Textile workers Strike (1934)
The textile workers' strike of 1934 was the largest general strike action in United States history at its time. It involved textile workers from all over the southeastern United States and lasted twenty-two days. It began with unauthorized wildcat strikes that rolled through the northern part of Alabama in the spring of 1934. A special convention was called by the United Textile Workers in New York City on Monday, August 13, 1934. The delegates, especially those from the southern states, voted overwhelmingly to strike.
The strike began at midnight on September 1, 1934. In Gastonia, North Carolina, an estimated 5,000 prople marched in the September 3rd Labor Day parade. Gastonia had been the site of the infamous strike of 1929. The strike swept through southern cotton mills, outpacing the union organizers and employing "flying squadrons" which traveled by truck and on foot from mill to mill, calling the workers out.
Within a week, almost 400,000 textile workers nationwide had left their jobs and the texile industry was shut down. It is important to note that in August of 1934 the union's total membership had stood at 270,000. The workers left their jobs without union membership or in some cases union leadership.
The stage had been set for this remarkable grassroots uprising with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president. In June 1933, during the height of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt signed the National Industry Recovery Act and called for cooperation among business, labor and government. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was set up to raise wages, control hours of work and stimulate an economic recovery, but most small employers and many large ones in the South ignored the employer code established by the Cotton Textile National Industrial Relations Board (the "Labor Board," as workers called it -- even 40 years later it was common in the textile belt of the Carolinas to hear workers talk about complaining to the "labor board").
The strike resulted from the heightened expectations for better treatment, combined with the defiance of the mill owners ("code chiseling") and government inaction -- there were nearly 4,000 complaints from workers to the labor board by August 1934; the board found in favor of only one worker. Union supporters often lost their jobs, and employers increased production quotas to compensate for reduced hours of operation. In other words, the labor board had set a forty hour work week for the first time, but mill owners required the same amount of work in that 40 hours as they had in the 50 to 60 hour week. In Georgia, the governor called out the United States National Guard and the pickets were locked up in an old World War I prisoner of war camp. In South Carolina, workers were ambushed and shot from the windows of one textile plant.
The strike's ultimate failure and the union's defeat left the southeastern portion of the United States an unorganized and anti-union region for the next fifty years. However, the struggle, and the heart-felt pleas of hundreds of letters to President Roosevelt in the aftermath of the strike (many protesting the illegal blacklisting, evictions, and threats to former strikers), helped produce the labor reform laws of 1935, in particular the National Labor Relations Act.
