Mass picketing buoyed the strikers’ spirits and turned back scabs. Each plant had its own shop committee and picket captains chosen by the rank and file. The shop committees’ chairwomen formed a central strike committee that organized mass meetings on a daily basis, and flying squadrons kept the picket lines in close touch with one another. Friends and family joined strikers on the lines and helped them build a support network that extended from unions to churches to civil rights groups. After just ten days, the strikers won a settlement that met their wage demands, including pay equity for black workers. And though employers still refused to recognize the FWIU, the wage victory galvanized its St. Louis branch. The nutshellers helped to organize other low-wage workers, strengthen the city’s Unemployed Councils, and launch a militant campaign to desegregate public parks.
These patterns of struggle permeated the new labor movement that took shape during the New Deal’s early years. Craft unions had become accustomed to defending only the interests of their highly skilled members and avoiding the risks of concerted action or solidarity with the masses of unskilled workers, often of suspect ethnic and racial origins. Now, grassroots industrial unionism—a marginal force since the early 1920s—took center stage. Its hallmarks were mass action, democratic decision making, and do-it-yourself organizing that reached beyond workplaces and union halls to set entire communities in motion.
In the second half of 1933, union membership grew by 775,000—an astonishing figure given the depth of the depression. The surge continued through 1934, pushing total AFL membership over the three million mark, slightly better than 1929. AFL industrial affiliates recouped their crippling losses of the 1920s. By 1935, industrial unions represented more than a third of all union members, compared to a sixth in 1929.
New members swarmed into unions old and new. As soon as the NIRA was enacted, the United Mine Workers and others sprang into action, using sound trucks, posters, and handbills to spread the message of Section 7(a): “The president wants you to join the union.” Miners grabbed membership cards as fast as the union handed them out, and many started locals without waiting for organizers to arrive. The UMW added 300,000 members and penetrated new territory in Kentucky and Alabama. The International Ladies’Garment Workers grew by 100,000, reviving New York City strongholds and building new, predominantly Mexican American, locals in Los Angeles and San Antonio. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers—now an AFL affiliate—signed up 50,000 new members. Black workers in Alabama’s iron mines led a Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers organizing drive. More gains followed in 1934. By summer the UMW was more than a half-million strong; the United Textile Workers had over 300,000 members, up from 50,000 a year before; and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had grown from about 5,000 to more than 100,000. Mass-production workers from other industries also pounded on the AFL’s door. They came in through federal labor unions (FLUs); by the end of 1934, the Federation had chartered more than 1,400 new federal locals. Their ranks included 100,000 autoworkers, 90,000 woodworkers, and 60,000 rubber workers.
Organizing accelerated on other fronts too. “Red” unions affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) enlisted at least 125,000 new members—coal miners in Gallup, New Mexico, steel workers in Ohio, office workers in New York City, farm workers in California. California farm workers also built new ethnic unions such as the Filipino Labor Union and La Confederación de Uniones de Campesinos y Obreros. In Laredo, Texas, Mexican workers from different trades formed La Asociación de Jornaleros. Black and white sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta founded the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Pork butchers in Austin, Minnesota, spearheaded the formation of the Independent Union of All Workers, which organized upper Midwest workplaces from meat plants and department stores to beauty shops and gas stations. Professionals and highly skilled tradesmen formed unions like the American Newspaper Guild; the Screen Actors Guild (led by Boris Karloff and Groucho Marx); the Mechanics Educational Society of America, founded by tool and die makers; and the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians, formed originally as a “United Committee” of unemployed civil engineers to protest NIRA Construction Industry Code wage standards.
As unions expanded, so did community organizing under radical auspices. In New York City, the Communist-led United Council of Working-Class Women built tenant unions and rent strikes. The Birmingham branch of the Communists’ International Labor Defense mobilized 3,000 members against lynch law. The unemployed movement—organized by Socialists as well as Communists—picked up momentum in cities across the country. In San Antonio, Texas, at least ten chapters of the unemployed federation Worker’s Alliance of America were active, coordinated by Tejana activist Emma Tenayuca.
The organizing drives of 1933–34 spawned some 3,500 strikes, and unrest continued into 1935, which saw another 2,000. Strikes erupted in workplaces from factories to cotton fields, trucking depots to laundries, construction sites to office buildings; even among homeworkers, especially garment workers from New York to San Antonio to Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, where “inside” needleworkers brought “outsiders” into their 1933 strike over piece rates. “The country is full of spontaneous strikes,” wrote one labor journalist; “wherever one goes one sees picket lines.”
Conflict was especially bitter in agriculture, where New Deal policies made labor conditions worse. To shore up farm produce prices, the government paid landowners to cultivate fewer acres. Sharecroppers and tenants were evicted, field hands scrambled for fewer jobs, and farm wages—exempted from NIRA protection—fell. In 1933 alone, thirty-seven California farm strikes, most led by the TUUL’s Cannery and Agricultural Workers, involved 50,000 workers—in the largest strike movement ever seen by the state’s agribusinesses. Strikers and their families set up tent colonies, pooled resources, maintained mass pickets despite brutal repression, and won better pay scales in twenty-nine of the strikes. In 1933–35, strikes also hit cranberry bogs in Massachusetts, cotton fields in Arizona and the Deep South, sugar plantations in Puerto Rico, orchards in the Pacific Northwest, vegetable farms in Ohio, Michigan, and New Jersey.
Strikes by nonagricultural workers meanwhile swept through cities and towns in every part of the country. The peak came in mid-1934, when four exceptionally big uprisings grabbed national headlines.
In April, when workers in an AFL federal union at the Auto-Lite plant in Toledo, Ohio, went on strike for union recognition for the second time in three months, the company got an injunction, then resumed production with scab employees. The Lucas County Unemployed League put half a dozen people on a picket line. More joined every day, thousands by late May, enough to keep the scabs from leaving the plant. When the pickets defied National Guard orders to disperse, the soldiers attacked, killing two and wounding hundreds. Fighting filled Toledo streets for days. After the city’s unions voted for a general strike, Auto-Lite accepted most of its workers’demands.
San Francisco stevedores joined the AFL’s International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) seeking higher pay and shorter hours for themselves and all West Coast longshore workers. Negotiations produced no results. On May 9, 1934, at 8:00 P.M., longshoremen walked out in every West Coast port, and added a new demand: union-controlled hiring halls. Other maritime unions made their own demands; sympathy strikes spread as far as Gulf ports like Mobile, Alabama. Two months into the strike, authorities moved to open the docks. On July 5—“Bloody Thursday”—police attacked the pickets, killing two, wounding more than a hundred. Local unions called a general strike. On July 16, 127,000 workers shut down San Francisco—everything from factories to restaurants to streetcars. Vigilante bands beat strikers and ransacked union halls, and the general strike collapsed in three days. But the marine strike continued until rank and filers voted to accept federal arbitration. On July 30, strikers lined up on the waterfront and returned to work—all together, all at once. Arbitration gave the ILA most of its demands, and other unions also won improvements.<
br />
An employers’ association called the Citizens’ Alliance had long kept Minneapolis an open shop stronghold when drivers from a communist faction* in a small Teamsters local set out in 1933 to organize truckers. By next spring, Local 574 had 6,000 members. On May 15, it launched a strike against trucking employers. A women’s auxiliary canvassed for donations, ran a commissary for strikers’ families, and gave first aid to picket-line injuries. After a Citizen’s Alliance leader and another deputy were killed during a May 22 police attack on a mass picket line at the city’s central marketplace, employers agreed to settle. When they stalled, Local 574 struck again on July 16. Farmers from Minnesota and nearby states restocked the strike commissary. On July 20, police shot sixty-seven strikers on a picket line; two died, and 100,000 people attended one funeral. The governor sent 4,000 National Guardsmen to enforce martial law, but few trucks moved. When the Alliance accepted the strikers’main demands on August 21, thousands took to the streets for a twelve-hour celebration.
NIRA Section 7(a) was a joke in most textile mills. Workers flooded into the AFL United Textile Workers complaining of low wages, long hours, and “stretch-out”—assigning additional machines to operators until they worked nonstop the entire shift. Over the summer of 1934, walkouts spread from Alabama cotton mills throughout the South; on August 18, an emergency UTW convention voted for a general textile strike to force NIRA compliance. Beginning September 1, more than 400,000 workers idled every kind of textile mill from Alabama to Maine—the biggest strike in U.S. history. Mass pickets and parades took over mill town streets. In communities like Durham, North Carolina, the strikers had such widespread support that there was no violence. But violent confrontations were common. In Rhode Island an angry mob smashed windows and looted stores in Woonsocket’s business district, and in South Carolina deputies killed six strikers in Honea Path. State after state called out the National Guard, 11,000 troops in all;another ten strikers were killed. On September 21, Roosevelt announced new officials would be appointed to enforce the NIRA in the industry and asked that the strike end. UTW leaders complied the next day. Nothing had been won. Employers continued to flout the NIRA, and southern mills often refused to rehire returning strikers.
The textile strike’s defeat was the largest of many setbacks for the new labor movement, which saw many more defeats than victories. Grassroots unionism was immensely powerful but faced tremendous obstacles.
Federal officials gutted NIRA Section 7(a) with bogus interpretations of the law and lax enforcement. Corporations like U.S. Steel and General Motors rushed to establish new Employee Representation Plans. Within months of the NIRA’s passage, the number of workers covered by ERPs shot up from 1.25 million to double that figure. Employers persuaded the National Recovery Administration that these “company unions” were bona fide labor organizations meeting Section 7(a) requirements.
Even when New Deal agencies favored workers, they could not enforce their decisions. As the strike wave rolled across the country, the government set up labor boards to adjudicate workplace disputes and established a National Labor Relations Board in July 1934. This board—unlike its predecessors—interpreted the NIRA in favor of unions, but lacked any authority to enforce decisions. The final word remained with the National Recovery Administration, which almost always sided with employers.
AFL conservatives undercut the new labor movement as well. The textile strikers scared UTW leadership, militant mass-production workers alarmed AFL headquarters. In March 1934, 200,000 autoworkers were poised to strike against the open shop. AFL President William Green negotiated a truce that got them a new labor board, which denied them union recognition. Steel workers met a similar fate that summer, as did rubber workers the next year.
Green and company also frustrated plans to parlay mass production FLUs into national industrial unions. The AFL Executive Council invited craft unions to raid federal locals for their skilled members, leaving the less skilled—along with others rejected by the crafts on account of color, sex, or nationality—to fend for themselves. “The rubbish at labor’s door,” Teamster president Daniel Tobin called them, saying straight out the thoughts of nearly every craft union boss.
Such attitudes did not go unchallenged. As industrial affiliates like the United Mine Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers revived, their leaders called for militant organizing in mass production. The TUUL amplified the chorus in the winter of 1934–35, when its radical unions dissolved and sent their members into AFL affiliates.
But labor leaders who lacked the will to organize retained the balance of power. By summer 1935, the AFL had so disappointed its new recruits in mass production that more than half a million of them had dropped out. The exodus decimated the United Textile Workers, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, and federal unions in auto, rubber, and other industries.
For its part, corporate America tried to deprive the new labor movement of popular support, force it to abandon mass action, demoralize its rank and file, and pick off its most militant leaders. Antilabor propaganda made every militant unionist a violent agitator following orders from Moscow, every strike a Bolshevik plot. Employers founded or funded a host of associations to spread the gospel: the American Legion (insurance and banking money), the Sentinels of the Republic (Pew family oil interests), the American Liberty League (General Motors executives), and organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Employers mobilized state and local government support. Alabama cities Birmingham and Bessemer passed ordinances against possessing and distributing radical literature, which for local judges meant all union publications. Homestead, Pennsylvania, banned mass meetings; when federal Labor Secretary Frances Perkins came to talk with steel workers in 1933, she had to meet them at the Post Office, on federal property. California authorities helped break the farm strike wave by arresting eighteen TUUL leaders for criminal syndicalism in July 1934. Eighteen strikers were killed on picket lines during the second half of 1933; eighty-eight more over the next two years. More than 18,000 pickets went to jail in 1935.
Corporate and vigilante violence supplemented legal repression. In 1933, California agribusinesses, banks, and utility companies started the Associated Farmers, which mobilized battalions of up to 2,000 goons to attack pickets and raid tent colonies. Hate groups were ready to help. The Ku Klux Klan revived in 1934 in Dallas, Texas, to save America from labor radicals. A General Motors manager suggested to a colleague facing a union drive: “Maybe you could use a little Black Legion.” A midwestern offshoot of the Klan, the Black Legion killed at least ten auto union activists in 1934–35 in the Midwest’s industrial cities. Corporations also relied on professionals. After 1933, big business spent an estimated $80 million a year on agents specializing in antiunion espionage and violence. More than 200 agencies furnished tens of thousands of operatives to companies like Chrysler, Standard Oil, Firestone, Westinghouse, Campbell Soup, Quaker Oats, Montgomery Ward, Borden Milk, and Statler Hotels. A few like the Ford Motor Company and U.S. Steel preferred their own security forces.
Such assaults increased the risks of organizing and undermined many a strike, but grassroots unionism persisted. Anti-Communist propaganda failed to ignite a new “Red Scare,” partly because it charged that Bolsheviks were behind the New Deal as well as the new labor movement, and the Roosevelt administration declined to support the campaign. Moreover, the new labor movement’s community networks were resistant to red-baiting. Even brutality could backfire. In Birmingham, Alabama, a metal worker took his eight-year-old son to see a union organizer who had been tortured by thugs employed by U.S. Steel subsidiary Tennessee Coal and Iron. As the boy examined the wounds, his father instructed him: “Look at that, sonny. That’s the company. That’s what you got to learn to hate—and fight agin.”
Corporations’ belligerence—their war on unions, countless infractions of NIRA rules, wild charges against the New Deal—played poorly wit
h the general public too. Letters flooded the White House demanding that the president control big business. Then, in May 1935, the Supreme Court voided the NIRA as a violation of Constitutional limits on federal power. The Roosevelt administration changed course: a second New Deal took shape, based this time on a government partnership with workers, not businessmen.
A new federal agency, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), greatly expanded public works programs to create jobs. By early 1936, the WPA had more than 3.4 million workers on its rolls. Most worked on construction projects—roads, bridges, parks, recreation centers, and other public facilities. The WPA also organized the Federal Writers Project and the Federal Theatre Project, which employed writers, artists, actors, and musicians. It worked with the new National Youth Administration to provide part-time jobs to poor students so they could continue their educations.
Another second New Deal initiative addressed the free market’s failures to provide economic security, both short- and long-term. The Social Security Act established national unemployment insurance, administered by the states and financed by a tax on employers; and pensions for workers, * funded by taxes on both employers and workers. It also authorized federal grants to states to assist disabled individuals and destitute children (along with their mothers). The coverage was not especially generous—it excluded agricultural, hospital, and domestic workers—but the act was a breakthrough: for the first time the federal government took responsibility for working people’s long-term economic security.
In another concession to popular anger at business magnates, Congress substantially raised federal taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. It also passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act, breaking up gas and electric monopolies that charged exorbitant rates.
The centerpiece of the Second New Deal, and its most important concession to labor, was the National Labor Relations Act, usually called the Wagner Act after its author, Senator Robert Wagner of New York, and signed into law July 5, 1935. Where NIRA Section 7(a) had recognized unions, the Wagner Act gave them protection (though, like Social Security, it exempted agricultural, hospital, and domestic workers). It established secret-ballot elections for workers deciding whether to be represented by a union. It prohibited employers from interfering with organizing and banned specific common practices: using threats, coercion, or restraint against an organizing drive; sponsoring labor organizations (“company unions”); discriminating against union members in hiring, firing, or job assignments; retaliating against workers who reported Wagner Act violations; and refusing to bargain with a union voted in by the workers. Finally, Wagner established a new National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to oversee the elections, hear and rule on complaints about violations of the Act, and petition federal courts to enforce its rulings. A coda added, “Nothing in this Act shall be construed so as to interfere with or impede or diminish in any way the right to strike.”
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 26
