battle to the City and State
Councils where they ousted Communist leaders who did not support the CIO’s position favoring the Marshall Plan and opposing
Wallace.
After the 1948 election, the CIO took the fight one step further, expelling the ILWU, Mine, Mill, the Farm Equipment Union (FE), the Food and Tobacco Workers, and the
Fur and Leather Workers after a series of internal trials in the first few months of
1950, while creating a new union, the International Union of Electrical,
Radio and Machine Workers(IUE), to replace the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE), which left
the CIO.
Merger with the AFL
Reuther succeeded Murray, who died in 1952, as head of the CIO. William Green, who had headed the AFL since the 1920s, died the same month. Reuther began
discussing merger of the two organizations with George Meany, Green’s successor as head of
the AFL, the next year.
Most of the critical differences that once separated the two organizations had faded since the 1930s. The AFL had not only
embraced industrial organizing, but included industrial unions, such as the International Association of Machinists, that had
become as large as the UAW or the Steelworkers.
The AFL had a number of advantages in those negotiations. It was, for one thing, twice as large as the CIO. The CIO was, for
its part, once again facing internal rivalries that threatened to seriously weaken it.
Reuther was spurred toward merger by the threats from David McDonald, Murray’s
successor as President of the Steelworkers, who disliked Reuther intensely, insulted him publicly and flirted with disaffiliation
from the CIO. While Reuther set out a number of conditions for merger with the AFL, such as constitutional provisions supporting
industrial unionism, guarantees against racial discrimination, and internal procedures to clean up corrupt unions, his weak
bargaining position forced him to compromise most of these demands. Although the unions that made up the CIO survived, and in
some cases thrived, as members of the newly created AFL-CIO, the CIO as an organization essentially disappeared in the merger
process.
Industrial Unionization: CIO and the Black Community
Although CIO was beneficial to all workers, it is known to have helped the black workers the most. In the days prior to the
establishment of the CIO, under one hundred thousand blacks only were members of the American trade union. This number rapidly
multiplied after the foundation of CIO was in place. The number grew until it reached upwards around five hundred thousand in the
early 1940s.
At the events which were held by the union prior to 1939-1940, it was very rare and unlikely to see a black union official
representing them. But in the year of 1939-1940, it became more and more common to the point where it was actually seen as a
normal occurrence that there would be a black union official at all of these events. During these time periods another group was
formed to help support the black workers. This group was known as the National Negro Congress. The National Negro Congress
supported both the AFL and the CIO. However, it was more interested in forming an alliance with the CIO rather than the AFL due
to the fact that they believed the CIO would accomplish and get a lot more beneficial things done for the black workers. Although
many of the black community felt this way and agreed that their should be a unionization, The National Negro Congress did not
speak for the whole black community. In fact many felt that unionization with the CIO was not the way to go. One side felt that
racism should be the major argument and was strongly linked to capital. The other side felt the National Trade Union was the only
way to go. Although they were split the one thing that did not waiver was that both sides were strongly looking to further
advancing the presence and strength of the black community in the workforce.
Presidents of the CIO, 1935-1955
Further reading
Archives
- Southern Labor Archives. Department of Special Collections, The University Library, Georgia State University. (Official repository for hundreds of local and regional union
offices, as well as the national offices of IAMAW, NFFE, UGWA, UFWA, PATCO, UTWA, and the Georgia State AFL-CIO.)Online guide retrieved April 27, 2005.
- Martin, Katherine F., ed. Operation Dixie: The CIO Organizing Committee Papers, 1946-1953. Media: 75 reels of 35mm
microfilm. Online
guide to the microfilm edition retrieved April 27, 2005.
Books
- Fraser, Steven. Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. Reprint ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8014-8126-0
- Griffith, Barbara S. The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO. Philadelphia, Pa.:
Temple University Press. ISBN 0-87722-503-6
- Lichtenstein, Nelson. Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II. Reprint ed. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987. ISBN 0-521-33573-6
- Lipsitz, George. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press,
1994. ISBN 0-252-06394-5
- Preis, Art. Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55. Rev. ed. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1964.
ISBN 0-87348-263-8
- Phelan, Craig. William Green: Biography of a Labor Leader. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989.
ISBN 0-88706-871-5
- Zieger, Robert H. The CIO 1935-1955. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. ISBN
0-8078-2182-9
Web sites
See also
External links
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