GREAT DEPRESSION, PROTESTS AND REFORM DURING

Despite the fact that labor organizers in other industries such as automobile manufacturing had fought for and won the right to collective bargaining, management in the steel industry angrily refused to recognize the unions. The so-called "Little steel" companies — Bethlehem, Republic, National, Inland, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube — refused to sign contracts with the Committee of Industrial Organizations. "I won’t have a contract, verbal or written, with an irresponsible, racketeering, violent, communistic body like the CIO," said Republic Steel president Tom M. Grindler. "And until they pass a law making me do it, I am not going to do it."

And Grindler meant what he said. In the spring of 1937, the steelworkers at Republic’s South Chicago plant went on strike. On Memorial Day, a crowd of union sympathizers gathered to show support for the picketers, who were outside the plant. Although the demonstration was peaceful, company guards and local police broke up the picket lines by clubbing the protestors. As people began to run away, police began firing on the crowd. Ten were killed and many more wounded — most of them shot in the back. After that, the strike was broken, and the steelworkers returned to the mills without a contract. The Memorial Day Massacre of 1937, as many now call it, was a bloody defeat for trade unionism. It has come to symbolize business hatred of unions.

The Memorial Day Massacre was just one of many examples of social unrest that occurred during the Great Depression. The economic and social upheavals of the 1930s left many Americans wondering whether their elected officials could lead them through the crisis. As a result, people were more willing than they had been for decades to listen to proposals that promised to get the economy moving — and share the country’s wealth among all of its citizens.

The Labor Movement

During the 1920s, the influence of the labor movement had declined, and union membership was drastically reduced. This happened for two reasons: The unions could not get so much as a toehold in rapidly growing industries, such as automobile manufacturing and chemical processing, and actions by the Republican administration, as well as Supreme Court decisions, favored management over labor.

Labor’s influence continued to decline in the early years of the 1930s. By the time Roosevelt took office, only one in ten workers (excluding farm workers) belonged to a union, and unions had little influence in important industries such as steel and rubber. As the economy continued to falter, jobs kept evaporating. Union organizers found it difficult to keep old members, let alone attract new ones. In some industries, workers were afraid to take part in union activities for fear of angering their bosses.

Even though the labor union movement was in a slump, employers kept up their union-busting tactics. These included using professional strikebreakers to block organizing drives, hiring spies to infiltrate the unions, and stockpiling weapons to use in the event of a strike.

Another anti-union tactic was the use of the company union. Set up and controlled by employers, these unions had little power or independence. The National Recovery Act guaranteed workers the right of collective bargaining (basically the right to unionize), so these company unions appeared to comply with the law. But these unions were really a move by employers to avoid having to bargain in good faith with real unions organized by the workers themselves or their representatives. Even though company unions violated the intent of the NRA, by 1935 there were nearly six hundred of them, with over two million members.

Another reason that union strength faltered in the early 1930s is that the American Federation of Labor (AFL) insisted on staying primarily a craft union for workers in skilled trades, such as carpentry and masonry. It had little interest in organizing the other workers, most of them unskilled factory laborers, in the new mass-production industries. Also, the Hoover administration, which had believed that a voluntary partnership between business and government could turn the economy around, had done little in the early years of the decade to encourage any form of union expansion.

Eventually, organized labor became increasingly discontented. Incidents of industrial violence increased to their highest level since 1919. In 1934, this militancy erupted when 1.5 million workers went on strike nationwide. All over the country and in all types of industries — from truck drivers in the Midwest to dock workers on the East Coast to cotton mill workers in the South — workers struck. They demanded improved working conditions and the right to organize freely without management control. During some of these strikes, workers clashed with local police and even the National Guard. Many of these clashes were violent. In San Francisco in 1934, for example, during a dock workers’ strike, scabs, with police support, fought pickets for several days. At one point, the police fired on the pickets, killing two and wounding many more. But the longshoremen persisted and achieved collective bargaining rights.

Voters began to pressure Congress to intervene. Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York took leadership on the issue by drawing up a measure to enforce the NRA’s collective bargaining guarantees. The Wagner Act, passed in 1935, upheld the right of all workers to form and join unions. In order to supervise plant elections, the act also created the National Labor Relations Board. Its most far-reaching provision was to replace the principle of proportional representation with majority rule. Under proportional representation, several unions could represent the different groups of workers within a plant. The new system meant that the union winning a majority of votes in the plant election would represent all the employees there. The act also prohibited employers from refusing to rehire strikers, blacklisting workers, conducting industrial espionage, or setting up company unions.

This legislation was like a shot of adrenaline for the industrial union organizers. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers headed a large group within the AFL that recognized that modern factories were using new types of workers, such as those on an assembly-line, not the artisans of previous decades. Therefore, new types of unions — industrial unions — were needed to represent them. Lewis and his group demanded that the federation allow industrial unions to be chartered.

In September 1935, Lewis presented a charter plan at the AFL convention. When the delegates voted it down two to one, Lewis led a walkout of his faction. The seriousness of the split became clear when William L. Hutcheson of the carpenters’ union called Lewis a "bastard." Lewis responded by punching him in the jaw. In November of that year, Lewis’s faction, joined by leaders of the clothing, steel, automobile, and rubber industries, created the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO). Predictably, the AFL expelled the CIO. But the CIO was not concerned. It was too busy taking advantage of the provisions of the Wagner Act and organizing hundreds of thousands of industrial workers. The split was made official in November 1938, with Lewis as CIO president.