In a post from 2009, I wrote about North American Aviation, the defense company headquartered just southeast of LAX (then known as Los Angeles Municipal Airport) from 1936 to 1967.
In the story, I briefly mentioned the June 1941 strike at the plant, but it’s worth a closer look. Just six months before Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II, North American’s crucial aviation defense production, in the process of ramping up even before we entered the war, came to a standstill that brought about national repercussions.
The strike was fomented by organizers of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a national labor coalition founded by John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers in 1935. The CIO had split off recently from the American Federation of Labor over a disagreement in union tactics. (After years of bitterness between them, the organizations would merge to form the AFL/CIO in 1955.)
But in the late 1930s, the CIO favored a decidedly more activist stance than the AFL. One of its agitators, William Busick, convinced workers at the Northrop aviation plant, just across Imperial Highway from North American, to go on strike for better wages on Feb. 23, 1937.
The strike was settled a week later, but Busick and his cohorts continued working hard to recruit employees at North American and other defense plants to join the CIO.
Another aircraft industry strike on Nov. 15, 1940, this one at the Vultee Aircraft plant in Downey, also was settled within a few days, but tensions ran high. After the settlement, Texas Congressman Martin Dies accused four labor officials involved in the strike of being Communist subversives attempting to sabotage the American defense industry.
A couple of days after that, the CIO announced that it would begin a campaign targeting North American after company officials disputed whether the union had enough members to act as the sole collective bargaining agent for the plant’s workers.
The union wanted a minimum wage increase from 50 cents to 75 cents an hour, and an across-the-board 10-cents-per-hour raise for all employees. Negotiations had begun on April 16, 1941, after the National Labor Relations Board ruled in favor of the CIO as bargaining agent.
Talks stalled by late May, with increasing strike threats coming from the union. It held a strike vote on May 23. With little more than half of the plant’s 11,000 workers voting, the results were overwhelmingly in favor of striking; only 210 votes were cast against it.
The strike was delayed while the matter went to mediation. The plant was closed for a three-day holiday over the Memorial Day weekend in an attempt to cool tensions, but the union planned to strike on Tuesday, June 3.
On June 1, workers voted to delay the strike again. But this time, they set a firm deadline for two days later, and the strike was on when a settlement wasn’t reached in time. Thousands of workers walked off their jobs shortly after midnight on Thursday, June 5, 1941, leaving only a skeleton crew behind.
The effect of the work stoppage on the defenses of a country already engaged in war production for its allies was profound, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reacted swiftly. On Friday, June 6, he signaled his plans for the government to seize the factory and force production to resume.
Picket lines were set up in the area, and skirmishes regularly broke out when workers attempted to cross them. Unrest was growing. FDR set 7 a.m., Monday, June 9, as the deadline for seizing the factory, and began marshaling U.S. Army troops for the effort.
About 500 Army troops from Fort MacArthur’s Third Coast Artillery battalion, in San Pedro, were sent to the strike area, and more troops gathered in Ventura and at March Field in Riverside. Eventually, about 3,500 troops took part in the operation.
On that Monday morning, violence broke out when police attempted to escort workers into the plant across a crowd of strikers; 20 people were arrested in the scuffles.
The arrival of Army troops had caused tension, but when the June 9 deadline arrived, they quickly took control of the situation, marching through strikers to secure the plant and allowing workers to return.
The show of force persuaded many of the strikers to go back to work, and increasing numbers of them did so over the next few days. Authorities banned picket lines near the plant, enforced by Army patrols. The strike was broken.
By June 12, plant officials were reporting that production had returned to normal, though Army troops would remain at North American for about another two weeks. They left shortly after workers approved a new contract on July 1, 1941, which gave them the raises they had demanded.
Fallout from the strike included an effort to purge the CIO of suspected Communist infiltrators, the changing of the draft status of 111 recalcitrant workers from 2-A to 1-A that immediately made them available for the draft, and the enactment of a federal law expressly granting the president the right to use Army troops to seize defense plants in similar situations in the future.
Another strike hit North American on Oct, 23, 1953. It lasted much longer and involved more employees, 33,000, but was nowhere near as raucous as the 1941 labor action. It was settled on Dec. 15, 1953.
Because it came during peacetime, it did not involve the deployment of troops to seize the plant. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was involved in the labor mediation process but did not take sides in the actual dispute.
(Source: Sam Gnerre, Daily Breeze- 23/9/2019)
