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Vol. 71/No. 11      March 19, 2007

 
Women and labor’s fight for industrial unions
(Books of the Month column)
 
Below are excerpts from Labor’s Giant Step, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for March. In its pages the story of the explosive labor struggles and political battles in the 1930s that built the industrial unions is told by participant Art Preis. The book describes how those unions became the vanguard of a mass social movement that began transforming U.S. society by reaching out to the whole working class, including women who contributed greatly to those struggles. The first excerpt describes the May 1934 strike by Teamsters Local 574 in Minneapolis. The second is about the 1937 sit-down strikes by auto workers in Flint, Michigan. The third draws lessons from these strikes. Copyright © 1972 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY ART PREIS  
The Local 574 leaders warned the membership over and over to place no reliance or hope in any government agents or agencies, including Floyd B. Olsen, the Farmer-Labor Party governor, and the National Labor Board. They preached reliance only on the mass picket lines and militant struggle against the employers.

From the start, the strike leaders summoned the whole working-class populace to their support. The very active unemployed organization responded at once. A 574 Women’s Auxiliary, with a large membership, plunged into the strike, doing everything from secretarial work and mimeographing, to running the huge strike kitchen and manning picket trucks.

Some 700 of them marched in a mass demonstration to the Mayor’s office to demand the withdrawal of the “special” police. The march was led by Mrs. Grant Dunne, auxiliary president, and Mrs. Farrell Dobbs, auxiliary secretary and wife of a young coal driver who was a strike picket dispatcher. A decade later Farrell Dobbs became editor of The Militant and then national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party… .
 

*****

The strikers moved on February 1 to occupy a still more strategic plant, Chevrolet No. 4 where the Chevrolet motors were assembled—a real bottleneck. The leader of the Chevrolet unionists was Kermit Johnson, a militant left-wing Socialist. Chevrolet No. 4 had not been shut down, as it was not certain whether the union had sufficient strength in the plant. A bold stratagem was devised to capture the plant by reinforcements from the outside.

A diversion was created. Several thousand strikers marched to Chevrolet Plant No. 9 from the union headquarters. They were led by Roy Reuther and Powers Hapgood. GM informers, as had been expected, had tipped off management about the march on No. 9. Armed Flint detectives and company guards had been installed in the plant. The workers inside began yelling “sit-down!” and a forty-minute battle was waged inside the plant. The Women's Emergency Brigade, organized and led by Genora Johnson (now Dollinger), fought heroically on the outside, smashing the windows to permit the tear gas to escape from the plant.

During this diversion, a group of Chevrolet No. 4 men, with some squads from Chevrolet No. 6, marched boldly into the No. 4 plant, shut down operations, barricaded doors and gates and set up patrols. Steel gondolas, weighing hundreds of pounds apiece, were piled against doors and windows from floor to ceiling. That night, troops with bayonets marched ominously outside—but Murphy did not dare give an order to attack… .
 

*****

All the schemes of the employers to divide the workers and smash their strikes failed. During the postwar strike wave in 1919, the employers had brought thousands of unwary Negro workers from the South to use as scab labor. The end of World War II, however, found 1,600,000 Negro workers in unions, primarily in steel, coal, automobiles and meat packing. A third of the delegates to the CIO United Packinghouse Workers convention were Negroes, and hundreds of thousands of Negro militants bolstered the picket lines.

The use of women, particularly the wives of strikers, to start back-to-work movements and break the morale of the strikers proved a fiasco after World War II. Millions of women had been brought into industry during the war. A high percentage of them were married women forced to work to make ends meet. In the first eight months after V-J Day, according to the report of the Women's Bureau of the U. S. Department of Labor, some four million women were dropped from the labor force. They had no love for the employers. Not only did women strikers and strikers’ wives help man the picket lines and run the soup kitchens in all the major strikes, but in a series of strikes the miserably exploited telephone operators were to force the powerful American Telephone and Telegraph Company trust to deal with their unions.

Two misguided wives in Flint called a meeting of over 300 women to start a back-to-work movement in GM. But after a discussion of the issues, the meeting sent a telegram to Truman demanding he make GM bargain in good faith with the union. Part of the meeting collection was turned over to the strike fund and the two who had called the meeting volunteered for strike kitchen duty.  
 
 
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