Texas Labor History by Glasrud Bruce A.;Maroney James C.;

Author:Glasrud, Bruce A.;Maroney, James C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

11

Unionizing the Trinity Portland Cement Company in Dallas, Texas, 1934–1939

GREGG ANDREWS

In 1934–35 Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration confronted a direct challenge to Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in Dallas, Texas. A local panel of the National Labor Relations Board—established by the president through power given him by a congressional resolution in June 1934—ruled that the Trinity Portland Cement Company had to recognize the overwhelming desire of workers at the company’s plant in Dallas to name Portland Cement Workers Union No. 19310 as their exclusive bargaining agent. Portland Cement Workers Union No. 19310 was affiliated with the Texas State Federation of Labor (TSFL) and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). On December 10, 1934, however, the company notified the board that it refused to comply with the ruling.1

Although Trinity’s workers had voted in favor of the union by a nearly unanimous margin of 150 to 2, company officials held out in defiance of the NIRA’s labor provisions, hoping to retain their company union and reaffirm exclusive control over labor policies. Until January 1939, Trinity’s workers battled an array of antiunion measures in an attempt to force the company to recognize their union and sign a collective bargaining agreement. After a tenacious campaign to assert their rights under the New Deal, the workers achieved a victory whose ramifications extended beyond the Dallas plant. Trinity signed joint labor agreements at all three of its Texas plants—the first such labor agreements signed with a cement corporation in the United States.

Trinity’s first plant—located near the west fork of the Trinity River on a five-hundred-acre bed of limestone and shale reserves in Eagle Ford, a small community on the western edge of Dallas County—began producing cement in 1909. The company built a plant in Fort Worth in 1924 and another in Houston in 1926.2 The campaign to organize workers at Trinity’s Eagle Ford plant also was tied to unionization efforts at the Lone Star Cement Company in the nearby community of Cement City. In fact, Eagle Ford was so close that Dallas residents at the time commonly referred to both communities as Cement City.3

The Eagle Ford and Cement City mills were the first cement plants in Dallas, the state’s largest city in 1910. Clustered together, the two plants converted West Dallas into a focal point of cement manufacturing to service the growing demands of an increasingly urbanized area. The Trinity plant took advantage of good rail facilities via the Texas and Pacific Railway and the Texas Northern Railroad to ship barrels and jute bags of cement. The cement was used to pave Dallas-area streets and sidewalks, build viaducts and bridges, encase artesian wells drilled by area farmers for irrigation purposes, build highways, and facilitate other construction and oil drilling projects in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.4

Trinity had no difficulty attracting a cheap labor force. Many of the plant’s initial unskilled production workers were Mexican immigrants uprooted by the Mexican Revolution and drawn by the lure of industrial jobs to Dallas.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.