Oakland General Strike of 1946

OAKLAND GENERAL STRIKE OF 1946. The last of five citywide general strikes by U.S. workers in 1946, the Oakland strike grew out of a walkout by about a thousand members of the Department and Specialty Store Employees Union Local 1265, most of them women, against two downtown department stores. The strike started because large majorities of workers at the two stores had signed union cards, but management refused to bargain with their representatives and fired one woman worker who had signed a union card. In response, the workers set up picket lines and initiated an action that paralyzed production in the city for almost four days.

Non-union truckers from Los Angeles tried to cross union picket lines and carry twelve truckloads of merchandise into the Hastings’ Department Store in Oakland early on Monday Morning, 2 December 1946. Strikers tried to block driveways in front of the store, but a squad of Oakland police officers escorted the trucks past the picket lines.

The Alameda County Labor Council of the American Federation of Labor officially endorsed a general strike to begin Tuesday morning, 3 December, a day after most workers walked off the job on their own. Eventually more than ten thousand people joined in the general work stoppage. By Monday evening groups of workers began closing virtually all of the businesses in the city except for pharmacies and grocery stores. Strikers allowed anyone to leave the downtown area, but they allowed only workers with union cards to enter it. A carnival mood prevailed as strikers permitted taverns to remain open, but dragged jukeboxes outside into the street.

Twenty thousand workers attended a mass meeting on Tuesday night at the Oakland Auditorium, while thousands more waited outside in the rain, listening to the proceedings on loudspeakers. Representatives from 142 unions voiced support for the retail clerks’ strike demands and went on record against police intervention in the strike.

During the next thirty-six hours, workers took diverse actions to enforce their control over the city. They formed patrols to prevent looting, monitored grocery store sales to prevent hoarding, and imposed price controls to prevent price gouging. Five thousand strikers massed in front of the struck department stores and celebrated their control over the downtown area.

Newspaper editorials condemned the strike as “unrestrained” and “juvenile,” while Oakland’s mayor called the work stoppage an example of mob rule. International Brotherhood of Teamsters national president Dave Beck condemned the strike as “nothing but a revolution,” and ordered his members to get back to work. Oakland’s Teamsters remained out.

On Thursday morning, 5 December, the city manager reached an agreement with Labor Council officials to end the standoff. The city pledged to refrain from using police officers to shepherd strikebreakers across picket lines, while labor leaders pledged to end the general strike. Dissident rank-and-file strikers protested against the agreement because they felt it did nothing to help the striking clerks win their initial demands, but after sporadic picketing and demonstrating on Thursday and Friday the strike finally came to a close. Although women workers initiated the strike, men from unions across the labor movement quickly took control of the insurgency, pushing women to the sidelines and in the process squandering their agency and leadership potential. While the working class at large made some gains from the strike, the women at the center of it stayed on strike for five months until finally succumbing and returning to work with no real improvement in their condition.

Besides paralyzing production in the Oakland area for almost four days, the strike’s 100,000 worker participants forced the city police department to assume a more neutral stance in labor-management disputes and they gained a greater sense of the community of interests binding them together. In the aftermath of the strike, four pro-labor candidates won election to the Oakland City Council. In addition, the general strike contributed to the nationwide militancy characterizing American workplaces in 1946 and 1947 as the country witnessed the largest wave of strikes in its history.

Glass, Fred B. From Mission to Microchip: A History of the California Labor Movement. Oakland: University of California Press. 2016, 280-291.

Lipsitz, George. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1994, 148-152.

Loomis, Erik. A History of America in Ten Strikes. New York: New Press. 2018, 135-155.

Rhomberg, Chris. No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2004, 104-110.