May is Labor History Month in California and not many people know about it. Labor History Month was made official in California when Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 2269 which encouraged schools to commemorate May with lessons that make students aware of the role labor has played in California and the United States. This development in our recent history is what California Labor historian Fred Glass has called “one of California’s best kept secrets.”
But with labor gaining new attention through last 2021’s strike wave and ongoing high-profile organizing drives at Amazon warehouses, Starbucks, and elsewhere, perhaps it’s time people took the history of labor more seriously. When I spoke with Glass, the retired Communications Director of the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) and author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of California Labor, the first serious study of California Labor history in decades, he, not surprisingly, agreed.
On the significance of California officially promoting labor history, Glass observed that it was important because,
Most people are vaguely aware that unions were behind such advances for the working class as the eight-hour day and forty-hour work week, minimum wage and child labor laws, and workplace safety and health regulations. However, most people also don't know these actual historical events, or what it took in the way of collective effort and sacrifice to achieve them. Labor History Month, signed into law by Jerry Brown a decade ago, provides us an opportunity to explore and remember that history, and honor those who came before us and put their bodies on the line.
When I asked, Fred, who I have known and worked with for years on CFT’s labor education projects, what events stood out to him as particularly relevant for the average Californian to know, he picked three. The first, Glass explained, was one of the few General Strikes in American history,
The 1934 San Francisco General Strike—one of just fifteen or so citywide general strikes in US history—was a desperate effort during the Great Depression to support west coast maritime workers attempting to reorganize unions busted over the previous fifteen years. Conditions on ships and docks were dire, with starvation wages and daily injuries.
As with most strikes in our history, Glass notes, this one was met with fierce resistance from the bosses,
When the employers refused to recognize their unions, dockworkers, sailors and other seagoing workers went on strike. A murderous police attack led to hundreds of injuries and the deaths of two strikers. In response, the maritime strike escalated into an enormous city-wide sympathy strike, shutting down San Francisco for several days.
In the end, however, the workers collective effort was rewarded and as Glass elaborated,
The result: union recognition, higher wages, union-run hiring halls, and new dignity and respect for workers formerly treated with contempt. The General Strike also provided a push behind the 1935 Congressional vote creating the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), establishing the right to collective bargaining for most private sector workers.
Even those with a passing knowledge of American labor history frequently assume that it was a big deal in the Thirties, but after the gains of the New Deal era, labor struggles became less significant. Not so, Glass reminds us,
Thirty years later, the United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Larry Itliong brought a campaign for justice in California's fields to the attention of the public through well-organized boycotts of grapes and lettuce. With a workforce mostly comprising undocumented immigrants, and with no federal labor law protecting farmworkers (they were excluded from the NLRA) corporate farmers had kept wages below the federal minimum and saturated the fields with toxic pesticides, disregarding worker safety and health, due to their belief that fear of deportation would prevent any collective worker action.
This campaign is a seminal moment in labor history that shows the intersection of the struggles for economic and racial justice. Glass again explained,
But at this moment—the peak of the Civil Rights movement—and thanks to the boycotts, public recognition of racial discrimination extended to the fields. Strong support from other unions gave a boost to organizing efforts, and the UFW, a civil rights movement as well as a union, helped lift a generation of farmworkers from poverty and exploitation.
In terms of contemporary labor history, Glass pointed to one of labor’s largest electoral victories in recent years:
In 2012, with the state still mired in the aftereffects of the 2008 crash and Great Recession, California unions built a labor-community partnership to pass one statewide ballot measure and stop another. Prop 30 proposed to slightly raise income taxes on the richest Californians to restore state funding to schools and public services ravaged by budget cuts. Prop 32 said neither unions nor corporations could collect money directly from workers' paychecks for political contributions. Sounds fair. But while this is how unions collect political money, it's not how corporations do it. Prop 32 would have handcuffed unions while leaving big business and billionaires free to continue dominating political expenditures. On election day, Prop 30 passed and Prop 32 lost. California's recovery from the recession was greatly aided by billions of dollars in new revenues from the richest one percent of the population, and unions lived to fight another day at the ballot box on behalf of their members.
Thus, through direct action, social movement campaigns, and political action, California labor got the goods for ordinary people throughout our history. What can students and/or ordinary Californians learn from this?
Glass concludes,
The takeaway should be twofold. Labor history didn't end with the bad old days; we live in the stream of history, and we need to live our lives with the same sense of solidarity and responsibility shouldered by those who came before us. That's because no advances in worker rights and economic security have ever been permanent—precisely the reverse is true. Each generation must defend what we inherit from the previous one, because greed and unconcern for workers doesn't sleep. The only remedy for the growing inequality of our new Gilded Age will be our widespread determination to roll it back.
A version of this article appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune “Community Voices Project.”