Vol. 77/No. 30      August 19, 2013

BY FARRELL DOBBS
Around mid-June 1938 the North Central Area Committee fought a brief skirmish with long distance trucking firms operating out of Omaha, Nebraska. The clash was only a prelude to a long, bitter struggle that was to erupt there a bit later. To explain why this situation developed, a short sketch of the background is needed.

Omaha lies on the west bank of the Missouri river, opposite Council Bluffs, Iowa. It is the industrial and commercial center of Nebraska. As a transportation hub for the surrounding region, the city is also an operational base for several railroads and truck lines.

In the 1930s Omaha had a population of around 200,000. Of its 17,000-odd industrial workers, about 6,000 were employed in packinghouses and some 4,000 in trucking. The conditions under which they toiled were exemplified by a Chamber of Commerce boast that capitalists could operate with “low labor costs.”

To have cheap labor it was necessary to maintain open shop standards. This required an unremitting anti-union campaign, which was carried out by the Omaha Business Men’s Association (a counterpart of the Minneapolis Citizens Alliance). In 1919, for example, the Association had been instrumental in viciously smashing a packinghouse strike, and as recently as 1935 it had broken a strike of streetcar workers. A general anti-union weapon had been devised for such purposes in the form of a state-enacted anti-picketing law, which declared in its key provision:

“It shall be unlawful …to loiter about, beset, patrol or picket in any manner the place of business …or any street, alley, road, highway or other place in the vicinity …for the purposes of inducing …others not to trade with, buy from, work for, or have business dealings with [any firm or corporation].”

These brutal policies had long held the Omaha labor movement down to little more than a few small craft unions of skilled workers. Previous attempts to organize truck drivers in 1929, in 1931, and again in 1933, had been defeated. As a result the average wage in trucking was twenty-five cents an hour. The usual work week was eighty hours.

Although a charter existed for General Drivers Local 554, it had remained more or less a paper union, dominated by right-wing officials in the Omaha Central Labor Union (AFL), and utterly lacking in organizational initiative. This was criminal neglect. Conditions were rotten ripe for a membership campaign in the industry, as the workers themselves demonstrated in the spring of 1937. One day they simply launched a spontaneous strike against Watson Brothers Transportation Company, headquartered in Omaha. Long after the event Louis Miller, who emerged as one of the Local 554 leaders, wrote a letter to me describing how their first walkout began. …

“We came to an agreement that the best way to get our fight going was to tie up Watson’s, where we worked. Tom would get the men lined up on the Chicago end of Watson’s runs. Lee and Fritz would take care of Lincoln. John, Earl and I would tie up the company’s Kansas City terminal.

“The night we tied up Watson in Kansas City, the first driver who had been called for a run was Bert [Albert S.] Parker. He had a hot-freight load of bakery goods that was supposed to be in Omaha by 3 a.m. When we told him about the strike he refused to pull out the rig and everyone else on the dock also quit work.

“That’s the kind of guts the men had, with no union behind us.

“Tom Watson, who had charge there, told us we couldn’t do that to him. We answered: ‘They ain’t rolling, Watson.’ Then we held a meeting on the street to decide what to do next.

“We called Omaha to report that the Kansas City terminal was shut down. Then we called the Teamster business agent at our end, O.B. Enloe of Local 41. The first thing he said when he came down was: ‘I have been waiting for this for over a year.’

“About 3 a.m. Mace Brown, president of the Omaha Central Labor Union, called and I talked to him. He said we should bring the trucks to Omaha and join Local 554, which he called ‘his union.’ I didn’t know Brown from Adam’s green fox, so I asked to talk to one of the Watson drivers. I don’t recall who it was I talked to, but he said it was okay to come on in because they had Omaha tied up and were about to join Local 554.”

Developments similar to those described by Miller had also been taking place at other Watson terminals. Once the Omaha road drivers were all back in town, they marched in a body to the Labor Temple. There they joined Local 554 and Mace Brown helped to arrange a meeting at which they elected new local officers. After that Watson and the other trucking employers agreed to negotiate with the union, so the strikers returned to their jobs.

In the talks that followed the bosses offered little and stalled a lot. Things dragged along until the angry workers again launched a spontaneous walkout, this time at several trucking companies. The new tie-up, which lasted about two weeks, was conducted in defiance of the state’s anti-picketing law, and it was very effective. Finally, on June 16, 1937, the bosses gave in. They signed a contract providing a minimum wage of forty-five cents an hour, well above the previous average rate for the city, along with other concessions. They also agreed to reinstate eleven workers who had been fired for union activity.

It was the first strike victory in the recollection of the oldest Omaha union worker.