This dissertation describes the genesis of a new labor movement. In the 1930s, radical workers created industrial unions because the craft unions did not respond to their needs. A grass roots phenomenon that eventually had systemic implications, working class militancy caused the break between AFL and CIO that opened the councils of organized labor to the unskilled. The 1930s history of CIO locals in New Orleans provides a backdrop, but the focus of the study is on the rank and file. Archival material contributed the viewpoint of contemporary CIO organizers who wrote from New Orleans. Labor newspapers and the African-American Louisiana Weekly gave further detail. The National Archives yielded the records of investigators from the Departments of Labor and Justice. The writings of Charles Logan, South West Regional Chair of the NLRB, furnished further insight The dissertation analyzes the political environment of 1930s labor conflict in New Orleans: the New Deal and its implications, the popular front and the conservative red-baiters, the political machine and its alliance with the AFL. Real representative unions promised worker control, but the employers fought hard to protect their power. Craft leaders and petty officials also defended their stake in the system. Solidarity across the lines of race and skill gave the workers their strength, but the new unions caused intense factional competition in the upper echelons of labor's own institutions The narrative begins in the 1880s with interracial cooperation on the Crescent City waterfront and continues through the radical strikes of the late 1920s, the rise of company unions in 1933 and the effect of consent elections after the Wagner Act. Grass roots activism took center stage in the labor movement after 1935. This study describes the challenge the workers themselves posed to several AFL maritime unions in 1936 and the new unions they created, particularly the CIO locals that emerged in several fields in New Orleans. A study of class, race and human relations, the work also presents the experience of the individuals, the violence CIO organizers endured and the contracts they signed in six industries / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_23418 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Contributors | Ambrose, Edith Rosepha (Author), Mohr, Clarence Lee (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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