Minneapolis general strike of 1934: Difference between revisions

The Minneapolis General Strike of 1934 grew out of a strike by Teamsters against most of the trucking companies operating in Minneapolis, a major distribution center for the Upper Midwest. Led by local leaders associated with the Trotskyist Communist League, a group that later founded the Socialist Workers Party. The strike paved the way for the organization of over-the-road drivers and the growth of the Teamsters union. It was also an important catalyst for the rise of industrial unionism in the 1930s.

Leadup to the strike

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters was, under the leadership of Daniel Tobin in 1933, a conservative craft union averse to strikes. While the union's members were often called on to support other unions' strikes, since their role in transport brought them in contact with workers in many other unionized industries, and had developed strong traditions of solidarity in some areas, the International Union itself was cautious to the point of resistant to any use of the strike weapon. The provisions of the International Constitution that required a two thirds vote of the membership to authorize any strike action and that gave the International President the power to withhold strike benefits if he believed that a local union had struck prematurely, It also divided its members into separate unions along craft or industry lines: ice wagon drivers in one local, produce drivers in another, milk drivers in a third, and so forth.

The Teamsters also had a number of general locals; Local 574 in Minneapolis, which had no more than 75 members in 1934, was one of them. A number of militant members, including several Communist Party members who had gone to the newly formed Communist League of America (Left Opposition) in the internal split following Trotsky's expulsion, became members of Local 574 in the early 1930s.

These militants—Ray Dunne, his brothers Miles and Grant, Carl Skoglund and later Farrell Dobbs—began by organizing coal drivers through a strike in the coldest part of 1933 that ignored both the cumbersome approval procedures established under the International's Constitution and the ineffective mediation procedures offered under the National Industrial Recovery Act. The victory gave the union a great deal of credibility among both drivers and their employers. The union began organizing drivers wherever they could be found.

The union also began preparing for the strike in a number of ways. It rented a large hall that could be used as a strike headquarters, kitchen and infirmary. It organized a women's auxiliary to staff the headquarters. Finally, it entered into discussions with the sympathetic leaders of organizations of farmers and the unemployed to obtain their support for the upcoming strike.

The strike

The strike began on May 16, 1934. The strike was remarkably effective, shutting down most commercial transport in the city with the exception of certain farmers, who were allowed to bring their produce in to town, but delivering directly to grocers, rather than to the market area, which the union had shut down.

The market was to be the scene of the fiercest fighting during the earliest part of the strike. On Saturday, May 19 police and private guards beat a number of strikers trying to prevent strikebreakers from unloading a truck in that area and waylaid several strikers who had responded to a report that scab drivers were unloading newsprint at the two major dailies' loading docks. When those injured strikers were brought back to the strike headquarters the police followed; the strikers, however, not only refused to let the police into the headquarters, but left two of them unconscious on the sidewalk outside.

Fighting intensified the following Monday, May 21, when the police, augmented by several hundred newly deputized members of the Citizens Alliance, an employer organization, attempted to open up the market for trucking. Fighting began when a loaded truck began leaving a loading dock. The battle became a general melee when hundreds of pickets armed with clubs of all sorts rushed to the area to support the picketers; when the police drew their guns as if to shoot the union sent a truck loaded with picketers into the mass of police and deputies in order to make it impossible for them to fire without shooting each other.

Other unions, particularly in the building trades, began to strike in sympathy with the Teamsters. The American Federation of Labor Central Labor Council in Minneapolis offered financial and moral support for the strike, allowing the union to coordinate some of its picketing activities from its headquarters.

The fighting resumed on Tuesday, May 22. The picketers took the offensive and succeeded in driving both police and deputies from the market and the area around the union's headquarters. Two deputies, one a member of the board of directors of the Citizens Alliance, were killed in the fighting.

Negotiations

The Central Labor Council, the Building Trades Council and the Teamsters Joint Council approached Mike Johannes, the Minneapolis Chief of Police, to propose a truce, under which the local would cease picketing for twenty-four hours if the police and the employers ceased trying to move trucks. The employers, the Teamsters and the building trades signed a formal truce agreement. Johannes, however, declared that the police would move trucks once the truce expired, leading the union to announce that it was resuming picketing.

At this point city government appealed for Governor Floyd B. Olson to mobilize the National Guard. Olson did, but stopped short of actually deploying them, unwilling to alienate his labor supporters. Olson had already been attempting to mediate the dispute, On May 25, the employers and the union reached an agreement on a contract that provided union recognition, reinstatement for all strikers, seniority and a no-discrimination clause. The membership approved it overwhelmingly.

The strike resumes

The union thought that it had the employers' agreement to include the "inside workers", the warehouse employees as well as the drivers and loaders. When the employers reneged on that agreement the strike resumed on Tuesday, July 17. Governor Olson again mobilized, but did not deploy, the National Guard.

The union's leadership had chosen to use different tactics in this strike; it ordered its members to picket without carrying any clubs or weapons of any sort. The police, on the other hand, armed themselves with riot guns which sprayed buckshot over a wide arc. On Friday, July 20, the police opened fire on a group of unarmed pickets, killing two and injuring more than fifty, many shot in the back as they tried to flee the market area,

The police violence sparked a show of support from other unions and a one day strike of transport workers. Each side stepped back from the confrontation: Chief Johannes and Mayor Bainbridge faced calls for their impeachment, while the union continued to urge its members not to give the police any justification for further attacks, disarming a number of picketers who wanted to return fire with fire. The union did not make any overt efforts to stop those few trucks accompanied by convoys of forty police cars apiece that tried to deliver goods, but sent so many cars with pickets to accompany those convoys that the police were never able to shepherd more than a few delivery trucks on any given day.

Martial law and settlement

"Bloody Friday" also spurred Governor Olson to intervene more forcefully: he mobilized more National Guard troops and promised to make Minneapolis "as quiet as a Sunday school", while pressing a mediation proposal with the threat to declare martial law if either side rejected it. The union, to the Governor's evident surprise, accepted the mediators' proposal; the employers rejected it. Olson proceeded to declare marital law, banning all picketing and allowing trucks to move only with a military permit. Authorities at first allowed permits only to those trucking firms that adopted the mediators' proposals, then to grocery companies, arresting any pickets who complained. The union, seeing martial law as a device to break the strike on a piecemeal basis, demanded that all permits be revoked.

When Olson ignored that demand the union made plans to go back out on strike on August 1 in defiance of martial law. The night before the strike was to resume, however, the National Guard encircled the union's headquarters and arrested a number of the union's leaders, who were transported to a stockade at the State Fair Grounds.

The Guard was not able, however, to capture all of the union's leaders; Farrell Dobbs and Grant Dunne slipped through the lines and made it to the AFL's headquarters, to which strikers had been redirected after the seizure of the union's headquarters. The union then decentralized its operations further, using filling stations around town as local dispatch and information-gathering centers. As it turned out, that was fortuitous for the union, as the Guard seized the AFL's offices later that day; Dobbs and Dunne once again slipped through the lines and spent much of the rest of the day avoiding arrest.

Later that day, however, Governor Olson signaled, through an intermediary, that he wanted to talk to Dunne and Dobbs. Olson had attempted, after the arrest of most of the union's leaders, to bargain directly with a committee of representative members of Local 574; they, however, refused to talk to him until he released the union's leaders and returned the union's headquarters to the union. When Olson claimed that he had seized the union's headquarters because it had defied martial law by holding a rally at its headquarters, the union produced the permit that permitted it to hold a rally there. Olson backed down, releasing the imprisoned leaders and returning the headquarters to the union. Hundreds of other strikers remained in the stockade.

The leaders of the strike called for a general strike of all AFL unions to protest Olson's strikebreaking activities, but received no support for that proposal from the AFL. The strike continued for another three weeks, with both sides showing more and more fatigue as it wore on. It was finally ended by a new mediation proposal that provided for elections at each trucking company to determine whether Local 574 would represent the drivers and inside workers. The union won elections in nearly all of the major firms, losing in most of the smaller "mom and pop" operations. It subsequently won significant wage increases through arbitration.

The impact

The strike changed Minneapolis, which had been an open shop citadel under the control of the Citizens Alliance for years before 1934. In the aftermath of this strike thousands of other workers in other industries organized with the assistance of Local 574.

The strike also gave the Communist League, later renamed the Workers Party of America, a strong position in Local 574, but little more. The party was later driven out of that local by prosecutions under the Smith Act and a trusteeship imposed by Tobin in the early 1940s.

More importantly, the strike launched the career of Dobbs, who played a significant role in the organization of over-the-road drivers throughout the Midwest. Those efforts led in turn to the transformation of the Teamsters from a craft union, made up of locals with a parochial focus on their own craft and locality, into a truly national union.

External sources

• Capsule history of the 1934 strikes
• Trotskyist Work in the Trade Unions, by Chris Knox

Further reading

• Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Rebellion. 218 pages. Pathfinder Press (NY); Reissue edition (July 1, 1994). ISBN 0873488458.

• Dobbs, Farrell. Teamster Power. 255 pages. Monad Press. 1973