Strike threw a monkey wrench into Montgomery Ward’s holiday plans 75 years ago

December 1, 2012 by

Kris Kringle has graced The Union Advocate’s pages in several forms over the years. In 1962 his beard was used as a symbol of the union advantage.

More than 30 workers in St. Paul threw a monkey wrench into Montgomery Ward’s holiday-shopping rush Dec. 6, 1937, walking off the job after management at the mail-order company’s University Avenue plant refused to negotiate with their elected union representative, Warehouse Employees Local 20,297.

The picket line drew 300 supporters on the strike’s first day, according to The Union Advocate.

A week later police conducted a “mass arrest” of picketers, who were charged with disorderly conduct. Police levied the same charge against a Montgomery Ward detective accused of entering Local 20,297’s strike headquarters and “using abusive language.”

Despite the bluster, the strike fizzled out after its second week as a result of lukewarm support from the labor community. The St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly voted against placing Montgomery Ward on its “do not patronize list,” noting that several craft unions, including the Electrical Workers and Operating Engineers, had members working inside the University Avenue plant.

While some of the workers were reinstated after the strike ended, those who were unwilling to “repudiate their union membership” were not, according to National Labor Relations Board charges filed the following July. The NLRB charges also alleged Montgomery Ward “maintained an espionage system among its employees to not only discourage unionization but to virtually prohibit it,” the Advocate reported.

[The Union Advocate’s “This Month in the Archives” feature offers a look back at what our newspaper was reporting from 5 to 100 years ago. Our digital archives are online, searchable and free to anyone. Click here for access.]

In 1997 Santa joined volunteers in the Minneapolis skyway to call attention to sweatshop labor.

100 Years Ago: Shoe Cutters staged organizing drive

St. Paul-based Shoe Cutters Union No. 281 scored a major organizing victory in December 1912, expanding its membership rolls to include roughly 85 percent of all shoe cutters in St. Paul.

The union, which represented workers at only one local shoe manufacturer prior to the organizing drive, successfully appealed to non-union workers, according to the Dec. 27 edition of The Union Advocate, with a mix of economic and social incentives.

A circular letter sent to all shoe cutters “contrasted the conditions in the factories where … a minimum wage for cutting prevailed with those in the unorganized factories where cutters were paid a sliding scale based upon the necessities of the employer.”

Later, Local 281 hosted a “stag party” for the city’s union and non-union shoe cutters. The party netted “a large number of applications for membership,” giving the local enough clout to present a price list – with a minimum wage scale – to several manufacturers in St. Paul.

All but one of those manufacturers agreed to the union’s terms, The Advocate reported. “A strike was called against the factory which held out, and in less than a day afterward this factory also conceded the demands of the union.”

The new price lists resulted in wage increases for the city’s shoe cutters of between $1.50 and $3 per week.

In 1987 Santa urged shoppers to buy union.

25 Years Ago: Carpenters targeted chain restaurant builders

A non-union construction firm building Bonanza Steakhouse restaurants across the Twin Cities suburbs found itself the target of an aggressive campaign of leafletting, picketing and consumer boycotts, staged by Carpenters Local 87 in the fall of 1987.

The campaign eventually led to victory for all Building Trades unions, the Dec. 14 Union Advocate reported, as Alexandria-based Don Getz Construction agreed to use union labor on all future construction jobs. Getz signed the agreement in a donut shop with Local 87 business representative Jerry Beedle, after approaching him during an action outside the Bonanza in Stillwater.

Beedle said the agreement marked a big victory in the trades’ battle to keep fast food and retail chains from building non-union. “If you allow one fast food operation to go non-union, then the danger is another and another and another will take the same route,” Beedle said.

Discount retailers don’t often care about the value in hiring construction workers who are better trained and more productive, he added, making public pressure necessary. “We use every negotiable way to try to get employers to the bargaining table, and when we have to, we use consumer pressure,” Beedle said. “We’ve found that’s been very effective.”

10 Years Ago: Bush, Pawlenty eyed privatization

Minnesota’s public employees were bracing themselves for privatization battles at the federal and state levels in December 2002, as Union Advocate Editor Michael Kuchta reported.

Republican executives in the White House (George W. Bush) and in St. Paul (Governor-elect Tim Pawlenty) were touting alleged cost savings taxpayers would realize by outsourcing public employees’ jobs to the private sector.

But public sector union leaders called the privatization push crony capitalism at its worst. “The Republican Party at the state level is doing the same thing the Republican Party is doing on the federal level – paying back their contributors,” said Jim Monroe, executive director of the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees.

As for the cost savings of privatization? U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum wasn’t buying what Bush was selling.

“While the stated goal of this move is cost savings, the administration has been unwilling to back up this claim with facts,” she said. Because private companies need to make a profit, she pointed out, they often achieve low bids only by undercutting wage, benefit and safety standards.

McCollum also raised fears of increased fraud and other bad behavior.

Filed Under: From the Archives Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

October 2012: Remember when farmers and union members worked together?

September 27, 2012 by

With families across the Midwest struggling to keep their farms out of bank foreclosure, union members rallied with farmers Oct. 10, 1987, at the Heartland Jobs with Justice rally on the Iowa State Fairgrounds.

About 40 Minnesotans were among the estimated 1,500 to 1,700 union members at the rally, Union Advocate Editor Barb Kucera reported from Des Moines, Iowa. And with 1988 caucuses just around the corner, presidential candidates Bruce Babbitt, Richard Gephardt and Paul Simon made the rounds.

Helen Waller, president of the National Save the Family Farm Coalition, thanked union members for working “shoulder to shoulder” in Washington to advance farm credit reform to help family farmers avoid foreclosure – a partnership sugar-beet farmers in Minnesota and North Dakota appear to have since forgotten.

“We appreciate so much having labor help us in our way toward just farm credit reform,” Waller said. “This underscores my belief that farmers and laborers are critically dependent on each other… Neither of us can prosper unless we prosper together.”

[The Union Advocate’s “This Month in the Archives” feature offers a look back at what our newspaper was reporting from 5 to 100 years ago. Our digital archives are online, searchable and free to anyone. Click here for access.]

• 50 Years Ago: Support for Hastings strikers. In October 1962 Twin Cities-area members of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union rallied around their sisters and brothers – but mostly sisters – of OCAW Local 6-717, on strike at Smead Manufacturing in Hastings since Aug. 27.

Supporters packed hundreds of cases of canned food and shipped them to striking workers and their families – so much food that it overflowed the double garage of Local 6-717 Secretary Helen Herrmann.

Between 450 and 500 workers at the office-products manufacturer went on strike after Smead refused to bargain in good faith on a first contract with their newly elected union representatives, according to the Oct. 11 Union Advocate.

More than a month after the strike began, Smead employees were still “standing fast, adhering to their principles, despite the threats of discharge for continuing a lawful strike, despite the economic pressures, despite the company’s efforts to resume operations with scabs who sulk through the picket lines,” The Advocate reported.

“Most of the strikers are women, but they don’t act like members of any so-called ‘weaker sex’ when it comes to standing up for their rights pertaining to job security and other issues which the company had declined to negotiate.”

The strike dragged on into December 1962, when union members narrowly voted to accept a two-year contract ending the strike. The contract called for a 13-cent wage increase retroactive to March 28.

• 75 Years Ago: St. Paul Airport expansion. The St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly rolled out a special committee in October 1937 to direct a “vigorous campaign of education” against a proposed bond issue to improve and expand the city’s airport. Notably, the opposition included the St. Paul Building and Construction Trades Council.

A front-page editorial in the Nov. 4 Advocate opposed the airport development as “a private utility at public expense for the benefit of wealthy, gouging air transportation lines.”

Labor opponents pointed out that St. Paul – already “rated as one of the most over-bonded cities” in the nation – had more pressing priorities than airport expansion, a project many considered a real estate boondoggle.

“Labor is suspicious of this whole proposition,” The Advocate reported. “The property adjacent to the present airport is largely delinquent and this bond issue is being used to bolster the owners’ hope of selling lands to the city which otherwise will be taken over by the state.”

The bond issue passed in a special election Nov. 16. The Assembly later censured two labor-endorsed elected officials for championing the airport proposal, and appointed a committee to monitor the airport project and publish its findings in The Advocate.

• 100 Years Ago: ALEC didn’t invent ‘model legislation.’ A committee of state senators, appointed to “carefully examine the subject of compensation for workers injured in the line of their employment,” held its first meeting in October 1912. Interested parties in attendance included representatives of the Minnesota Employers’ Association and liability insurance companies – but not organized labor.

The idea that union leaders would be left out of drafting Minnesota’s first workers’ compensation law didn’t sit well with The Advocate, which ran an indignant, front-page report in its Oct. 25 edition.

“So far as we have been able to learn, no notification was sent to any of the labor unions of the state or any of their representatives but E. G. Hall, president, and W. E. McEwen, secretary, of the State Federation of Labor,” The Advocate reported. “These gentlemen will, in all probability, attend the next meeting of the committee.”

With labor absent, George M. Gillette of the Employers’ Association “occupied the greater part of the time of the meeting,” The Advocate noted. The Employers’ Association presented committee members with a model bill they might use as a template in crafting the state’s workers’ compensation law. (Sound familiar?)

The Advocate picked through Gillette’s model bill, pointed out several concerns and offered this warning to union leaders:

“It is of the greatest importance that the labor unions of the state have persons present at [the next committee] meeting to present their views. Otherwise, they are likely to have to put up with a law not at all agreeable or helpful to them in any large measure. And they ought to get to work at once in the matter, in order that their views may be fully and clearly presented to the committee and pressed on its attention in the most forcible and emphatic way.”

Filed Under: From the Archives Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 2012: CIO sympathizers routed at statewide AFL convention in ‘37

September 12, 2012 by

Delegates to the Minnesota AFL-CIO’s 51st Constitutional Convention will gather in Rochester Sept. 16-18. It is certain to be a much more harmonious affair than the statewide labor convention held in Hibbing 75 years ago, when AFL delegates snuffed out an attempt by “CIO sympathizers” to gain a foothold in the organization.

“Minnesota Labor took a definite stand on the side of the American Federation of Labor” at the statewide convention in September 1937, the Minnesota Union Advocate reported in its Sept. 30 edition.

[The Union Advocate’s “This Month in the Archives” feature offers a look back at what our newspaper was reporting from 5 to 100 years ago. Our digital archives are online, searchable and free to anyone. Click here for access.]

Over accusations of “steamroller tactics,” four delegations “known to be either affiliated or openly partisan to the CIO” were denied credentials via a voice vote from the convention floor. Delegates proceeded to elect an executive council “that is 100 percent loyal to the A. F. of L.,” and they voted to prevent U.S. Rep. John Bernard, a member of the Farmer-Labor Party representing the Iron Range, from addressing the convention because of his work as an organizer for the CIO.

The upstart Committee for Industrial Organization had been founded from within the AFL two years earlier by unionists who favored increased organizing among industrial workers. At the 1937 state convention, CIO supporters called themselves “progressives,” but the AFL establishment branded them “sympathizers.”

“Every effort of those sympathetic to the CIO to get at least a luke-warm reception for their proposals was met by a united front that left no question as to the temper of the majority,” The Advocate reported.

Gov. Elmer Benson “made an eloquent plea for harmony” in his address to the convention, broadcast over several radio stations statewide.

“Divide and rule was the slogan of the Roman emperors. A division within the ranks of labor is the hope of those who seek the destruction of labor,” Benson said.

“The dark cloud on labor’s horizon today is the division which has developed within the ranks of the American labor movement. It is a division which comes from the top and not from the bottom – not from the rank and file. The rank and file will never permit a permanently divided labor movement.”

The CIO formalized its break with the AFL in 1938, holding its first convention and renaming itself the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The two bodies merged as the AFL-CIO in 1955.

• 100 Years Ago. A union member looking to wet his whistle probably avoided the Schwabel Bros. saloons downtown St. Paul. According to the report of a delegate to the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly during the body’s September 1912 meeting, Schwabel Bros had employed non-union bartenders.

That wasn’t the only tavern-related issue to come before the Assembly during the meeting. The Cabinet Makers’ delegate “reported three saloons in the city which were fitted up with non-union fixtures.” The matter was referred to the executive board for consideration.

• 50 Years Ago. Martin J. O’Donnell, president of St. Paul-based Building Laborers Local 132, urged the city’s unions to send a representative to the St. Paul Housing Clinic at St. Thomas College in September 1962. The clinic tackled the issue of affordable and safe housing for residents of St. Paul.

The interest of Building Trades unions in such a project “can be taken for granted,” O’Donnell said. “But it would be short-sighted indeed for officers and members of unions engaged in other lines of business or industry to take the position that they don’t have an equally important stake in this matter.”

Working families, he said, should be concerned about the quality of housing facilities a community offers its citizens, particularly for young families and the elderly.

• 25 Years Ago. With President Ronald Reagan seeking approval from Congress to funnel more aid to rebels in war-torn Nicaragua, delegates to the Minnesota AFL-CIO convention in September 1987 approved a resolution urging peace in Central America – and calling on the national AFL-CIO to lobby Congress to reject Reagan’s request.

The resolution passed after delegates challenged the ruling of the convention chair, Minnesota AFL-CIO President Dan Gustafson, that the resolution ran contrary to national AFL-CIO policy, Union Advocate Editor Barb Kucera reported.

“The AFL-CIO does not support an end to U.S. aid to the Contras unless the Soviet Union and Cuba end their aid to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Gustafson said.

“After the ruling of the chair was challenged, Secretary-Treasurer Bernard Brommer took the gavel. The challenge to the chair was upheld on a voice vote of the delegates, and the resolution was passed on a voice vote.”

• 10 Years Ago. Two years after workers at Dakota Premium Foods voted to form a union, the workers’ bargaining committee finally reached a tentative agreement with the South St. Paul meatpacking plant Sept. 30, 2002.

The contract included pay raises ranging from $2 to $4.50 an hour, raising hourly wages at the plant to between $10 and $13.50. It also included a $1,000 signing bonus, a grievance and arbitration process and seniority rights.

But the difficult process Dakota Premium workers endured to get their first contract provided an “example of what is wrong with U.S. labor law,” Advocate Editor Michael Kuchta wrote.

“The company tried to overturn election results, then continually delayed bargaining by filing multiple legal appeals of rulings that went against the company. Company negotiators finally began bargaining with workers on Aug. 15.”

St. Paul’s newest union went into action at “A Fair of the Heart” Sept. 13, 1987. Members of International Cornhuskers of America Local 1987 shucked thousands of ears of corn for the crowd of 45,000 at the annual United Way event. Pictured above are Steelworker Nyals Kittel (left) and Minnesota AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Bernard Brommer. At right, AFSCME member Lucille Robinson and Minnesota AFL-CIO Community Service and Education Director Christine Matuzek.

Filed Under: From the Archives Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

August 2012: Electrical Workers Local 110 formed a century ago

August 1, 2012 by

It’s not a “golden anniversary” – that would be 110 years – but Local 110 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers will turn 100 years old this month, and members planned to celebrate July 28 with a picnic on Harriet Island.

The St. Paul-based union traces its roots to a division that took place in July 1912, when members of Electrical Workers Union No. 23 (now IBEW Local 23) voted to allow inside electrical workers to form their own local if they wished to do so.

[The Union Advocate’s “This Month in the Archives” feature offers a look back at what our newspaper was reporting from 5 to 100 years ago. Our digital archives are online, searchable and free to anyone. Click here for access.]

The split was amicable, as the Minnesota Union Advocate reported in its July 26, 1912, edition. “The membership of this union has increased so rapidly and so extensively during the last few months that the advisability of dividing it into two unions, a linemen’s and an inside wiremen’s union, has been seriously considered,” Editor Cornelius Guiney wrote.

Inside Electrical Workers’ Union No. 110 held its first membership meeting Aug. 16 at the St. Paul Trades & Labor Federation Hall. The new union, according to Guiney’s report in The Advocate’s Aug. 16 edition, boasted “seventy-five members and an all-conquering spirit of determination to get every inside electrical worker in the city on its roster.”

Local 110 Press Secreatry A.J. Velat told The Advocate the wiremen “intend to make their union one of the best of their craft in the history of St. Paul,” adding that they already have “struck a winning pace” with a “spirit of enthusiasm that stops at no obstacle.”

“If all the members stick and work, as they seem determined to do, there can be no doubt of early and great success,” Velat said.

One hundred years later, Local 110 members are still sticking, still working and, without a doubt, still succeeding. Congratulations!

• 75 Years Ago. In August 1937, beauty salons were a hotbed for organizing drives in St. Paul.

Ellen’s Beauty Shop, located on Cedar Street downtown, was the target of an ongoing action staged by members of the Beauty Workers Unit, a newly formed arm of Journeymen Barbers Local 31. The Advocate reported Aug. 12 that Ellen’s initially refused to recognize the local, prompting six beauty workers to picket outside the shop and the Journeymen Barbers to pull their working member from the salon.

Perhaps after watching what happened at his neighbor’s salon, Allan Goldman, owner of the Sha-Ri beauty salon at 6th and Cedar, “intimidated his employees and compelled them to sign individual contracts with him in addition to signing a statement … in which the employees declared they were satisfied with their employer,” Local 31 reported in the The Advocate’s Aug. 26 edition.

Goldman went so far as to seek an injunction to stop picketing outside Sha-Ri. “It was set up in the complaint that pickets were intimidating prospective customers, using abusive language, blocking the entrance to the shop and in other ways interfering with the conduct of the business,” The Advocate reported.

Goldman withdrew his complaint after a judge ruled picketing could continue – provided the wording on picketers’ signs was truthful. Court battles between Sha-Ri and the union would continue, however, for the next two years.

• 50 Years Ago. The nation was mired in an “economic lag” in August 1962. Unemployment had been stuck above 5 percent for 57 consecutive months. The Union Advocate’s Aug. 23 edition trumpeted the AFL-CIO’s plan to achieve full employment: a 35-hour workweek.

The nation’s largest labor federation urged its affiliate unions to push a 35-hour workweek at the bargaining table, and called on Congress and President Kennedy to pass an “amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act to require that all time worked in excess of 35 hours a week, in operations in interstate commerce, be paid double time.”

• 25 Years Ago. Unions representing workers at Continental Baking Co., maker of Wonder Bread, Twinkies and other products, rallied inside Minneapolis City Hall in August 1987, protesting the city’s role in the company’s decision to cease operations in the Twin Cities.

The city purchased Continental’s plant at 1200 Third Ave. South to make room for construction of the Convention Center. The company announced it would not relocate in the Twin Cities, displacing more than 100 workers, members of five local unions.

In the Aug. 24 Union Advocate, union leaders warned the decision would impact the freshness of Continental’s products.

“We want people to realize this is a fresh product made here in Minnesota,” said Bakery Local 22 steward Dave Bentley, who handed out Twinkies to the large group at the rally. “If they close the plant down it won’t be made fresh here. It will be made in another state.”

• 10 Years Ago. The Minneapolis Convention Center hosted 3,500 delegates to the American Postal Workers Union’s biennial convention in August 2002. When Vice President Dick Cheney dropped into town to help Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Pawlenty raise money at the Hilton Hotel, most of those delegates were waiting to greet him.

“Postal workers engulfed the sidewalks around the block and across the street from the Hilton, chanting ‘Cheney No! Union Yes!’ and ‘Cheney is a crook!’” Union Advocate intern Hannah Clark reported. “In a point missed by most media reports, the protesters outside clearly outnumbered the guests inside.”

• 5 Years Ago. Among the 13 people killed when the Interstate 35-W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed Aug 1, 2007, was Greg Jolstad, a member of Operating Engineers Local 49 working to resurface the bridge at the time it collapsed. Members of AFSCME and the Laborers also were working on the bridge that day.

In the days that followed the disaster, union leaders joined the chorus of voices calling on policy makers to reevaluate the public’s level of investment in infrastructure.

“It’s been talked about for years – something’s going to happen like a bridge falls down,” said Jim Brady, president of the Laborers District Council of Minnesota and North Dakota. “It’s not popular to spend money on this stuff. It tends to get ignored. Then something like this happens and you can’t ignore it.”

Filed Under: From the Archives Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,