Women Strikers Occupy Chain Stores, Win Big by Dana Frank

Author:Dana Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, History
ISBN: 978-1-60846-246-9
Publisher: Haymarket Books

Epilogue

Louis Koenig, a.k.a. “Smiley,” stayed on as secretary-treasurer of Local 705, the Detroit waiters’ and waitresses’ union. He retired in 1960 at the age of seventy-two and spent the rest of his life at a nursing home in Florida.

Mira Komaroff stayed on at Local 705 too, first as recording secretary and then, after Koenig retired in 1960, inheriting his job as secretary-treasurer. In 1939 she married and changed her name to Myra Wolfgang. She went on to become an international vice president of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union in 1952 and a pioneer woman leader in the AFL-CIO, fighting for equal pay and the minimum wage, and helping to found CLUW, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, in 1974. She died of a brain tumor in 1976, a month before her sixty-second birthday.

Floyd Loew was purged from the local in 1943, after he refused to cooperate with Koenig and Komaroff/Wolfgang and cross a picket line during a strike at Harper Hospital in Detroit. He remained active as a dissident rank-and-file activist in HERE for the rest of his life, in Florida, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. He died in the mid-1990s.

Paul Domeney, the Hungarian waiter, and Mary Davis, the union waitress, who both visited the picket line during the Woolworth’s strike, were purged from Local 705 in the fall of 1938 for advocating rank-and-file participation in contract negotiations, the right of rank-and-filers to vote on ratification of their own contracts, and one unified union of all restaurant workers. Domeney lost his job at the Book-Cadillac Hotel as a result and was blacklisted from work in the city’s hotels and restaurants. In 1940 he founded an independent union of Detroit restaurant workers, Local 1064, affiliated with the CIO, which survives to this day. He retired to Florida in 1999 at the age of ninety. Mary Davis is still thriving as an independent activist for social justice in Detroit.

In April, 1937, Governor Frank Murphy and other officials cracked down on sit-down strikes in Detroit. Throughout the nation, state and local governments moved swiftly to restore private property rights at the point of a gun, ending the sit-down wave. But the Congress of Industrial Organizations nonetheless went on to greater and greater victories throughout the late 1930s and the 1940s. By 1948 it represented almost four and a half million workers in industries all over the country. In 1955, the CIO merged with the AFL to form the AFL-CIO.

The Woolworth Corporation continued to expand during the 1940s and 1950s. In February of 1960, a new wave of young people launched sit-ins at its stores throughout the South to protest the chain’s refusal to serve African Americans at its lunch counters. Protesters joined them to picket Woolworth’s stores throughout the country. The chain finally agreed to serve African Americans, and eventually hired them to work in its stores as well.

Although the Woolworth Corporation acquired new subchains such as Foot Locker and Kinney Shoes and grew to 6,700 stores by 1996, the company failed to keep up with new megastores such as Wal-Mart and Costco in the 1980s and 1990s.

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