1946 Oakland General Strike

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Over the past several years,
when there's been some frustration and anger over the state

(00:23):
of the world or maybe the state of where we live,
I've seen kind of a tide of people calling for
a general strike, and whenever that happens, I find myself
wanting to do an episode on a general strike. We
have talked about some general strikes before, back in twenty
nineteen in two different episodes, we talked about the Winnipeg

(00:44):
General Strike and the Lemerick Soviet and both of those
had happened in nineteen nineteen, but a lot of those
calls for general strikes here in the United States in
the more recent past. Those have happened in the years
since we did those episodes, especially in the face of
the COVID nineteen pandemic and the George Floyd protests. In

(01:05):
twenty twenty, we have gotten a ton of requests for
an episode on the Icelandic general strike, known in English
as the Women's Day Off, which happened in nineteen seventy five,
and while I would really love to do an episode
on that, it is hampered by my inability to read Icelandic,
just the language that the vast majority of stuff about

(01:28):
that is written in. So that has brought us to
instead the nineteen forty six Oakland General Strike, which is
today's subject. The nineteen forty six Oakland General Strike was
part of a massive wave of strikes that took place
in the US in nineteen forty five and nineteen forty six.
For context, much of the federal law around unions at

(01:51):
this point went back to the National Labor Relations Act
of nineteen thirty five, also called the Wagner Act. We
talked more about this law and the con text for
its passage in our most recent Saturday classic on the
Flint sit down strike. The Wagner Act gave employees the
right to form unions and barred employers from interfering with

(02:11):
that right. It also established the National Labor Relations Board,
which supervised union elections and investigated allegations of unfair labor practices.
Yeah Prior to the passage of this act, unionizing was
seen as basically a criminal conspiracy. The Wagner Act was
framed as diminishing the causes of labor disputes that were

(02:34):
quote burdening or obstructing interstate and foreign commerce. It had
been passed as part of the New Deal, which was
the collection of policies, programs, and laws implemented during the
Roosevelt administration to try to help the United States recover
from the Great Depression. The Wagner Act had also followed
a huge wave of strikes another labor unrest in nineteen

(02:57):
thirty three and nineteen thirty four. Overall, most business leaders
and Republican politicians were not fans of the Wagner Act,
but for more than a decade after it was passed,
Democrats held majorities in both houses of Congress, and the
President was also a Democrat, so for the most part,

(03:18):
opponents of the Wagner Act were stuck with it. In
nineteen forty one, as industries in the United States were
gearing up for World War II, there was another wave
of strikes. The US had not entered the war yet,
but a range of industries suddenly became critical to the
war effort. Workers in those industries and elsewhere saw this

(03:40):
as an opportunity to secure higher wages and better working conditions.
And took aggressive collective action to try to get that done. Then,
in December of nineteen forty one, Japan bombed the US
naval station at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the United States
entered the war. The federal government saw an obvious need

(04:02):
to put an end to the strikes and to keep
production going. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration started
negotiating with union leaders on how to do that. The
two major union organizations Roosevelt was working with were the
American Federation of Labor or AFL, and the Congress of
Industrial Organizations or CIO. There was some animosity between the

(04:26):
AFL and the CIO. The AFL worked with craft unions,
which were considered to represent skilled labor, while the CIO
was focused on industrial workers, who were seen as unskilled.
The CIO had started off as a committee of the
AFL before splitting off into its own organization. In late

(04:47):
December of nineteen forty one, AFL and CIO leadership agreed
to a voluntary no strike pledge for the duration of
the war, but striking, or at least the th the
threat of striking, was really the most powerful tool that
unions had to try to improve their pay and working conditions.

(05:07):
After union leaders agreed to this no strike pledge, union
workers started wondering how or even whether their unions would
be able to fight for them. Support for the AFL
and the CIO started to wane among union workers, and
then that led to concerns about whether the AFL and
the CIO would be able to enforce that no strike pledge,

(05:29):
like were people just going to go striking anyway without
their approval? So the government took additional steps to try
to reduce labor disputes, including establishing a National War Labor Board.
Among other things. This board established a policy for union security,
which meant that newly hired workers could automatically become union

(05:50):
members after fifteen days of work, and their dues would
automatically be deducted from their pay. Many workplaces were essentially
closed shops in which union membership was required in order
to work there, and as a result, union membership soared.
These steps did not put a complete stop to striking

(06:11):
or to labor unrest. In June of nineteen forty three,
Congress passed the Smith Connolly Act, and that act allowed
the president to take control of privately owned businesses that
were seen as critical to the war effort if there
was a strike or other labor unrest going on. This
was passed over Roosevelt's veto on June twenty fifth, nineteen

(06:33):
forty three. Meanwhile, the US was also trying to keep
inflation from spiraling out of control, as it previously had
during World War One. An Office of Price Administration was
established in nineteen forty one to control the prices on
a variety of goods. Food rationing was implemented both to

(06:54):
make sure food was available for the war effort and
to help offset the fact that food prices couldn't be
used to influence consumer demand. Then, in nineteen forty five,
the war ended the Office of Price Administration, the National
War Labor Board, and the Smith Connelly Act were all
supposed to be temporary wartime measures, and they were all

(07:17):
dismantled and dissolved. Businesses also saw an opportunity to start
rolling back wartime labor protections, including the National War Labor
Board's union security policies, and maybe even to roll back
some of those protections from the Wagner Act. At the
same time, with an end to price controls, prices searched

(07:40):
in nineteen forty six, inflation surged to eighteen percent. Prices
doubled for bread and meat, and when Roosevelt re established
price controls, increased demand for these products led to shortages.
As soldiers returned from the war and wartime industry shut down,
unemployment increased, and there was also a huge housing shortage.

(08:03):
There was also a lot of pent up demand for
goods and services. People had lived through the Great Depression
in the nineteen thirties and then they had continued to
make sacrifices during the Second World War, so people had
gone from not being able to afford things to not
being able to get them because of wartime rationing and shortages.

(08:24):
This all became part of that cycle of inflation and
scarcity as well. And in light of all of this,
people were frustrated. Everyone had lived through years of sacrifice
and this we're all in this together ideology, and people
had lost friends and their loved ones to the war.
Young people felt like they had spent years of their

(08:46):
lives serving in a war when they should have been
in school or starting a family or establishing themselves in
a trade, and now that they were home again, wages
were stagnant, prices were skyrocketing, and goods were hard to find.
Women who had been able to get good paying union
jobs in wartime industries were forced out of those jobs

(09:06):
when men returned from service, mainly into industries that were
lower paying and not unionized, like retail and domestic work.
So with all of this going on, and with those
wartime no strike pledges starting to expire, workers once again
started going on strike. President Harry S. Truman had come

(09:28):
into office when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April of
nineteen forty five, and that November he convened a labor
management conference with the hope of heading off a crisis.
This conference did not really reach any kind of resolution.
As unions started negotiating new contracts, many were focused on
better pay and working conditions, but some unions tried to

(09:52):
take things a step further and influence society as a whole.
For example, when United Auto Workers started negotiat with GM
in nineteen forty five, they didn't want the cost for
employee raises to be passed on to consumers through higher prices,
because that would just continue to fuel inflation. The union

(10:12):
wanted a thirty percent wage increase to make up for
the year's workers had gone without raises and the rapidly
rising cost of living, and thought that GM could afford
this increase without increasing the price of its vehicles. GM's
perspective was that, no, it could not afford that kind
of wage increase without also having a price increase, but

(10:33):
even if it could, the price of the product was
up to the business and not the union. These talks
broke down and a strike started on November twenty first,
nineteen forty five, which lasted for one hundred and thirteen days.
This was not at all the only strike, and this
wave of strikes continued into nineteen forty six. That year,

(10:56):
roughly a quarter of union workers in the United States
went on strike at some point. That included two hundred
thousand electrical workers, two hundred and sixty thousand meat packers,
four hundred thousand coal miners, and seven hundred and fifty
thousand steel workers. In some cases, the federal government stepped

(11:17):
in to seize control of industries that were seen as critical.
This happened in the case of striking railroad workers who
were threatened with military conscription, and with the meat packing plants.
In addition to strikes across specific industries. There were multiple
general strikes in nineteen forty five and nineteen forty six.

(11:39):
These often started with a specific union going on strike,
and then other unions and non union workers joined them
in solidarity. For example, in Stamford, Connecticut, the International Association
of Machinists was negotiating a contract with Yale and Town Company.
They could not reach an agreement and a strike was
called on November seventh, nineteen forty five. When local police

(12:03):
refused to intervene, the governor sent in the state police,
and people were outraged. Stamford had a population of sixty
five thousand people, and an estimated twenty thousand participated in
a one day general strike that shut the city down. Eventually,
federal negotiators stepped in and the Iam and Yale in

(12:25):
Town Company reached an agreement in April of nineteen forty six.
Another general strike was in Rochester, New York. In May
of nineteen forty six. City manager Lewis V. Cartwright fired
almost five hundred municipal workers who were trying to unionize,
and then fired more than sixty truck drivers who walked

(12:46):
off the job to protest those firings. There was a
mass demonstration in support of the fired workers who were rehired,
but the city manager refused to recognize the union still.
This led to a general strike on May twenty eighth
that involved all thirty five thousand members of AFL and
CIO unions in the city. There were general strikes in Hartford, Connecticut, Camden,

(13:13):
New Jersey, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania as well, and in Oakland, California,
which we will get into after a sponsor break. In
nineteen forty six, retail workers in Oakland, California, were trying

(13:34):
to unionize. Retail unions in the area included the Department
and Specialty Store Employees Union Local twelve sixty five and
the Retail Clerk's International Protective Association. The Department and Specialty
Store Employees Union had already organized the Shcress Store in Oakland,

(13:55):
as well as some of the city's shoe stores. Workers
were also trying to organized at CON's Department Store and
at Hastings Clothing Company, which were both in Laidtham Square
across the street from one another. Workers at Cons and
Hastings had learned that workers at the unionized stores were
making about ten dollars a week more than they were.

(14:16):
Retail workers also wanted to move away from a ready
room system of getting shifts. Workers who didn't have an
assigned shift for the day were expected to wait in
a room in the store's basement, arriving in the morning
and then waiting to see if they were needed. They
often waited until lunchtime or later before being either called
up to work or sent home, and they were not

(14:38):
paid for their time while they waited in the ready room.
About three quarters of the eight hundred and fifty employees
at CONS had voted to unionize. Hastings was a smaller
store than CONS, but almost all of its one hundred
employees were on board. Most of the workers who were
trying to organize were white women, and a lot of

(14:59):
them were middle ag aged or older. Many of them
had worked at the stores for years. Many had also
had high paying union jobs in Oakland's shipyards during the war,
and so they already had experience in being in a union,
and they wanted a union at their retail job, but
the stores refused to negotiate. The Retail Merchants Association, or RMA,

(15:23):
united all the big department stores in Oakland and Berkeley.
It was deeply anti union Cress and the unionized shoe
stores had both been forced to leave the RMA after
recognizing their employees' unions. Management at cons and Hastings did
not want the same thing to happen to them. Management
said they would only recognize the union if all twenty

(15:46):
eight stores they were part of the RMA agreed to unionize.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
That was just not feasible.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
Workers at Hastings went on strike on October twenty third,
nineteen forty six. About a week later, on October thirty first,
workers at CON's went on strike as well. Although the
leadership of the Teamsters union seems to have been kind
of ambivalent about the retail workers' strike, Teamsters refused to
cross the picket lines to deliver goods to the stores.

(16:17):
Other unions in Oakland also encouraged their members not to
cross the picket lines to go shopping. At this point,
Oakland City Council, the police, and the Oakland Tribune were
all tightly connected. Joseph Noland, who had previously served in
the California State Senate and in the US House of Representatives,
owned the newspaper, and a lot of other powerful people

(16:41):
in California had personal or political connections to him. Noland
had also supported Earl Warren in his bid to become
governor of California, so he had a very wide network
of very powerful political connections that stretched well beyond Oakland.
In other words, while the retail workers had a lot
of support from unionized workers in the city, the city

(17:03):
itself and its Republican political machine were both entrenched and
both very anti union. As December and the Christmas shopping
season started to approach, workers at both stores were still
on strike, even though a lot of shoppers were refusing
to cross the workers picket lines. The stores had gone

(17:24):
without deliveries for weeks, so their stock was getting low.
Teamsters were not delivering merchandise, but the striking workers knew
that it was possible that strike breakers would be brought
in to deliver things in their place, so the workers
were keeping an eye on the stores, and they were
also parking their cars in the loading areas so that

(17:46):
trucks could not get in if they did arrive. According
to the strikers, they had a verbal ok from the
police to park their cars at the loading docks and
assurances that their cars would be safe there. On December first,
the city and the RMA had police forcibly clear roughly
five hundred picketing workers from around the stores. Some of

(18:09):
the nearly two hundred and fifty police officers who were
dispatched to the downtown area were armed with tear gas
and gas masks, but they mostly did this by shoving
people out of the way with their clubs, battering and
bruising some of the strikers in the process. Some of
the striking workers and their supporters were injured during all
of this, mostly after being struck with officers clubs, but

(18:32):
one man Newton's Salvage, had to be hospitalized after being
knocked down by a police officer on a motorcycle. Police
also towed the workers' cars out of the loading areas,
and according to some reports, they left those cars in
gear while towing them to intentionally damage their transmissions. After

(18:53):
clearing people out of the downtown area, police established a
cordon and escorted six trucks through it. Each of those
trucks made two trips from a warehouse in Berkeley where
the merchandise had been staged for delivery. It was clear
to the strikers and their supporters that this had all
been planned out and coordinated and that the city government,

(19:15):
the police, and store management had all been involved. The
trucks were from Veterans Trucking Company, which employed combat veterans
and had been established by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association
to deliver merchandise during strikes. This led to some altercations
between the veterans who were breaking the strike and the

(19:35):
ones who were on the picket lines. Newton Salvage, who
we mentioned a moment ago, was a streetcar operator, and
when the street cars and buses started arriving on scene
just as part of their daily routes, a lot of
their operators refused to cross the police cordon. Operators stopped
their street cars and removed the control mechanisms which rendered

(19:59):
them inoperable and immovable, and bus drivers also left their
buses and just walked away. Al Brown, president of the
Carmens and Drivers Union, was part of this action with
the street cars and described the police cordon as a
picket line he refused to cross. F I'm understanding his
statement correctly, this sounds like the malicious compliance on his part.

(20:23):
This action by the street car drivers and the bus
drivers really snarled traffic all over Oakland for hours. Over
the course of the day, people in Oakland became really
angry about what was happening. It wasn't just that truck
drivers had been hired to break the strike. It was
at the police, which people had paid for with their taxes,

(20:43):
were protecting the strike breakers, shoving around the strikers, many
of whom were women, and keeping people out of the
downtown area. In later interviews, Joe Showday of the International
Typographical Union described this use of taxpayer funded place least
to quote, beat us off our own streets was quote
the first step toward fascism. The only workers actually on

(21:09):
strike on December first were the workers at cons and Hastings,
and then there were teamsters who were refusing to cross
their picket lines in solidarity. On December second, union officials
from the AFL and the CIO met to decide what
to do. Ultimately, the AFL told its members in Oakland
to quote take a holiday the next day to protest

(21:31):
the use of police force to try to break the strike.
A mass meeting had already been scheduled to take place
that night in support of the striking retail workers. The
general strike officially started at five am on Monday, December third,
about one hundred thousand AFL workers across the county didn't
show up for work or walked off the job. Between

(21:54):
the retail workers and their supporters from other unions, there
were more than five thousand people picketing front of the stores,
with reports of much greater numbers in the surrounding area.
Street Cars and buses didn't leave their yards after five am,
so there were massive traffic jams all around Oakland. Union
typesetters and press operators joined the strike, so this also

(22:17):
stopped the presses at the Oakland Tribune. The Sailors Union
of the Pacific walked off of three ships that were
docked at the Port of Oakland, which were all loaded
up and ready to depart. This general strike basically took
over the whole downtown area. Teamsters patrolled to make sure
things stayed peaceful, and since the city was decorated for Christmas,

(22:39):
this turned into kind of a festival atmosphere. Bars were
allowed to stay open if they only served beer but
not liquor, and if they moved their jukeboxes onto the
sidewalks and let people play them for free, especially into
the afternoon in the evening, this really felt kind of
like a party. But while there was immense support for
the general strike among union members, there wasn't a lot

(23:02):
of coordination or planning from union leaders. For example, a
well planned general strike can keep basic critical services running,
both to try to maintain goodwill with local residents who
aren't striking, and to make sure the strikers have access
to the supplies and support they need. In Oakland, virtually
all the stores were shut down except for food stores

(23:25):
and pharmacies. Unionized restaurants shut down, and picketers forced the
non union restaurants to shut down as well. The milk
wagon drivers union had objected to the general strike, and
they were allowed to continue delivering milk, but before long,
with all the restaurants closed, people were starting to get hungry.
Strikers also realized that single men living in boarding houses

(23:49):
in Oakland had no kitchens and relied on those restaurants
for all their food, so as the day wore on,
some of the restaurants were allowed to reopen. Night, about
ten thousand AFL union members gathered at Oakland Auditorium for
a mass meeting, with at least five thousand people listening
to the address over speakers outside. This was especially a lot,

(24:13):
considering that it was raining really hard that night. Speakers
included James Galliano, who was attorney for the clerks and
the Labor Council, and Harry Lindeberg, who was secretary Treasurer
of the Sailors Union of the Pacific. This meeting was
more like a rally than a planning meeting, with Lundenberg
giving the most radical speech, which described the police department's

(24:36):
actions as fascism in America. As the general strike stretched
into December fourth, concerns were growing among the leadership of
the AFL. Most of the unions that were participating were
AFL unions, but there wasn't really anyone in charge on
site at the strike or a clear set of demands.

(24:56):
Demonstrators had started calling for the mayor in the entire
city council to resign, which went well beyond the demands
of a simple labor negotiation. International Teamster president Dave Beck
also called the general strike quote a lot of foolishness
and described it as more like a revolution than an
industry dispute. There were some discussions of starting another general

(25:20):
strike across the Bay in San Francisco. The CIO also
started discussing whether its unions should join the general strike.
Since the CIO's unions included workers at pretty much all
of the city's basic utilities, this could have given the
strikers an incredible amount of bargaining power. Most of the

(25:40):
city's unionized black workers were also in CIO unions, so
CIO involvement would have brought more of these workers into
the strike as well. But on December fifth, the AFL
Central Labor Council of Oakland called for an end to
the general strike after a vote by business agents. Those
are two the people who act as liaisons between the

(26:02):
union and the management. Beck also ordered the Teamsters to
resume their deliveries to the stores. City manager JF. Hassler
had given verbal assurances that the Oakland Police would no
longer protect in non striking trucks that were trying to
deliver to the stores. The Labor council decided that the
use of police to protect the trucks was what had

(26:24):
prompted the general strike, and now that that was resolved,
there was no reason to continue. Also, at this point,
the mayor had been given emergency powers, although those had
not been put into use, and there were rumors that
federal troops were going to be deployed. Yeah, so there
were concerns that things in Oakland were going to get
a lot worse than the kind of peaceful party atmosphere

(26:46):
that they had had. The general strike ended on December fifth,
nineteen forty six, at eleven a m. Having lasted for
fifty four hours. A lot of the actual strikers were
furious at the decision to call it off, and many
of the striking retail workers felt betrayed and angry. None

(27:07):
of those workers' actual issues had been addressed, and store
management was still refusing to negotiate with them or to
recognize their union. In spite of the order for teamsters
to return to work at the stores, a lot of
them continued to refuse to cross the picket line. These
picket lines also got a lot smaller after the RMA

(27:27):
got an injunction to allow only five pickets at each
store entrance. The city managers also did not keep their
promise not to use police to protect deliveries to the store.
After the general strike, the AFL, CIO and NAACP united
to form the Oakland Voters League. The league tried to

(27:49):
build connections between organized labor and the city, which was
predominantly white, and the city's black voters and civil rights activists.
The league also backed candidate for the five city council
seats that were up for election in nineteen forty seven.
Four of those candidates won. The fifth, Glenn Goldfarb, lost

(28:09):
very narrowly. There is some speculation that this may have
been due to the design of the ballot which made
his opponent look like part of the labor ticket, or
it could have been because of anti semitism. This council
had nine members, so the ticket didn't have a majority,
so this wound up being more of a symbolic win
than an ushering in of change in the city. The

(28:32):
Oakland Voters League was also short lived. It dissolved after
not seeing similar successes. In nineteen forty nine, the retail
workers strike ended the day before the city election, and
a week later the Retail Merchants Association recognized Local twelve
sixty five as the union for all of its stores.

(28:52):
It took years for the workers at cons and Hastings
to actually get a collective bargaining agreement in place, though
this general strike, along with the other strikes in nineteen
forty five and nineteen forty six led to changes in
federal law, and we'll get into all of that after
a sponsor break. The nineteen forty six Oakland General Strike

(29:21):
took place after that year's general election, in the face
of rampant inflation and massive labor unrest. Republicans had taken
the majority in both houses of Congress. Although Democrat Harry
Truman had been re elected as president, this was the
first time since nineteen thirty three that Democrats had not

(29:42):
controlled both houses of Congress, and for almost all of
that time, the president had also been Franklin D.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
Roosevelt.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
When the new Congress was sworn in in nineteen forty seven,
legislators immediately got to work introducing bills related to labor,
specifically bills that would put in new limits on the
Wagner Act. It wasn't just about the immense wave of
strikes that had happened in nineteen forty five and nineteen
forty six. This was at the start of the Cold

(30:10):
War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and
legislators had deep concerns about communism within the nation's organized labor,
and communism had been a big part of the labor
movement starting in the early twentieth century, with many union's
most effective organizers also being Communist Party members. This wasn't

(30:31):
the first time there had been heightened concerns about communism
in the US. We've done several previous episodes related to
the first Red Scare of the nineteen teens, including our
two parter on the Palmer Raids. The nineteen teens, like
the mid nineteen forties, had also been a time of
widespread labor activism and strikes. As we said, a lot

(30:52):
of the bills that were introduced were related to all
of this in some way, but two really came to
the forefront. One introduced in the Senate by Robert A.
Taft of Ohio, chair of the Senate Labor Committee, and
the other in the House by Representative fred A. Hartley
Junior of New Jersey, the Republican chair of the House

(31:13):
Education and Labor Committee. Broadly speaking, Hartley's bill was more
restrictive than Tafts was, and the version that ultimately passed
both houses of Congress included elements of both of their bills.
The resulting law is the Labor Management Relations Act, but
it's more commonly known as Taft Hartley, the AFL Central

(31:36):
Labor Council had teamed up with the CIO to create
a joint committee to combat anti labor legislation, and unions
demonstrated against this bill. This included a Detroit rally planned
by United Auto Workers, which had about two hundred thousand
people in attendance. Workers, union organizers and their supporters called

(31:58):
on Truman to veto this bill. Truman did, calling it
quote completely contrary to that national policy of economic freedom.
He said that it would encourage quote distrust suspicion, and
arbitrary attitudes, and he also used words like drastic and
unworkable in reference to it. Overriding the president's veto requires

(32:21):
a two thirds majority of Congress, and the Republican Party
had only a narrow majority in both houses, but the
Taft Hartley Bill had bipartisan support, and Truman was not
able to rally enough Democrats to stop Congress from overriding
his veto. One thing working against him here was racism.

(32:42):
Shortly after the end of World War Two, the CIO
had launched Operation Dixie to try to unionize industries in
the South, including black and white workers, and Southern Democrats
were deeply opposed to this effort. The Taft Hartley Act
became law on June twenty third, nineteen forty seven, amending

(33:03):
the Wagner Act of nineteen thirty five. Legislators framed it
as restoring the balance between labor and management, or unions
and employers, while unions described it as a slave labor law.
The Wagner Act had outlined a series of unfair labor
practices that were outlawed for employers. Taft Hartly outlined unfair

(33:26):
labor practices for unions as well. It outlawed secondary boycotts,
meaning that unions cannot take action against neutral third parties
in disputes with an employer. So, as an example, a
retail workers union could not plan a boycott of a
clothing manufacturer whose goods are being sold at their store.

(33:48):
Sympathy strikes were outlawed as well, like the Teamsters striking
in support of Oakland's retail workers, This essentially outlawed the
type of general strike that had been carried out out
in Oakland and several other cities in the United States
in nineteen forty five and nineteen forty six, and it
also outlawed wildcat strikes, or strikes undertaken by union members

(34:11):
without the union leadership's authorization. Some of the other Taft
Hartley provisions included a ban on feather bedding, that's forcing
an employer to pay for work that wasn't actually done so.
An example of that would be if a factory moved
from a manually operated machine to an automatic one, the
union could not force the employer to keep that person's

(34:34):
job even though there was no longer work to do.
It also outlawed closed shops that required workers to already
be a member of a union before being hired, although
it allowed union contracts that required workers to join the
union after being hired. It also allowed states to pass
open shop legislation, or what is known as right to

(34:55):
work laws, which allow people to work at unionized workplaces
with out being compelled to become a member of the union.
These kinds of laws are currently on the books in
twenty six US states, as well as Guam. The law
also gave the US Attorney General the authority to use
injunctions to prevent a strike if it would quote imperil

(35:16):
the national health or safety and required unions to give
employees and managers advanced notice of strikes. There were a
lot of other Taft Hearty provisions as well, and we're
not going to try to talk about every single one
of them, but a major one that we have not
talked about is that Section nine H required union officers

(35:37):
to sign non communist affidavits. If union leaders did not,
their union would not be allowed to have an election
overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, and the NLRB
also would not investigate any claims that the union filed
about alleged unfair labor practices. This meant that unions had

(35:59):
to per communists from their leadership if they wanted the
protections and recognitions that exist under federal law. This caused
a lot of unions, especially industrial unions, to lose some
of their most dedicated and experienced leaders, who either refused
to sign these affidavits or were ousted because of their
ties to communism. The Taft Hartley Act had an obvious

(36:23):
effect on things like sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts. The
Oakland General Strike was the last major general strike in
the United States for decades. There have been some more
recent general strikes in the US, including the twenty eleven
Oakland General Strike, the Essential Workers General Strike in the
early months of the COVID nineteen pandemic, and the Strike

(36:46):
for Black Lives on July twentieth, twenty twenty in some
of these labor unions have expressed support for the strike,
but without explicitly instructing their members to participate, which would
be illegal under the Taft Hartley Act. Several unions were
involved with the Strike for Black Lives, but this was
framed as a one day walkout rather than an ongoing

(37:07):
general strike. Beyond that, it's impossible to hit every detail
of the Taft Hearty Act and its impact and legacy,
and like the wrap up of a single podcast episode,
there is an argument that a lot of its provisions
legally codified decisions that the NLRB was already making, rather
than trying to set a whole new precedent. Its weakening

(37:30):
of union rights and protections was a factor in the
AFL and CIO ultimately merging into one organization in nineteen
fifty five. This made the AFL CIO one enormous umbrella
with sixteen million members, which could at least theoretically have
a lot of power, But at the same time, Taft

(37:51):
Hearty provisions meant that smaller unions had a lot less
bargaining power, especially with the end of closed shops and
the rise of right Now to work states. Taft Hartley
also definitely had a chilling effect on the CIO's efforts
to unionize the South. Those efforts were already being hampered
by racism and discriminatory laws. There have also been other

(38:14):
federal laws that have been passed since nineteen forty seven
that have modified Taft Hartley in one way or another.
To return to the Oakland Strike, Latham Square went through
a three year renovation that was finished in twenty sixteen.
The central Plaza area has six placards about the area's history,

(38:34):
and one of them is dedicated to the general strike.
Do you also have listener mail? I do have listener mail. First,
very quickly we heard from Colin who had requested the
episode on the Great Epizootic of eighteen seventy two, and
Colin said, no, it was not because of the current
Avian flu situation that we are all living through. Colin

(38:59):
had just encountered the word epizootic somewhere and looked it
up and stumbled across this eighteen seventy two epizootic. I
thought that would be a great show topic. I agree
that is a perfectly acceptable reason to come up with
a show suggestion just randomly stumbling across a word one day.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
That's how shows get selected half the time.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
Yeah, I also have an email that I am going
to read from Patty. Patty's email is titled Hominy Love.
Patty wrote, Tracy and Holly, thank you for this week's
episodes on pelagra. I had heard parts of the story before,
but y'all talked about so much more that I did
not know. With last month's epizootic episode, I am loving

(39:42):
all the medical history info. I grew up eating hominy
and thought everyone ate it too. My mom would also
make a dish with spinach and scrambled eggs that was
so good, just canned spinach, drained and cooked into scrambled eggs.
She said she grew up eating it with poke greens
instead of spinach, what she called poke salad. Now I

(40:03):
just need a pork chop to go on the side
with my hominie and spinach ultimate comfort food. I've been
listening to your podcast since the beginning. I love the
Halloween and holiday episodes, the unearthed and eponymous foods. Please
see the pet tags of my two cats, Rocco and Penny.
Rocco half main coon, half grumpy old man, and Penny

(40:23):
a classic orange. I have seen her lick soap and
eat plants that should be toxic to her.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
She is fine.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
Wishing you both the best. You're both so amazing, Patty.
Thank you so much, Patty. Let's look at these kitty cats.
Penny Penny, Hello, Penny Penny is a very very uh,
loungey looking orange cat with a face that's just sort
of like, yes, hello, I'm hanging out here in my

(40:52):
lounging space.

Speaker 2 (40:53):
I'm looking for some soap to eat.

Speaker 1 (40:56):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (40:57):
Rocco is so fluffy and is stretched out on a
hardwood floor. Just I cannot, I cannot adequately describe how
fluffy this cat is. I used to have a cat
named Sestina, who I thought was very fluffy. This cat
is fluffier than Sestina. I can see where the half

(41:18):
main coon is coming in with the size of this
kitty cat.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
And the fluff and the fluff. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
So thank you so much, Patty. I am glad to
hear about this. The hominie and just this recipe of
spinach and scrambled eggs. I think that sounds really good.
Poke salad its own cultural food. Also, I'm gonna need

(41:45):
you to explain that one to me, which part I
don't know what poke salad is. So pokeweed is a plant.
It is a plant that people can forage. There is
a specific way that it needs to be prepared in
order to be eaten safely. So don't just go to
Google a picture of pokeweed and go chomp on some.

(42:06):
But it is a staple food and a lot of
the places that it grows I've always associated it with,
like life in the South. I would there would be
poke weed growing all over the area around where my
parents lived when I grew up. The berries that it
grows very very recognizably distinctive to me. And there's a

(42:31):
whole process of like preparing it and washing it that
has to be done to make it safe to eat
because of the toxic compounds that it just contains as
it grows. So yeah, I like the idea of someone
in place of that just using canned spinach. Frozen spinach

(42:55):
can also be a great addition to stuff. I have
some bagged spinach in my fridge right now that's gonna
be cooked down tonight because it is no longer crisp
and green. We've reached We've reached the time that the
spinach must be eaten, and so it is going to
go into something I'm making for dinner tonight. So thank

(43:18):
you again, Patty for these pictures and an email about
hominie and poke salad and all of that. If you'd
like to send us a note about this or any
other podcast or at history Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to our show on iHeartRadio app
or wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff

(43:44):
you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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