WI Earl Browder is made the minister of labour in 1944?

The wartime leader of the american communist party, Earl Browder, had a very original take on communism as he believed that the United States due it's own national identity should develop communism based on it's own reality and not try to import the soviet model, something that can be seen on his motto "Communism is 20th century americanism" (this is also a response for the motto of the other leader of the CPUSA, William Z Foster "Towards soviet america"). Because of that Earl Browder took many positions that actually hurted pretty bad the party but also supported the USA war effort, like asking the communists (that were on their peak in the 30s and early 40s) to vote for Roosevelt, dissolving the communist party and turning it on the communist political association, advocating for a state of cooperation between the soviet and american governments, thus making him gain favour with the Roosevelt administration that offered him in 1945 the post of minister of labour. The end of the war, however, and the beginning of the cold war shattered Earl career as the ideal of soviet-american cooperation collapsed and the soviets ordered him to return to the pre 1941 enemity between both sides, something he refused and got fired for.

Let's say that the proposal goes further one year before, in 1944 Roosevelt is reelected and Earl Browder is appointed the minister of labour as Roosevelt takes office again, now we got a communist on FDR cabinet and Browder got some influence to maybe persuade the administration to be more friendly towards the USSR (something impossible in the long therm).

What are the effects of such thing? I ask the effects on two scenarios: on the first Roosevelt dies as OTL and Browder is more likely pushed out from the administration; on the second Roosevelt survives 'till the end of his mandate, would he fire Browder eventually or keep him 'till the end?

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If it was anything like the CPAs scab for the Soviets mentality you could be looking at very nasty federal repression of late war inflation strikes, and potentially 46.
 
If it was anything like the CPAs scab for the Soviets mentality you could be looking at very nasty federal repression of late war inflation strikes, and potentially 46.

Care to explain? I don't quite get what you are saying (I have no context for the post war inflation)
 
Browder simply had delusions of grandeur about his influence in the Roosevelt administration. (See https://books.google.com/books?id=nIYC5pd1XQoC&pg=PA215 on how Josephine Adams bamboozled him: "In 1943, however, her mental delusions were not so manifest, and Browder believed he had a private pipeline to the White House. Browder gave Adams material on various political matters to discuss with President Roosevelt during their (as he thought) frequent chats. Actually, Browder's political information became the texts of the letters Adams continued to send Mrs. Roosevelt, who recognized the political interest of some of Adams's letters and forwarded them to her husband—noting on one, however, "I know nothing of her reliability." Mrs. Roosevelt sent polite responses to Adams, the most encouraging being a note that "your letters go directly to the president. What then happens I do not know." That, however, is not what Josephine Adams told Earl Browder. She represented that she met in person with FDR, and she gave Browder substantive messages that she said were the president's responses to Browder. Adams in fact simply made up FDR's responses, basing them on the analysis offered by political commentators and on what Browder wanted to hear...")

FDR knew perfectly well that Communism was still unpopular in the US, so while he may have appreciated how much the CP and its allies in the left wing of the CIO were doing for the war effort (and for his re-election) he repudiated Communist support in public and there is no way he would give an open Communist public honors, let alone a Cabinet post.

Of course if Browder somehow could become Secretary of Labor he would be a very unpopular one with everyone in the labor movement except the CIO Left. In fact, even some CIO leftists had to repudiate his advocacy of "incentive pay"--i.e., piecework:

"In March, Paul Ste. Marie, president of the huge Ford Local 600 in Detroit, circulated leaflets with quotations from [Browder's] Production for Victory, arguing that a victory for the CP-backed opposition slate in upcoming local elections would mean the return of the speed-up and the management time-study man. In a public letter to Ste. Marie, Browder insisted that "old prejudices" against increasing the speed of production should be laid aside for the good of the war effort. Ste. Marie was in political trouble within the UAW for having backed the Republican candidate in the last Michigan gubernatorial election, while the opposition slate, which included a black UAW leader allied with Communists, Sheldon Tappes, could count on support from the sizable black membership of the local. Nevertheless, the left slate had to repudiate the incentive-pay proposal to ensure their victory." https://books.google.com/books?id=iWMprgS8q0AC&pg=PA163 [my emphasis--DT]

And in the internal conflict in the UAW, "incentive pay" was a godsend to the Reutherites in their struggle against the leading UAW leftist, George Addes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Addes and his then-ally Richard Frankensteen. A Reutherite ditty (to the tune of "Reuben and Rachel") :

Who are the boys who take their orders
Straight from the office of Joe Sta-leen?
No one else but the gruesome twosome,
George F. Addes and Frankensteen.

Who are the boys that fight for piecework,
To make the worker a machine?
No one else but the gruesome twosome,
George F. Addes and Frankensteen.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Y97uNsn4scQC&pg=PA183

The Reutherites could not openly attack the Communists and their allies on the no-strike pledge--after all, that was mainstream CIO (and for that matter AFL) policy. But "incentive pay" gave them just the issue they needed...
 
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Care to explain? I don't quite get what you are saying (I have no context for the post war inflation)
As the war went on inflation (the inability of workers to buy things they felt they ought to have) increased. This increased wild cat strikes and wild cat industrial action of other kinds. As inflation increased during the war, due in large part to productivity and production going to war and waste, workers fought the boss harder at work.

The AFL and CIO and CPUSA opposed workers striking.

If the CPUSA had an incompetent administrator as head of labor in the US government, an administrator trained by his party in the use of disciplinary and administrative techniques against oppositions, the chances are that the CPUSA calls troops out against workers. The CPUSA will murder workers over jeapordising their interests in Soviet security.

For comparisons consider the ALP's use of troops against strikers in 1948. Nominally "left" or "workers" parties shooting workers is as common as corn bread. Just ask Vlad.

Bonus points if tanks are used. Get the name going 24 years early.

yours,
Sam R.
 
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"The majority of the time of officers, of grievance committeemen, of the unions as a whole, must go to winning of the war. How? Production. I'd rather say speed-up, and I mean speed-up. The term "production" covers the boss, government, and so on. But speed-up covers the workers—the people who suffer from speed-up are the workers. To put it bluntly, I mean your unions today must become instruments of speed-up of the working class of America."--Harry Bridges, 1942 ("No wonder the commissars found Bridges hard to handle. He had the unfortunate habit of reducing windy rhetoric to barebone essentials."--Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton University Press 1977), p. 214.
 
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