The 1946 Oakland General Strike
The Labor History Corner--an excerpt from "From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement" By Fred Glass
A version of this article appeared on the California Labor Federation California Labor History website. You can buy From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement from the University of California Press.
Seventy eight years ago Oakland experienced a dramatic, albeit little-remembered display of union power. More than one hundred thousand workers joined in the 1946 Oakland General Strike, shaking the East Bay business establishment anchored by Joseph Knowland’s anti-labor Oakland Tribune. As with most city-wide general strikes, the immediate results of this one was mixed. But its ultimate impact was considerable, leading to a political climate more favorable to working people’s interests.
The confrontation began as a routine organizing drive, at a time when workers regularly voted for union recognition, and the National Labor Relations Act had not yet been undermined by the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) and decades of anti-union legal decisions. Many elections featured the internecine question of whether to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) or the more militant Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The clerks didn’t face this choice on their election ballot, but it hovered in the background and played a significant role in the later general strike drama.
Several hundred workers at two downtown Oakland stores, Kahn’s and Hastings, sought union recognition in mid-1946, through the AFL Retail Clerks Local 1265 (now part of a UFCW local). When management fired union activists and refused to negotiate with the union, Local 1265 struck both stores. The Alameda County Central Labor Council called on AFL unionists to honor the picket lines. The Retail Merchants Association, along with the Tribune, sided with their fellow employer.
Bare shelves
By a month into the strike, the stores’ shelves were bare, largely a result of the refusal of Teamster truck drivers to deliver goods. This show of class solidarity deeply affected management’s ability to operate. Frustrated, management turned to allies within city government.
Word soon reached the strikers that the police were going to assist the stores in moving merchandise through the picket line. The Clerks reacted to the escalation of management tactics by calling upon fellow unionists to reinforce the line. On the evening of November 30, fearing an after-hours assault, seventy union officers and staffers from a variety of Alameda County unions augmented the clerks’ ranks.
Their fears were realized before daybreak on Sunday, December 1. Three hundred Oakland police swept the unionists off the street, injuring some of the peaceful picketers. Striker’s cars, legally parked on the streets, were towed away by police. The police then cordoned off six square blocks surrounding the stores and moved scab trucks—operated by non-union drivers from Los Angeles—through the line.
A streetcar named “Abandoned”
When the first streetcar of the morning rolled up, police tried to wave it through the crowd. But the driver, Al Brown, an officer in the Carmen’s and Drivers’ Union, instead removed the controls from the streetcar and left it standing in the middle of the street. Brown then convinced other streetcar and bus drivers to join a growing group of protesters.
Many unions met Monday afternoon and evening. Due to the structural frustrations of the post-war period (lack of jobs, inadequate housing for the workforce, and a renewed anti-union resolve on the part of employers) sentiment clearly moved in favor of a general strike. At an emergency meeting of five hundred union leaders, the Labor Council called for a county-wide “work holiday” to protest the police violence, support the Kahn and Hastings strikers, and demand that police never again escort strike-breakers. Members in 142 AFL unions were notified by telephone and radio reports of the Council’s decision.
As Joe Chaudet, an officer in the Typographical Union put it, “It wasn’t bringing in strikebreakers that started the General Strike. We’d seen strikebreakers before. But the thing was using the police force we were paying taxes to, to beat us off our own streets.”
Also significant in the background: 1946 had already seen five city-wide general strikes around the country, and the idea of the tactic was in the air.
Tuesday, December 3 found 130,000 workers engaged in a huge work stoppage. Hundreds of buses sat empty in the Key System yard, resulting in massive traffic jams on the Bay Bridge. Recalling one lesson from the San Francisco General Strike twelve years earlier, strike leaders made sure the printing presses at Oakland’s daily newspapers came to a halt, in order to prevent a flow of nasty anti-union propaganda. Most places of business closed or were staffed by skeleton management crews. Only vital services remained operational. Strikers directed traffic. And the people of Oakland joined the Kahn’s and Hastings picket lines, filling the street between the stores.
Remarkably peaceful
There were tense moments when the police attempted to escort strikebreakers into struck businesses, but strikers remained remarkably peaceful. Union picket captains kept the more boisterous in line and members of the Sailors Union of the Pacific (SUP) and Teamsters patrolled the streets to maintain order. Participants later recalled a carnival atmosphere, with jukeboxes on the sidewalks and impromptu dancing alongside the picket lines.
That night, at a mass meeting attended by 10,000 in the Oakland Auditorium and with 5,000 more listening to loudspeakers in the rain outside, SUP President Harry Lundeberg’s fiery speech against police escorting scabs met with a wildly enthusiastic reception. Workers were also encouraged by the Alameda County CIO Council’s announcement that if the general strike continued until Friday, their 30,000 union members in the area would walk off the job.
But on Thursday at 11 a.m., strike leaders, under pressure from the employers’ organizations, city government, and their own international unions, called an end to the “work holiday.” Many rank and file union members were upset, figuring they could have won all their demands with the CIO’s planned entry. But AFL leaders feared association with Communists in the CIO leadership, and also feared loss of direction of the strike.
The only gain was a verbal agreement by the city manager with the union leaders that henceforth police wouldn’t be used to “take sides” in a labor-management dispute. The unions extracted no agreement for the RMA to negotiate with Local 1265. Soon police began to escort scabs and merchandise across the picket line once more.
Try unity, not fratricide
At this point, the AFL and CIO recognized that unity works better than fratricide to achieve workers’ goals, and turned together to the ballot box in a coalition with the NAACP. The Oakland Voters League mobilized community support for a labor slate in the spring 1947 city council elections. Four out of five labor candidates won. This fell short of a majority on the nine-member council, but served notice to the Knowland-dominated city government that times were changing.
Within days of the election, the RMA signed an agreement recognizing Local 1265 as bargaining agent for their 28 stores, including Kahn’s. (Hastings had broken ranks and signed a closed shop union contract earlier in the year.) Local 1265 accepted an open shop, alongside a promise by the RMA not to interfere with union recruitment in the stores.
The General Strike and subsequent political action did not achieve all the workers’ goals. In fact, it took several years before the Retail Clerks gained a master contract with the RMA, and the Oakland Voters League fell apart after one more election cycle, prey to continuing tensions between the rival union federations.
Perhaps the most important effect over time of the Oakland General Strike was the participants’ sense of their own power in collective action. As Ev Schaaf, who had walked the Kahn’s picket lines put it, “It was a unique experience in my life to be involved in anything with such masses of people. I was really proud of the union members who came out. It convinced me more than ever that union was the way to go for working people”.
Fred Glass is the author of From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement (UC Press, 2016) and a former member of the State Committee of California DSA
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