The Bay Area General Strikes; '34 in SF & '46 in Oakland by Gifford Hartman Monday, Jan. 16, 2006

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the 1946 Oakland General strike. To commemorate, a presentation of the '46 Oakland strike will be presented--along with Chris Carlsson  description and analysis of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. These  descriptions and analyses will be followed by a discussion about how keeping the memory of the strikes alive helps us understand how we might express our solidarity with struggles going on today.

The Bay Area General Strikes event is on Wednesday, January 18 at 8:00 PM. The location is CounterPulse, 1310 Mission (at 9th St.) in San Francisco and it inaugurates the Spring Talks series.

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, Kahns 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 strikes 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 strikes 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  strikes 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  clerks 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&

 http://www.counterpulse.org/springtalks.shtml