2 weeks Ago By By Scott Sosebee Contributing Writer
In today’s modern world it is often difficult to believe the strides that our society and economy has made in regard to worker’s rights, and although many of those hard-earned rights are under attack today protections for the nation’s laborers remain much more rigorous than they were in the years before World War II. The central tenet of any labor rights movement has always been that workers should have a right to bargain for better working conditions, wages, and benefits. A person’s labor is their value, and they should have a right to negotiate the conditions of that labor just as a supplier, for example, negotiates the conditions of providing any service—material, consultancy, or transport just to name a few—to any industry or company.
In order to achieve maximum value for that labor, workers should be able to collectively bargain—in other words negotiate as a large group instead of in individual transactions—which amplifies their power against capital owners. Without that, wages, conditions, benefits, and safety are all at the whim of the margin of profit, which capital will always seek to maximize even if it means the exploitation of the very workers it employs. What that means is that the worker must also maximize whatever power it may have, and since its most valuable asset to the employer is its labor, then the most vital power workers have is the right to—and again, collectively—withhold that labor.
In other words, the strike is the tool laborers can wield in negotiations. Factory and other commercial concerns in the United States understood this potential power, which is why they continually—in the past and still today—make moves to end, or at least lessen, the right to collectively bargain. For the most part, such a campaign against collective bargaining had been effective in the U.
S. until the reform movement of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression. Ultimately, with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 workers won federal government protection and legislation that guaranteed them the right to organize and, most significantly, collectively bargain.
Still, despite such protections, resistance to such legal protections among management in many industries was strong, which led to a wave of strikes and confrontations in the late 1930s. One of those came from an unlikely place, in an unlikely industry, and led by an unlikely group of workers. The San Antonio Pecan Shellers strike in 1938 was a walk off by the Latina women who were the predominant laborers of the industry to protest the dreadfully low pay and abhorrent conditions they worked under.
While, in the end, the workers essentially lost the fight, the battle they waged began to change the social order and politics of the city and brought a unique leader, Emma Tenayuca to national prominence. Pecans are a popular nut, and in the 1930s the production of pecans was an important industry in Central Texas. The Southern Pecan Company was one of the most prominent of those firms and one the largest—and most powerful—businesses in San Antonio.
The company’s most intense labor was in the shelling of pecans, and it employed mostly women of Mexican descent to perform those tasks. It was a vital source of income for these working-class women and their households. These female workers and the income they earned—many of them first generation immigrants from Mexico—were often the difference for their families from destitution.
Despite being the vital cog in the Southern Companies profits, these women were poorly paid and worked under long, grueling conditions. The work was tedious and played havoc with these women’s hands and fingers. The pay was meager, but when the Depression hit in the early 1930s Southern Pecan lowered these worker’s wages to even lower levels, and at the same time increased working hours.
Under Franklin Roosevelt the United States government began to pass legislation and also use federal oversight to end the exploitation of workers in many industries. One such attempt came as early as 1933 when the National Recovery Administration, working with an industry collective, the National Pecan Shellers Association, set an industrial code that called for shellers to receive $11.00 a week.
But, that standard applied only for men; the code for women, on the other hand was just $7.00 a week—and women formed the bulk of the workforce. Such a wage was still a paltry sum, even for the 1930s, but it was too much for Julius Seligman, who was one of the owners of Southern Pecan, so he pulled out of the Association and instituted is own pay scale of about four cents an hour.
Early attempts to organize against Seligman and Southern Pecan, under the banner of the Texas Pecan Shellers Union, were never effective, although the shellers had struck two times in the 1930s, once in 1934 and again in 1935. The situation began to change in 1938 when labor activist Emma Tenayuca emerged. Tenayuca, who at the time was a committed communist as well as a labor activist, was a fiery and determined labor leader.
Her commitment to communism lessened her effectiveness among some workers, but her gritty approach and passionate speeches led her to be called “La Pasionaria,” which the female shellers found attractive. In January 1938, thousands of shellers in San Antonio walked off the job and Tenayuca became the leader and face of the action. The walk out came when companies lowered the wages from their already paltry levels.
In support, the Texas Pecan Shellers Unions announced their support for the action. There were over 12,000 workers in San Antonio in the shelling industry, and almost half—almost all women—went on strike. The affected businesses faced the potential of an almost complete shutdown.
That led the city of San Antonio to enter the fracas on behalf of not the workers but management. Police Chief Owen Kilday sent his officers out ostensibly to quell violence against both sides, but the reality was that they served as strikebreakers for the companies. He arrested two officials of one of the Pecan Shellers union and also Emma Tenayuca.
Kilday used Tenayuca’s support for communism and the Union’s “subversion” to justify the arrest. San Antonio Mayor C.K.
Quin also blasted the strike and particularly Tenayuca in the press. Kilday sent his officers in to forcefully break up picket lines, often with tear gas and “billy clubs.” Hundreds were arrested and jailed, and although Texas governor James Allred protested the actions he took no direct action by sending in state officers.
The strikers sought an injunction from the district court to stop Kilday’s heavy hand, but Judge S.C. Tayloe denied their motion.
Ultimately, after Tenayuca stepped down as leader and through Governor Allred’s pleadings, the strikers demands for higher wages went before an arbitrator. The workers returned to work awaiting the decision. They should not have bothered.
The arbitrator essentially denied ever demand the worker’s made and gave the companies what they had originally sought. The strike was a loss for the workers, but it also changed the San Antonio political scene. Mexican Americans in San Antonio had previously been a fractured and easily exploited group in the Alamo City.
But the treatment of the strikers led to a backlash against the largely White establishment political machine in the city. Their new political voice generally supported progressive causes and while not immediately successful, eventually the San Antonio establishment could no longer ignore the power of the sheer numbers of voters of Mexican descent in their city. The 1950s and 1960s would see the fruits of that courageous stand by female shellers when a number of Mexican Americans, such as Henry B.
Gonzalez, rose to power in San Antonio. The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is an associate professor of history at SFA and the executive director of the association.
He can be contacted at [email protected] ; www.easttexashistorical.
org . If you enjoy Dr. Sosebee’s weekly columns, SFA Press has published a new book with a compilation of his material over the last ten years.
It is titled What Is It About Texas?. You can purchase the work through Texas A&M Press Consortium at tinyurl.com/SosebeeBook .
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