Primary Sources: The Great Depression and the 1930s: Labor & Employment

"The Western Electric Hawthorne papers are a series of original documents dating from 1921 to 1949 concerning studies conducted at the General Electric Company. The initial study involved changing factory lighting to improve productivity. Later studies analyzed a variety of worker behaviors including diet, sleep patterns, and other variables in working conditions."

"On May 9, 1934, International Labor Association (ILA) leaders called a strike of all dockworkers on the West Coast who were joined a few days later by seamen and teamsters, effectively stopping all shipping from San Diego to Seattle. San Francisco would become the scene of the strike’s most dramatic and widely known incidents, aptly described in one headline as “War in San Francisco!” On Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, two strikers were killed by the San Francisco police. A mass funeral march of tens of thousands of strikers and sympathizers four days later and the general strike that followed effectively shut down both San Francisco and Oakland (across the bay). Mike Quin, a self-described “rank-and-file journalist,” offered a sympathetic picture of the striking workers actions in The Big Strike, a collection of his published articles. Here, Quin described the events leading up to Bloody Thursday, and what happened in its aftermath." GMU History Matters

"On May 9, 1934, International Labor Association (ILA) leaders called a strike of all dockworkers on the West Coast who were joined a few days later by seamen and teamsters, effectively stopping all shipping from San Diego to Seattle. San Francisco would become the scene of the strike’s most dramatic and widely known incidents, aptly described in one headline as “War in San Francisco!” On Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, two strikers were killed by the San Francisco police. A mass funeral march of tens of thousands of strikers and sympathizers four days later and the general strike that followed effectively shut down both San Francisco and Oakland (across the bay). Mike Quin, a self-described “rank-and-file journalist,” offered a sympathetic picture of the striking workers actions in The Big Strike, a collection of his published articles. Here, Quin described the events leading up to Bloody Thursday, and what happened in its aftermath. " History Matters - GMU

Images from the San Francisco General Strike.

"One odd place in which a union drive emerged was among newspaper reporters, a group that had long resisted unionization efforts, in part because of their status as “professional” and “white-collar” workers. Newspaper columnist Heywood Broun was a sportswriter who gradually turned to writing book reviews and personal essays; in the 1930s Broun became a member of the Socialist Party and ran unsuccessfully for Congress. On August 7, 1933, Broun published this famous column calling—with some ambivalence—for a journalists’ union. The combination of Broun’s column, the intransigence of publishers, and the general labor unrest sweeping the nation led to a nationwide flurry of activity among newspaper people, culminating in the December 1933 formation of the American Newspaper Guild (ANG)."

"The nationwide labor upsurge of 1934 reached its peak in San Francisco. On May 9, 1934, leaders of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) called a strike of all West Coast dockworkers, demanding a wage scale, a “closed shop” (union membership as a requirement of employment), and union-administered hiring halls. A few days later seamen and teamsters joined the strike, effectively stopping all shipping from San Diego to Seattle. Enraged employers, backed by a sympathetic mayor and police chief, used every means available to open the waterfront and protect strikebreakers, whom they imported in large numbers. Working closely with local politicians and the press, the employers set out to convince the public that the strike was controlled by “Reds” intent on overthrowing the government. These scare tactics led to an investigation of employer actions by a Senate subcommittee. Violations of Free Speech and Rights of Labor, the subcommittee’s 1942 report, described the concerted efforts of the Industrial Association, the newspapers, and the San Francisco police to discredit the strike."

"The New Deal launched a series of federal employment programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which not only provided jobs but also initiated many important studies of the depressionÌs human toll. One such study, published by the WPA Division of Research in 1939, included transcripts of interviews by WPA workers with Dubuque, Iowa, families. The DiMarcos interview revealed that the disabled faced a double challenge during the depression: finding employment while competing for scarce jobs with the able-bodied. The DiMarcos, a deaf couple with a small child, recall in their own words (because they were deaf they had to write responses to the WPA interviewer’s questions), the struggles they endured during six years of unemployment."

"The Debs Collection, which is housed in the Special Collections Department, contains a collection of over 2,300 pamphlets, the majority of which were donated along with scattered periodical issues by the late Oscar Edelman. Additional materials have been received in smaller gifts or through purchases from booksellers such as Bibliomania and Southpaw. Funds for purchases were provided by state appropriations and annual donations from the Eugene V. Debs Foundation, located in Terre Haute, Indiana. " Some pamphlets have been digitized.

"The FLSA establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and youth employment standards affecting employees in the private sector and in Federal, State, and local governments. "

"The Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line wishes to thank Susan Rosenthal for granting us permission to place on the WWW this important interview with one of the working class’ great heroes. This article was not part of the collection of American Socialist magazine articles collected here having been conducted almost 35 years after the folding of American Socicalist.

*The author claims exclusive copyright for this interview. The author's permission is required for any duplication of the interview in any form, in part or in total. (susan@susanrosenthal.com) Printed copies and a digital edition for e-readers can be obtained through ReMarx Publishing: http://remarxpub.com/striking-flint/ "

Includes:
The Dispatcher newspaper, Voice of the Federation, and the Waterfont Worker

"A news sheet for Indians and the Indian service"
Issued by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs

A News Sheet for Indians and the Indian Service

"While the Industrial Workers of the World still is a going enterprise, the Marxists Internet Archive wanted to celebrate this organizations coming 100th Aniversary with a History Archive of documents related to it. We do not want to subsititute for the IWW’s own web site at iww.org. We want to compliment it with a mirror of it’s historical documents contained on it and our own additions from the current contents of the Marxists Internet Archive writers archive."

Archives at the Industrial Workers of the World website, includes things such as a documents library, IWW Resolutions,Chronology of the IWW's History, etc.

"Founded in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World captured the attention of a generation with its fiery rhetoric, daring tactics, and program of revolutionary industrial unionism."

"The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives is the unit of Catherwood Library that collects, preserves, and makes accessible special collections pertaining to the history of the workplace and labor relations." Some items are available online.

"... strives to “map” the historical terrain of the labor movement in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania for the use of both the academic and general public."

"In the letter Mrs. Smoot explains that her fourteen-year-old daughter will soon lose her job because of recent legislation addressing child labor..."

"In October 1933 Chicana dressmakers in Los Angeles launched a citywide strike against the sweatshop conditions under which they toiled. An interview with Anita Andrade Castro, a young dressmaker who went on to become a longtime union activist, provided glimpses of the experience of the rank-and-file strikers. In two excerpts from a long interview done in 1972 by historian Sherna Gluck for the Feminist History Research Project, Castro described, first, her initiation into the union and, second, her arrest as a striker, her anxieties about the impact on her desire to become a citizen, and her encounter with a prostitute."

"Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act ("NLRA") in 1935 to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy."

Includes articles related to labor in San Francisco including the 1934 General Strike.

"This multi-media web site brings the vital history of Seattle's civil rights movements to life with scores of video oral histories, hundreds of rare photographs, documents, movement histories, and personal biographies, more than 300 pages in all. Based at the University of Washington, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project is a collaboration between community groups and UW faculty and students."

"Georgia State University's Southern Labor Archives, established in 1971, is dedicated to collecting, preserving and making available the documentary heritage of Southern workers and their unions, as well as that of workers and unions having a historic relationship to the region. The largest accumulation of labor records in the Southeast, the Archives holdings include organizational records, pamphlets, periodicals, photographs, personal papers of labor leaders, oral histories, collective bargaining agreements, constitutions and bylaws, and convention proceedings from 1888 to the present."

"In 1938, the US Department of Labor released this film aimed at preventing the occupational disease of silicosis. It was produced in response to the national outcry over the death of more than 500 workers at Union Carbide's Hawks Nest Tunnel project near Gauley Bridge West Virginia in the early 1930s."

"Throughout the tobacco-growing regions of the American South during the Great Depression, individuals and families earned much-needed income by sewing drawstrings into small cotton tobacco bags. This website presents images and text from a report in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documenting tobacco bag stringing work in North Carolina and Virginia in 1939."

Images from the strike provided by Wayne State University Reuther Library.

Includes interviews with "labor organizers and strike leaders, rank-and-file workers with varying degrees of support for unionization, radicals, community members, policemen, National Guardsmen, and others. Although the subjects of the interviews vary, they generally cover the interviewee's personal and work histories, exposure to labor unions, working conditions before and after the Strike, the Strike itself, and UAW politics after the Strike. Other interviews may include such topics as migration to Flint, W.P.A., C.C.C., and other Depression-era work programs, Masonic/Catholic favoritism, preference of hiring outsiders to local people. In total, they cover the history of Flint's working class during the first half of the 20th century. Most of the interviews have been transcribed, and the transcriptions are searchable by keyword."

"The Uprising of '34 is a documentary film, released in 1995, that tells the story of the General Textile Strike from the perspective of those who experienced it firsthand. During the film's production, over 300 hours of interviews were conducted with former mill workers, their children and grandchildren, labor organizers, mill owners, and others who experienced or were affected by the strikes. The recorded interviews are held in Georgia State University Library's Special Collections and Archives."

"VOAHA enables you to access the full audio recordings of oral histories that have been deposited in Special Collections of the University Library. You can hear the voice, pitch, and rhythm of the narrations as well as the emotions these convey. You will hear the actual spoken words of oral history narrators, rather than seeing a written version of them in the form of a transcript. The CSULB oral history collections have been assembled from a number of sources and cover topics ranging from women's social history, labor and ethnic studies to Long Beach Area history and the musical developments in Southern California. Some of the interviews in the Asian American, Mexican American and women's history collections were recorded as early as 1972 and include interviews with narrators who were born in the mid to late 19th century. Presently, more than 1000 hours with 350 very diverse narrators are available online."

"... an online presentation of selections from a multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration (FSA) migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941."

"...explores this vital history, focusing on the men and women who have worked in the ports, the inland waterways, the fisheries, canneries, and other waterfront industries of California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Strikes and struggles for workplace rights have been part of that history and waterfront workers have created some of the most influential labor unions anywhere, including the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)."

"Women Working, 1800–1930 is a digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, workplace regulations, home life, costs of living, commerce, recreation, health and hygiene, and social issues are among the issues documented in this online research collection from Harvard University."

"The Women’s Emergency Brigade, which Genora Johnson Dollinger helped organize, saved the 1936 sit down strike at Flint, Michigan more than once. In this 1976 interview with Sherna Gluck, Dollinger recalls the famous “Battle of the Running Bulls” when police—bulls—tried to regain control of the GM plant by force. Dollinger and the other organizers of the Women’s Emergency Brigade faced constant sexist attitudes in their efforts to win the strike, even as they demonstrated their determination to put their bodies and their families’ well-being on the line. Sometimes this sexism took the form of an unwillingness to allow women to speak, sometimes it took gentler forms: Dollinger recalls how, in the heat of battle, a passing striker tipped his hat to her. In a key moment, Dollinger took a loudspeaker and persuaded women in the crowd to join the group in front of the plant. Overwhelmed, and afraid to shoot at women, the police abandoned their assault."

"The Communist-led Unemployed Councils mobilized jobless men and women in hundreds of local communities to demand jobs and better treatment from relief authorities. In these excerpts from a recorded interview, Anna Taffler, a Communist activist and a Russian Jewish immigrant, described how her own experience of facing eviction pushed her into organizing the unemployed. She also talked about the focus of local councils on issues like fighting for more relief and stopping evictions."

"Silicosis, a deadly lung disease caused when workers inhale fine particles of silica dust—a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite—became a national cause célèbre during the Great Depression when it was recognized as a significant disease among lead, zinc, and silver miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers. In 1938 the federal government declared silicosis AmericaÌs number one industrial health problem and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins convened a National Silicosis Conference in Washington, D.C. Despite such attempts to deal with the silicosis crisis, workers continued to complain of their plight. Hundreds of letters were sent to federal officials from across the country. The three letters included here (sent to Secretary Perkins) attested to workers’ desperation and to their confidence that the government would agree to investigate. "

"The Communist-led Unemployed Councils were the first and the most active of the radical movements that sought to mobilize the jobless during the Great Depression. In this interview, which is taken from the radio series “Grandma Was an Activist,” relief worker Mary Gale, who was sympathetic to radicals and the jobless, described how she worked behind the scenes to encourage her clients to organize and demand better treatment. The jobless and the poor had few advocates for them, and radicals like Gale not only became their champions but also pushed them to organize themselves. "

"John L. Lewis’ dramatic walkout from the October 1935 American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention and the creation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations) that soon followed marked a new stage in labor’s drive to organize industrial unions in depression-era America. Here Alice Dodge Wolfson, who was working as a stenographer in 1935, recalled her own contribution to the Lewis walkout and the creation of the CIO. Attending the October 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City as a delegate from her stenographers local of the United Office and Professional Workers Union (a left-wing New York union aligned with the supporters of industrial unionism around Lewis), Wolfson played a small but decisive role in helping launch the CIO when she rose to challenge an AFL official from the convention floor."

"In 1939, a federal Women’s Bureau survey revealed that only one in fifteen union members was female. But the same observers also noted the truism that women workers, once organized, often became tenacious and militant unionists. Unionists saw women as temporary members of the work force (as indeed most were before 1940, when the average worker was a young single woman). They mistakenly assumed that such workers would not be dedicated union members. Some saw women as unwelcome competitors for “men’s jobs” and worked to keep women out of better paid union jobs rather than recruiting them to join the union. Even the United Office and Professional Workers Association (UOPWA), a progressive union that focused its efforts on clerical workers, shared some of these demeaning views of women. A regular column in the UOPWA’s publication, the Ledger, featured “Susie Steno,” a condescending caricature of a clerical worker as a frivolous and naive young woman, albeit one who becomes a good unionist."

"The sudden revival of the United Mine Workers of America in 1933 was a remarkable story. In late 1932 the UMWA was a shambles, yet by the fall of 1933 the miners’ union had won a contract that guaranteed it recognition and stability in the hitherto nonunion southern Appalachian coal fields and was perhaps in the strongest position of its history. There was much debate over who had been the architect of this revival: some miners credited Franklin D. Roosevelt while others felt that the President of the UMWA, John L. Lewis, was the truly instrumental leader. For Buster Ratliff, interviewed by Nyoka Hawkins in 1987, the coming of unionization was the end of “slavery”and the emancipators were both John L. Lewis and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as another UMWA leader, Tom Raney."

"When members of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) decided to strike the “Little Steel”companies in May 1937, they could hardly have expected it to result in a massacre. On the afternoon of Memorial Day, a flag-waving, ethnically diverse group set out for the companyÌs Republic Steel’s main gate but were stopped by a large contingent of policemen. When one of the policemen suddenly and inexplicably fired his revolver into the front of the crowd the march turned into a massacre. In the end, ChicagoÌs police killed ten fleeing workers, wounded thirty more and beat fifty-five so badly they required hospitalization. Lupe Marshall, a housewife and volunteer social worker in South Chicago was among those beaten. She gave this testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, known informally as the La Follette Committee for its chair, Senator Robert La Follette, and charged with investigating the incident."

"John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers of America, was instrumental in the organizing drive that transformed the coal fields in 1933. He had planned his campaign before the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) became law and even before President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. (The National Industrial Recovery Act included a provision, section 7(a), that protected workers’ right to organize.) In February 1933 (prior to the passage of the NRA), Lewis spoke passionately to the Senate Finance Committee about the need for action to protect workers. In his Senate testimony, Lewis called for emergency action, including allowing workers to unionize and replacing corporate autocracy with union democracy. He warned that if action was not forthcoming, the nation might face grave consequences and promoted unionization as the answer. " GMU History Matters

"Strikes affect an entire community, and in the end they need that community’s support to succeed. This is especially true in the case of a sit-down strike like the legendary sit-down strike at Flint, Michigan, in 1936, when the strikers occupied the GM plants. The strikers, isolated at first inside the Fisher Body Plant Number One, needed food; they also needed information and advance warning on what management might be up to. The Women’s Emergency Brigade, formed during the Flint strike, proved indispensable to the union effort more than once. Genora Johnson Dollinger helped found the Women’s Emergency Brigade and became one of the strike’s key leaders. In this interview, conducted by historian Sherna Gluck in 1976, Genora Johnson Dollinger described first how the strike affected her family."

"The sudden revival of the United Mine Workers of America in 1933 was a remarkable story. In late 1932 the UMWA was practically defunct, yet by the fall of 1933 it was in the strongest position in its history. Perhaps the best historical narrative of the revival of UMWA was penned in lyrical form by an African-American former coal miner called “Uncle George” Jones. Jones had started working as a miner in 1889 at age seventeen but in 1914 blindness forced him out of the Alabama mines. Long known for his singing in church choirs, down in the mines, and on the picket line. Jones’ “This Is What the Union Done” not only expressed the miners’ sense of the role that Roosevelt and Lewis played in the union revival; it also beautifully captures a sense of the transformation when miners “got the union back again!” "

"The 1934 textile strike failed to bring the transformation in work conditions and social relations that the strikers had hoped to win and was widely considered a devastating defeat for Labor. An important window into the persistence of poor conditions in the mills is the letters that the mill workers (both male and female) wrote to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and other government officials describing their plight. These letters provided compelling evidence of the discontent that lingered after the 1934 strike. Included here are five letters from textile mill communities in Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina, which were written to Washington between 1937 and 1942. The letters testified not only to the difficult work conditions but also to the pervasive fear the workers felt if they tried to organize or complain publicly. One person who signed himself “just a worker” puts it simply: “I will have to be nameless or lose my job.” "

"Although many historians have emphasized the conservative dimensions of this language of Americanism—the ways that it reinforced rather than challenged the status quo—historian Gary Gerstle shows that it was considerably more complex and contradictory. He argues that it was “flexible enough to express both the social democratic and ethnic communalist visions that inspired political activism among the nationÌs workers during the Great Depression. As in other communities, this working-class Americanism infused the organizing campaign of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in Homestead, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1936. Four thousand steelworkers endorsed a declaration of their ”inalienable rights to organize into a great industrial union, banded together with all our fellow steel workers." It was surely not an accident that they worded that declaration in conscious imitation of the Declaration of Independence. " GMU History Matters