Rising discontent in the early 1930s
   

Most of the conflict in the early 1930s centered on the Century Electric plant, where a major strike occurred in 1934.

The leaflet at the left was issued during the initial organizing drive of 1933, which occurred after workers thought they might have some government backing for their right to organize. The code refers to the National Recovery Administration of the New Deal. The codes in theory were supposed to reduce the wage competition across regions, but the legislation for the NRA also includes a section 7a, which also in theory guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain collectively for the first time in American history.

Small groups of workers began to meet to form a union, and they soughht help from established labor organizations.

By spring 1934 over 1200 Century workers had signed petitions that asked the International Association of Machinists (IAM)/American Federation of Labor (AFL) to represent them.

Their spirit matched the democratic impulses of the war period. Each department elected a representative to a "committee of 46" and in late June 1934, these workers attempted to negotiate.

Management refused, and the workers walked out. IAM representativeFitzmaurice actually took a vacation during the course of the strike, and spent time trying to warn workers and government officials about radical influences. Century management followed the course of simply refusing to negotiate at all. In the end, the NRA's Labor Board of the early New Deal did little to help workers gain a voice

 
Through the NMTA, Century hired three hundred strikebreakers and threatened to fire workers if they remained on strike. These photos from the Police Department were given to the St. Louis NMTA. Workers on the picket line were arrested on the request of the Century management during the strike. The Police Department shared information about "radicals" with the Century company during the strike. The NMTA suggested that St. Louis CP leader Samuel Dukes, left, was working together with a leader of the Century union, Joseph Gorman, below in a police mug shot. This caused alarm at the offices of the St. Louis regional labor board, created under the National Recovery Administration to deal with labor unrest, and caused the board to intervene to stop radicals from influencing the strike.
"The resistance of the Company to all efforts so far as this Board was concerned was certainly the most pronounced and most studied and the most evasive that this Board has ever experienced," the labor board noted in a decision against the company in August 1934. By that time, the vice president of the IAM local was a Century spy.

 

The other major early 1930s organizing effort by electrical workers in St. Louis was at the Emerson plant.

In 1933, the Emerson preferred stockholders were able to name Joseph Newman (right) new President of Emerson Electric in the early 1930s. Newman had no experience in the elecrical industry, but tried numerous strategies to keep the company afloat in the depths of the Depression. He implemented a modern mass production system at the plant. But the new markets for cheaper fans that Newman had counted on never materialized, and fans actually caused a loss for the company. The company continued to use the strategy of lower wages for its workers as the means to remain a factor in the electrical industry.
Joseph Newman, President of Emerson Electric in 1933
In the mid 1930s, Newman revamped Building D, (left) so that motor components were machined and assembled on the same floor , with all operations connected by conveyors. The process eliminated some bench operations, increased output by fifty motors per hour, and brought in the first substantial numbers of lower-paid women, up to four hundred (22 percent of the workforce) by 1936.
Building D in the 1920s
  

 

For workers, Newman's attempts to restructure the company fueled discontent, especially aggravating motor assemblers and tool and die workers, a group of workers whose loyalty had been assiduously cultivated in the 1920s. Frank Abfall recalled the resentment of the men over the "modernization" in the department: "We used to do the complete motor, wind the coils, insulate, everything. But the company broke everything down, into separate operations, so the easy stuff was taken away from us. They were taking our work and giving our work away to women at half the wages." On the other hand, the women who were hired for the line assembly soon developed their own resentments at the low wages they earned--some took home paychecks of under five dollars for a week's work, and speedup was a constant complaint.

"Oh, it was a sweatshop, that's what we called it!" exclaimed Marie Strathman, who wound motor coils. “We had to suffer for them to make money,” Strathman added, describing women who came in before 7 a.m. well before starting time, to be able to make required output, and bandaged their entire hands to endure the work. Turnover among women was 100 percent during the year

 

 

 

 

Left: Weekly pay envelope for a woman who worked at Emerson in the early 1930s. The training period was especially penurious for the young women who tried to make the grade in the new motor winding operations.

 

St. Louis's community wage, managers explained, was part of the "special advantage" of St. Louis industry that allowed it to compete with the eastern companies. At least three times between 1933 and 1936, Emerson's managers, confronted with workers' wage demands, sent a "fact-finding" committee from the Board of Representatives (company union) to research the wage rates of other electrical companies in the area. These groups of workers reported their findings and confirmed the company's claims--that the "policy of the company is to pay the going wage in the community."
 

Emerson Electric had kept its Employee Representation Plan as a means to exert control, but workers in the early 1930s continued to try to make it work as a tool to represent them, especially after the failure of the AFL's machinist union to do so.

In the mid-1920s, most workers had come to view the ERP as a management tool. IAM member and skilled worker Frank Schlieman (right) had tried for years to make the ERP an instrument to bring more rights to workers. Schlieman sheepishly admitted that he took the ERP "rather serious[ly], but couldn't get so far with it." He tried to get incentive rate times adjusted for his fellow tool and die makers; he sometimes had success, "but often too late for a particular job." Emerson worker Charles Slezak recalled that most ERP representatives were not necessarily "company-minded" but, like him, participated "in the hope of some miracle to change this company-controlled plan."

The company failed in its unrelenting effort to persuade workers of a mutuality of interest. While the company had hoped that the ERP would be an effective tool, in the end the ERP functioned as the rope in a tug of war between workers--sometimes it was a vigorous contest,, but most times it was an unevenly match. Thus it should not be surprising that among the key figures in the CIO drive at Emerson were those who had been active at one time or another in the ERP. The experience of these workers with the company's version of "industrial democracy" would actually make some more receptive to the need for "outside" representation and leftist leadership.

Frank Schlieman

Electrical workers issued continual challenges to management, but it was a parallel movement of the early 1930s that sparked the beginnings of a new trade union movement in St. Louis . Left-wing activists, initiated into the unemployed movement of the early 1930s, brought forward from this an experiential basis that was critical in forging a coalition that could effectively challenge the political economy of control in the electrical industry. That is the subject of the next section