Allis-Chalmers Strike

ALLIS-CHALMERS STRIKE. The strike that took place at Allis-Chalmers in 1945 and its aftermath of repression marked a new phase of conservative counterattack against the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), aimed specifically at Communist labor leaders and indirectly aided by CIO chiefs themselves. Workers at Allis-Chalmers, in West Allis (Milwaukee), Wisconsin, had sought to organize themselves, with limited success, until they received a charter from the United Automobile Workers (UAW)-CIO as Local 248. Throughout World War II, the company attempted to provoke a strike, and made quite clear that they would force a strike, to undo the gains, when the war ended. Unwilling to bargain with the union’s Left leadership and rejecting arbitration, the company succeeded in promoting a nearly unprecedented campaign of harassment by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, anticommunist congressional investigators, media witch-hunters, and other conservatives against the strikers. Anticommunist unionists in Wisconsin, including some UAW locals led by Walter Reuther supporters, for a time refused to supply strike support.

After eleven months the strike failed, nearly destroying Local 248 as a result of the firing of almost one hundred of its leaders. Harold Christoffel (1912-1991), the local’s first president and most noted public Left figure, was later sent to prison for perjury before the Taft-Hartley Committee. The strike and its defeat—spuriously described by Walter Reuther as a “political” strike in consonance with European Communist-led strikes—delivered a serious blow to the Left in the UAW. Although progressive unions had lent their support to the strike and its leaders (and although Local 248 itself managed to rebuild under Taft-Hartley), the workers had become strategically weaker in the face of the increasingly coordinated repression.

Christoffel v. Wisconsin Employment Relations Board, June 1943. https://casetext.com/case/christoffel-v-wisconsin-er-board