Toledo 1934: How strikers defeated court injunctions

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Essential reading for today's labor activists In order for striking airline workers to find the way toward a course of action that can win, it is helpful to look back to some of the great victories of workers' struggles in U.S. labor history.

The Toledo Auto-Lite strike provides timely insight into the class-struggle methods that led to the construction of fighting mass industrial unions that brought America's giant corporations to their knees.

Together with the Minneapolis Teamsters and the San Francisco maritime strikes that same year, Toledo paved the way for labor victories that won all American workers big improvements in their living standards. These gains are essentially still intact despite the takeback campaign of the U.S. employing class.

The speech reprinted here was sent to the commemoration rally of the 50th anniversary of the Toledo Auto-Lite strike. The rally took place in Toledo on June 3, 1984.

The entire speech was published in the July 1984 issue of Socialist Action. For this edition, Selander adds, "In writing this speech, I checked my memory against accounts of the strike written by James P. Cannon. Credit for some of the best formulations in my speech belongs to this great socialist popularizer and champion of the working class."-The Editors •By TED SELANDER Brothers and sisters, the key to an understanding of the magnificent Auto-Lite strike in 1934 is that it was a strike won on the picket line by a community uprising. I repeat: on the picket line by a community uprising.

Toledo was in the grip of a tremendous popular upsurge of anger at the greedy bosses who hate to give their wage slaves a few cents more in their pay.

This was 1934 B.T.-B.T. meaning before television. As a matter of fact, it was before all the social gains which we fought for and won in the '30s—before unemployment pay, before food stamps, before social security, before the CIO, and before Medicare, etc.

After four years of depression, the Toledo workers were in an angry mood because of the bank failures, the idle factories, the overstocked granaries, and the 15 million unemployed. For four years we had poverty in the midst of plenty. Even the establishment was losing confidence in themselves and their system.

Rank and file is muzzled I don't think [as James P. Cannon pointed out] there was any real difference between the Toledo Auto-Lite strikers and the workers TITI involved in many of the lost strikes in the United States at that time. In practically every strike, the rank and file always displayed courage. The difference was in the leadership and their strategy and tactics. In nearly every strike the militancy of the rank and file was muzzled, many times snuffed out from the top.

The leaders are tricked by the courts, the labor boards, the mediators, the government, and the media to shift the fight from the picket line to the court and conference room. But all the while, the company keeps hiring scabs to take the strikers' jobs.

In the Auto-Lite strike, the company was hiring scabs by the hundreds and claimed they now had 1800 workers. We understood what was happening. We knew that the strike was dying and doomed. Only some bold, dramatic action could revive it, and even then it would have to be followed up with plenty of action This pamphlet by labor veteran Jake Cooper examines the main lessons of the 1985-86 strik against Geo. A. Hormel and Co. It focuses on the role of the company, the government, the courts, and the labor bureaucrat in helping to break the strike. It also examines the crucial questions of strike strategy employed by the P-9 leadership.

Order now! $1.50 plus $.85 for handling. Socialist Action, 3435 Army St., suite 308, San Francisco, CA 94110. and support to give the company an all-out fight. And nothing short of an all-out fight would do.

As you probably know, we wrote a public letter to Judge Stuart telling him that we were going to violate his anti-labor injunction and call for mass picketing. By mass picketing we didn't mean a few hundred, we meant thousands. Could we get thousands down to that picket line? Well, that was the $64 question.

We had spent the previous year organizing what some qualified observer said was the largest and most militant unemployed organization in the country-the Lucas County Unemployed League. We had held meetings and spoken in every section of the city and in the townships; organized countless marches, demonstrations, sit-ins; stopped evictions; won cash relief with a relief strike; and had held many, many other actions.

Because of this vast experience, we felt sure that we knew the temper of the Toledo workers. We felt we had a good chance to be the fuse that could ignite a spirit of solidarity with the Auto-Lite strikers to get union recognition and perhaps even win the first union contract in the auto plants of Toledo.

Workers violate injunction

On the first day that we violated the four individuals. That's right-just four. We were arrested, jailed, convicted and let out on bail and warned not to return to the picket line. But we told the judge that we were going back. And we did picking up some 50 pickets on the way.

After that, there were a series of arrests, each one with a greater amount of pickets— first 46, then 108, and in between many smaller numbers. Every time we went back from the courts and jail, the picket lines kept growing steadily until on May 23 there were 10,000 reported on the street in front of the plant.

Now when you have a mass picket line of thousands, it enables you to counter the company's offensive moves. For example, they brought out a high-pressure hose and turned a stream of water on us. But it didn't take very long for a couple of hundred pickets to take the hose away and turn the water on them.

Many times the police and deputies brutally clubbed the pickets; but before they could shove them into a patrol wagon enough pickets rushed in and grabbed the picket away and often gave them a taste of their own clubs.

You know that every good union has two educational committees: one to arrange lectures of all kinds and the other to educate scabs who won't attend classes.

Half the employees at the Auto-Lite were women who were among the very best strikers we had. A couple of days after the National Guard came in, the women grabbed a scab, took him into an alley, and stripped every bit of clothing off of him except his tie and shoes. Then they marched him, naked as a jaybird, up and down the downtown streets.

Next day the papers carried a large picture of him on the front page, but they had their artist broaden and lengthen the tie to hide the family jewels. You can bet that picture discouraged a lot of scabs, but it got a big round of applause from the unionists in Ohio.

Strikers fight National Guard The Auto-Lite strikers battled first the police, then the company guards and deputies, and finally the National Guard. The first day the Guard came in they fired without warning at the unarmed strikers, killing two and wounding 25.

After those murders, the enraged strikers fought the guard for six days and nights— returning again and again to face tear gas and vomit gas, bayonet charges, and even rifle fire.

During lulls in the battle, we stood on boxes educating the guardsmen about the issues in the strike and how they were being used against the workers. By the way, the casualties were not all one-sided. The hospitals were patching up not only strikers but police, deputies, and the National Guardsmen.

On June 4, the company surrendered and signed on the dotted line a union contract giving the strikers priority on jobs, a 5percent wage increase, and other concessions; agreed to withdraw all court charges and to pay all court costs. The logjam in Toledo had finally been broken, and 19 auto plants were organized before the year ended. The road was cleared to make Toledo a union town.

As a participant in the Auto-Lite strike of 1934, I appreciate this opportunity to join with you in this 50th anniversary celebration. It is a credit to all of you who organized this anniversary to keep alive the memory of labor's untapped strength as demonstrated in the Auto-Lite strike and all the other battles which prove that in unions we are strong.

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