The Bay Area General Strikes; '34 in SF & '46 in Oakland

THE LAST GENERAL STRIKE?

The Oakland General Strike of 1946 was one of the most inspiring examples of class solidarity during the fiercest episode of the class war in U. S. history—and also the last general strike to ever occur. The “Work Holiday” December 2-5, 1946 in Oakland, was an overwhelming demonstration of working class power based on massive solidarity with in a community; it was the last of six general strikes that year. 1946 was a crucial turning point in class struggle in the U.S., with more than 2,970,000 involved in strikes in the first six months of the year alone. Even the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics called the first half of 1946 “the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in the country’s history.” And there were also massive strikes on the railroads and by coal miners, autoworkers, and steelworkers. The steel strike was a walk-out of 750,000, still the record for the single biggest strike in any industry. By the end of 1946, there had been 4,985 strikes, involving 4.6 million workers and 116 million “man-days” were lost due to the industrial work stoppage (all of these are still the all time records for the U.S.).

The Oakland General Strike was sparked into action early one morning when streetcar drivers refused to cross a police cordon herding scab trucks to unload goods at a two department stores. Those workers at those stores, Kahn’s and Hastings which were located across the street from each other where Telegraph and Broadway merge, were mostly women who had been on strike for over a month for union recognition. Spontaneously, the strike spread and eventually involved nearly 130,000 workers, from 142 AFL unions, and it shut down all public transit and nearly all commerce in the East Bay. Block committees were organized, bars were allowed to stay open on the condition that they only sold beer and turned their jukeboxes out onto the street, and the streets were packed with strikers dancing and singing. Some called it a “work holiday.”

Lessons were learned from the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, which had spread to Oakland too, where 70 unions participated and shut the Port of Oakland down as tightly as the Embarcadero was in San Francisco. The key lessons were to shut down all newspapers, rather have them try to undermine the strike with deceitful, red-baiting propaganda as they had successfully done in 1934. So, all East Bay papers were shut down; Teamsters in San Francisco also refused to deliver the San Francisco dailies to the East Bay. Almost all transit, unlike San Francisco in 1934, was halted including striking truck drivers who blockaded the East Shore Highway and only allowed food deliveries through, and Greyhound buses which were prevented from entering or leaving. Sailors also walked off their ships docked off the Oakland Army Base.

But the most militant tactic of all, preventing scabs, was the most maligned in the media after the strike—and it was also the most effective in keeping the strike going. Even the vice-president of Hastings Department Store could not avoid a bruising, despite having a three-man police escort, as he tried to go through the crowd of angry picketers. On the strike’s last day, when Alameda Central Labor negotiators hastily—and fearfully—brought it to a premature end, the local CIO had declared that on the following day over 30,000 of their members would go out too, threatening to shut off all the public utilities, water, oil and gas, which would truly have paralyzed the city.

Dave Beck, Teamster leader who had been against the strike from the beginning, issued a back-to-work the day before the strike’s end—which the rank-and-file largely ignored. But these Teamsters, with many others, were among the last to stay out with the still-striking department store clerks the next—and final—day, even after cars with loudspeakers circled the streets of downtown Oakland telling of the strike’s end and encouraging people to return to work. The Labor Council only managed to get the City Manager to agree to no police “scabherding,” but without having resolved in the union recognition issue for either store. That did not happen, ending the department store clerk’s strike, until May, 1947. But by June, 1947 Congress had managed to pass Taft-Hartley, over Truman’s veto, and the kind of solidarity actions that made the Oakland General Strike, and all those mass strikes of that period, so successful were outlawed. Specifically, Taft-Hartley made illegal the sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts that had been such powerful weapons in the hand of the working class.

These days the conditions of working class people resemble the period giving rise to the sequence of events beginning with the three general strikes in the U.S. in 1934, here in the Bay Area in San Francisco and Oakland, in Minneapolis and in Toledo. The class struggle boiled over all through World War II and peaked in 1946 with the six general strikes in Stamford, CT; Lancaster, PA; Houston, TX; Rochester, NY; Pittsburg, PA; and in the Bay Area again in Oakland. The kind of working class solidarity that made those strikes so encouraging, while forbidden now by Taft-Hartley, must be revitalized in defiance of the law as we take the class war on the offensive again. These historical examples are lessons that we can draw on to make sure that Oakland in 1946 was not the last general strike, but the inspiration for the next one, and the next one after that and the next one…