Toward a New Deal in Baltimore by Jo Ann E. Argersinger

Author:Jo Ann E. Argersinger [Argersinger, Jo Ann E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General
ISBN: 9781469639581
Google: uyE6DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2017-11-01T00:34:28+00:00

CHPATER 6 The Struggle to Unionize

Labor Organization and the New Deal

The Great Depression and the New Deal intensified the drive for collective action among the city’s workers. “When the New Deal arrived in the spring of 1933,” Baltimore’s Sew-Sew News declared in November 1939, “the women’s garment workers reacted to it at once by launching one organization drive after another.” Like the citizens who acted in conceit to exert greater control over their neighborhoods, laborers organized both as workers and as members of their communities. Rooseveltian rhetoric legitimized labor organization, and local labor leaders used New Deal slogans to equate union membership with patriotic duty. Versions of the slogan, “The President Wants You to Join a Union,” rapidly spread beyond the printed appeals of the United Mine Workers. In 1937, for example, Baltimore cab drivers struck under the banner “Roosevelt Said Organize.” New Deal labor legislation also did much to encourage organization. Nationally, union membership climbed from 3.4 million in 1929 to over 8 million in 1939. Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act passed in 1933 stated that employees “shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” Inadequate enforcement of this provision under the NRA and the Supreme Court’s subsequent decision invalidating the Recovery Act, however, made the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 necessary for successful union recognition and collective bargaining. With the Wagner Act’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), workers received an institutional voice in labor-management relations. Just as the federal government approved the organizational role of politically marginal groups such as transients and public-housing tenants, it also legitimized the union idea among workers and some of their bosses. The New Deal provided an important opportunity to organize the industrial work force; the sons and daughters of immigrant families sided with the union and with Roosevelt. The Committee for Industrial Organization spearheaded the drive to organize the unorganized, often linking its movement to the Roosevelt reelection campaign of 1936. And in sharp contrast to the past, the government did not attempt to halt the labor movement of the 1930s.

To be sure, the federal government preferred loyal Democrats to disruptive militants among the work force. As in the case of other organizing groups, there were real limits to the support provided by the government, which favored a role of “constructive activism” for all such groups—whether they be transients, or tenants, or the labor force. There was but vague sympathy for workers from President Roosevelt, and he became weary of labor’s struggles when he proclaimed a “plague” on the houses of both labor and management in the Little Steel conflict. Even the Wagner Act often failed to check unfair labor practices; at its adoption, the Baltimore Sun felt it “safe to predict that the Wagner bill will be as ineffectual as was section 7(a).”1 City employers, moreover, openly flouted the NLRB’S actions until 1937 when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Wagner Act. Yet worker militancy increased and demands for union recognition grew more adamant.

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