We Have Fed You All A Thousand Years: National Biscuit Strike
In the June 19, 1930 issue of the Daily Worker, Sam Weissman, general secretary of the Food Workers Industrial Union, wrote that the successful organization of food workers could not be done by simply organizing the corner bakeries and cafeterias that had until then been the union’s main focus. A shift towards food manufacturing was necessary. “Our orientation must be towards the building of a national Food and Packing House Workers Industrial Union” he wrote, and it must “start immediately.”
He continues, asking “what kind of a revolutionary union can we build in such a period when we totally neglect to see the hundreds of thousands of workers struggling under the oppression of the capitalist class, when we base our struggles on those workers in the small bakeries, restaurants and cafeterias?”
In an attempt to tackle larger food manufacturing shops in New York City, the FWIU started holding open-air meetings every Friday at noon outside the factory gates of the National Biscuit Company (now known more commonly as Nabisco). These meetings attempted to outline plans for organization, gather contacts, and were often used to mobilize Nabisco workers to join other Communist Party-led demonstrations and initiatives.
The following is an excerpt from the book We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years: New York City Food Worker Organizing, 1912-1937. It describes the 1935 National Biscuit Company strike that temporarily shut down several factories, including what was, at the time, the largest bakery in the world. It describes in detail the factory conditions that led to the strike, the strike activity and organizing methods, and eventually why the strike failed. To order a copy of the book, visit https://deadramones.bigcartel.com/product/we-have-fed-you-all-a-thousand-years
The National Biscuit factory, the largest bakery in the world and largest manufacturing plant in New York City when it opened on 15th Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan in 1899, employed 6,000 workers and opened with an extravagant procession featuring 112 horse-drawn bakery wagons, a platoon of mounted police and a myriad of odd-choice floats, including one of a ferris wheel with Uneeda Biscuit boxes for cars and another with a nine-foot parrot clutching a box of biscuits in its talons. Seven years later it expanded further when Nabisco moved their corporate headquarters from Chicago to New York. Oreos were invented at the New York factory in 1912. Taking up an entire city block, residents of NYC–or more likely tourists visiting NYC–may know this landmark today as Chelsea Market. Production levels were so high that a train line was installed that could pull right into the factory for deliveries of flour and sugar. Much as the biscuit factory itself transitioned into a slow-walking tourist hellscape, this train line is now the elevated walking path known as the High Line.
Just prior to the start of the weekly meetings, an attempted wage reduction was thwarted when workers walked out. The bosses rescinded the proposed cuts twenty minutes later, drawing the attention of FWIU organizers in the process. Soon afterwards, Nabisco laid off 174 workers in one week and forced countless others to take “two week vacations without pay,” according to the Daily Worker. The highest paid workers were canned and replaced with workers at a much lower rate. Those that kept their jobs had their hours cut, but not the workload, forcing them to work dangerously fast. Management spread layoff rumors so regularly that “workers are being thrown into a panic.” On the walls of each department posters in big blue lettering read “what are YOU doing to increase Uneeda sales and thus protect your job?” As if it were the responsibility of the young woman folding hundreds of biscuit boxes an hour to “increase Uneeda sales.” Instead, according to the Daily Worker, “workers have expressed a willingness to struggle'' and were “realizing the need for the Food Workers Industrial Union.”
Organizers encouraged workers to air their grievances by writing to Labor Unity and to create shop bulletins to reach workers in other departments. At least two workers were reported as speaking at the open-air meetings, which were often attacked by police.
One Nabisco worker wrote into the Daily Worker’s Letters from the Shops column to tell the story of the “employment manager, as he calls himself.” The “biggest grafter in the place,” the manager would take bribes in exchange for job placement–”if you give him a nice big lump sum for the job, you will be sitting pretty and if you don’t, why, no job for you.” The problem, the letter-writer asserts, is that those who come looking for a job don’t have the money to buy one. The manager also reportedly took great advantage of workers “that he thinks can’t speak English very well and won’t tell the big boss on him.”
Another worker followed up thanking the Daily Worker for letting “everyone know what a grafter he is.” Adding, “he is positively rotten to poor people.” The second letter also reveals how the “straw boss” treats workers who come back to work after taking a sick day. “He puts them through the third degree,” the worker writes. “You would think he was a doctor, the questions he asks, and it is terribly embarrassing for women.
“Nerve of him, he should not have anything to do with women’s cases that are out sick. And another thing, he does not know how to talk to women.”
In a diary entry from June 21, 1928, National Biscuit Company worker Anna Saitta describes a typical day in the factory. “The heat is terrible. The foreman was every five minutes hollering at us today, because we couldn’t work fast. Our fingers were bleeding from the hot crackers that stick to the pans, and nearly every one of us had to go for plaster to the nurse. One girl fainted in Building A.” Saitta goes on to describe how “Spanish Mary” was fired “in spite of the busy season, because she danced the Tango during lunch,” calling the foreman that fired her “that old joy-killer” and adding that “this made us more sad than any sad story.”
The women workers described in Saitta’s diary entry represent a broad immigrant ethnic background, and are genially referred to by their ethnicity–”Jewish Shirley,” “Irish Gertie,” “German Erna,” “Lithuanian Rose,” “Irish Rose,” “Irish Mary,” “Italian Mary,” “Slovak Mary,” “Jewish Mary,” “Spanish Mary,” “fat Mary,” “skinny Mary.” You get the idea..
Another entry from February 28, 1928 titled A Day at NBC College–what her group of work friends called the Uneeda Biscuit factory–gives a glimpse of the life of a New York food factory worker. In a dream, Anna and “Slovak Mary” are walking near snow covered mountains, eating bread together and telling each other stories. “The mountains were white, all white and the sun shone upon them bright, the trees looked like faery kings with their glittering icey and snowy crown.” Just as Mary was about to begin singing to her, Anna is abruptly awakened by the “accursed disturber of dreams, you tyrant alarm clock.” Shutting it off, she murmurs to herself “phooey what a life” while trying to recall what she was dreaming, but being late for work she has “no time to think of it,” adding “eight hours spent in a factory are too much.”
Her room is dark as she gets ready for work. It’s raining outside. “Whenever I look through the window in the morning it’s raining, snowing or both at the same time,” she writes. Walking downstairs and towards the train station, shops are closed and each displays a clock reading a slightly different time, increasing her anxiety about being late
“At last arrived to the station, took out my nickel and deposited it with a melancholy look in the box. Goodbye my nickel I’ll never see you again. Clock, time? Seven-thirty. Maybe I’ll have enough time to eat breakfast. Train is coming. Second Avenue elevated. Crowded. People lean on me, I lean on them. They look at me with wrath, I look at them with disgust. We all with the others should get off, in order we could get a seat. I look around in the train. God, how many people live on this earth. Too many, too many.” A woman gets on at Mott Avenue and “leans on me, yawns and sighs.” Anna tries to “push her away,” finally yelling “God’s sake move away a little bit, or do you want to choke me?” The woman says nothing, but stares at her, “her eyes filled with hate, contempt and surprise.”
Getting off the train, she approaches the factory. She writes that “God Maloch,” a pagan deity associated with child sacrifice and the underworld, “God Mamon,” associated with the greedy pursuit of wealth, and “God Ignorance are sitting on the factory chimney.” She writes that “they suck our blood, there isn't in our body blood anymore.” Despite this, Anna and her friends greet each other joyfully: “How are you? Fine, how are you? Feel alright. Smiles and greetings. We would say that we feel fine even if we had to drop dead after.”
After settling in, the forelady sends Anna and a group of female packers across the street to work in the Ninth Avenue building. “That’s a factory?” she asks. “A toilet not a factory. No sun, no air, and cold! They want us to catch consumption.” The next several hours are spent packing biscuits and chatting and being told by the foreman–”that son of a b____”–to “shut up.” “What the hell is this,” he asks them, “a picnic or a factory.” Some of them are separated, sent to different tables, but because it’s the busy season, they aren’t afraid of being fired from “this shithouse.”
The workers' conversations range from Jewish Mary’s dirty jokes to Shirley’s sad stories and from their love lives to religion to ethics to life spent living in poverty. “Poor people can’t be good,” Gertie tells them. “A poor person has no money, and wants to have also nice things, for instance I walk through Fourteenth Street, see those coats in the shopwindows, nice coats, dresses, shawls. While my shoes are torn, my dress is dirty, shabby. I say first, if God would perform a miracle and I would find a purse with thousand dollars, I could buy all those things. I walk through the street, look on the pavement and there is a hope in my heart, maybe I’ll find some money. I look my eyes out, but no sir, I see banana peels, old papers, cigarettes and such junk, but money? No! Then I say, if there be a God, I must find money. God has to prove me now that he exists, not only in the Bible, but real life. So I say to myself, if there is a God, I’ll find money, if there is no God, I won’t. And of course I don’t find it, and I wish to hell heaven itself. And that’s a sin I know to curse God is a deadly sin, and I say the poor ones are all like me, and they’ll go to hell after death. And so long I know I’ll go to hell, what’s the difference how many sins I have. As long I have to suffer after death, I try at least to have as much sins as possible. And anyone who has brains will agree with me.”
On Another day, Gertie tells her coworkers that “I never heard that a poor man got rich from being honest. But a dishonest person, though poor, has always luck. For example, Ford, Rockefeller, or other such rascals. Everybody thinks they got rich from work. But hell, they got rich from cheating. Now all the papers write of them, and after they die, they’ll have some funeral. An honest man goes on living, suffering, and when he drops dead, not a dog barks after him. I am telling you, it’s rotten.”
When payday comes around, Anna writes “this afternoon we received our little, but well deserved wages, $14. Again to the machine to pick up the hot crackers, sweating and quarreling as usual with the men workers because they put too much work on, and before we get our wages, the foreman is always snooping around telling us to work faster or we will get canned today.”
On November 4, 1930, the Daily Worker published a report by the “Labor Research Association” in which a visitor takes a guided tour through the “great plant of the National Biscuit Company.” At that point, the factory was the “largest user of sugar and flour in the world,” and “employing in all 25,000 workers.”
When asked, the guide replies, lying of course, “no, we have not cut wages–not yet.” Girls in the packing departments of Nabisco’s 66 factories could earn up to $24 a week on the piece-work system. But when the company switched to hourly, weekly wages were indirectly cut to $18 or less, with girls at the Manhattan factory starting at $14 for a 44-hour week. Wages were often deducted for times when the conveyor belts were not running due to some mechanical error. National Biscuit’s president Roy Tomlinson made a salary of $106,500 in 1934, or a little over two and a quarter million today and more than 146 times what a worker in the New York plant made at the time.
While the belts were running, they ran fast. With white-uniformed supervisors setting the machine’s pace, workers “must not take their eyes off the job.” With no time for talking, “fingers must move instantly to guide the filling, folding and finishing of a box.” Two bathroom breaks are allowed each worker a day, and only when a relief worker is available to cover their spot in the line.
“Only young girls can keep up with the pace of the belts,” the Daily Worker report continues. “Older women” are forced to take inspection and examination jobs, “at lower pay.” A Nabisco worker in Beacon, New York wrote to the Daily Worker when management layed off 60 workers–all of them over 35 years old–”because only the very young ones can stand the terrible speed-up.” Workers fainted regularly, dealt with intimidation from company doctors, and were never compensated for taking time off after being injured on the job. In June 1925, a carpenter in the National Biscuit factory committed suicide “because he could not stand the pain” after an elevator he was working on crushed his right foot, according to the New York Times. The company tried to escape responsibility but was eventually forced to pay compensation to the worker’s wife. In 1928, a worker fell into a dough mixer–”a large cylinder in which knife-like blades revolve”–and died, according to the New York Times.
Workers' fingers often became so worn down from rubbing box and tray edges and picking up hot sheets of biscuits all day that their skin would rub right off. According to the report, “icing may cover the blood stain and the belt moves on.” A National Biscuit worker wrote to the Daily Worker from Omaha claiming to have witnessed this blood-tainting “many times” and calling their employer “a giant monster stretching its tentacles over the land and across to Canada crushing all biscuit companies like it does its workers.”
For men in the baking and mixing departments, “the speed is relentless.” With the layoffs, “the number of men serving the ovens has been cut in half, so that each man is speeded-up to do twice as much as before.” For those working the mix, “flour dust fills the lungs” and many workers suffer from sores and skin irritation due to their arms constantly being covered in flour.
Despite all the talk of layoffs, or more likely because of them, the company was extremely profitable. “The showing of the company is due to the constantly increasing efficiency of all departments,” the president wrote in a letter to stockholders in January, 1931. “In other words,” the report concludes, the “speeding-up of workers and cutting of wage-rates has increased the profits going to owners who never set foot inside the Nabisco plants.” In addition to worsening conditions in their own factories, National Biscuit continued to buy out and merge with other biscuit producers, building a network of 114 bakeries and selling over 100 million packages of their easily transportable Uneeda biscuits a year by 1900. By 1931, the company was going through six million eggs a year. In the midst of the Great Depression, the New Yorker wrote that “there is no economic stagnation in the biscuit world.” Small grocers accused the company of giving discounts exclusively to chain grocery stores and wheat growers called the food trust’s profits “a result of increased robbery of both the farmers and the workers,” according to the April 21, 1933 issue of The Producers News, the “Official Organ of the United Farmers League.
In June 1932, workers were sped up further with the introduction of the conveyor system. In the baking department, 60 workers produced what had previously taken 90 and in nearly all departments workers were expected to produce five days worth of product working only three days a week.
“In the icing department the girls are not even allowed one minute to take a drink,” according to “a worker correspondent” in the Daily Worker. Workers were regularly forced to toil into their lunch breaks “in order to finish up some work,” but still had to “be back on time when the bell rings.” The workday of a cake baker started at 5:30 in the morning and ended at 8 at night, with weekly salaries dropping from $28 to $19.
On May 28, 1934, 2,000 workers at Manhattan’s National Biscuit Company factory–joined by 700 at the company’s Philadelphia bakery–walked out demanding union recognition, an end to discrimination, equal pay for equal work, overtime pay, longer breaks for oven and conveyor workers, equal distribution of hours, fair treatment and pensions for the old, more relief, slower machines, showers and “the right to smoke in restaurant,” according to the Daily Worker.
“A group of food worker correspondents” later told their story to the Daily Worker, saying “a remarkable and important point” was that participants in the building of the union and strike were “totally inexperienced in organizing,” but added “we are proud to have such militant leaders among our workers.”
Organizing began after “conditions in the plant became unbearable.” Workers got together and “decided that we had to put an end to these outrages.” They began having “informal talks” with their coworkers and “the group began to grow by leaps and bounds.” They then applied for a charter and joined the AFL. Hearing that workers in the Philadelphia plant “had also become organized,” NYC workers reached out to them.
Workers then elected a committee of 16, who, along with “a rank-and-filer of the Philadelphia union,” presented their demands to the company. Management didn’t take the committee seriously and “took it all as a joke” when the Philadelphia worker said that “if our demands were not granted, the plant he represents will shut down.”
Fifteen minutes later, Philadelphia workers walked out. Within an hour, New York workers in the largest bakery in the world had joined them. Pickets were scheduled for the next day until “management and the regional labor board called our headquarters and requested our committee to come for negotiations.”
Within an hour–and only four hours after it had started–the strike was settled with National Biscuit recognizing the Inside Bakery Workers Federal Union, Local 19585 of the AFL as representing an “indeterminate number of its employees for the purpose of collective bargaining,” according to Ben Golden, executive secretary of the Regional Labor Board, as quoted in the New York Times.
In October, a National Biscuit worker wrote an open letter in the Daily Worker to Sunshine Biscuit workers, urging them to organize. “As you know, we had to decide to organize ourselves into a union controlled by the company or a union controlled by ourselves. We decided to organize a union controlled by the rank and file with complete liberty to present to the company our demands. And these we gained by organizing a united front of all men and women workers in the factory acting as one.”
This move towards rank-and-file militant unionism within the “reactionary” AFL represents a new turn in the Trade Union Unity League, discussed in a July 9, 1932 article in The Militant, appropriately titled… A New Turn in the TUUL. In it we learn that at the eighth session of the Central Council of the Red International of Labor Unions, it was declared that the TUUL has “not yet learned to work among the masses” and are “lagging behind” and “isolated.” The Militant calls this “new turn on working in the AFL and in the reorganization of the TUUL on the factory basis” a “mere side stepping and an attempt to veil the third party wreckage without drawing any consequences.”
And “after three years of a deepening crisis,” according to The Militant, the RILU began “carrying on work not only in those industries where there are no parallel revolutionary unions,” but also moving back towards working within “those AFL unions which are parallel to the TUUL unions.”
This shift in the TUUL explains, to some degree, why we see Food Workers Industrial Union organizers holding meetings outside National Biscuit Company’s gates and Daily Worker articles about abhorrent factory conditions, but workers on the inside, many of them disciplined Communist Party members, chartering a union with the AFL.
On January 8, 1935, National Biscuit Company workers walked out once again, led by Inside Bakery Workers Union president William Galvin, a young man who had, until then, spent 12 years in the National Biscuit factory. Nearly 3,000 workers in the Manhattan bakery–”the entire force in the New York factory” except for sixty security guards, according to the Daily News–joined in solidarity with 800 Philadelphia NBC workers–some of whom were working 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week–demanding “equalization of pay for similar work” and charging “the company had been discriminating against union members,” according to the New York Times. “It seems,” wrote the February 1935 edition of Working Women, “that the Philadelphia Nabisco was paying some packers 35 cents an hour and other packers only 30 cents an hour.” More specifically, men were being paid more for performing the same jobs as women. The Philadelphia plant, already represented by a business union, had been in arbitration with NBC over the issue for the last 7 months, yet “the company continued to maintain its differential between men and women workers in Philadelphia and efforts of the Philadelphia workers to effect an adjustment ended in failure, it is charged,” according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Union members also alleged that the company had begun shipping in goods from Cambridge and Buffalo, both unorganized shops, “thus forcing the reduction of the personnel here and in Philadelphia.” The New Masses called this “the company’s first major step in the campaign to break the union.” In response, the union declared they were “determined to stop this by extending the strike to every city where the company maintains plants.” The Inside Bakery Workers Union, organized by the workers themselves in June 1934, was willing to have the wage rate grievance arbitrated, but National Biscuit refused, sending the message that they intended to crush all union organization. Four days after the strike was called, National Biscuit declared a lockout and “stacked” the warehouses “to capacity,” according to the New Masses. Iron gratings were installed on the windows of the New York plant.
The 1920s saw a boom in food manufacturing. By 1924, 82,500 New Yorkers were employed in food production, a more than 70 percent jump from 1900. Thousands of women toiled in the city’s 1,127 food factories, producing half the country’s sugar and a sixth of its bakery products. New York was a particularly important plant to the National Biscuit Company not only due to the large consumer base of New York City. Because of its proximity to the port, National Biscuit workers in New York mixed, baked and packaged a large portion of the company's products to be shipped to the burgeoning biscuit-eating markets of Central and South America. A strike in their largest plant could not be tolerated.
National Biscuit tried to blame the strike on Communist agitation and infiltration, but of the 3,000 workers at the Manhattan factory, only 500 of them had worked there for less than five years, while nearly a third had worked for the company 11-15 years and 175 for 26 years or more. We can almost assume that diarist Anna Saitta and her friends on the production line were now taking part in the picketing. “You can’t say that this strike was fomented or carried on by outsiders,” Galvin told the Catholic Worker. “If they hadn’t had real grievances this strike would not have been called.”
“We are fighting against the constant speedup, people being laid off and a skeleton force doing all the work,” Galvin told the Catholic Worker. “If anyone is sick they are laid off for several weeks without pay. There is no definitive pension system, people 35-40 years in the employ of the company being kept on at small wages so that when they are finally laid off with a few dollars a week to keep them it is only because they can’t last much longer. When anyone is laid off with a pension we call it the death sentence.”
The strike quickly spread to neighboring cities, including Newark, Atlanta and York, Pennsylvania, bringing 6,000 workers out of five plants. Local 807 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters–the drivers delivering NBC products–joined the strike in sympathy and, according to The New Masses, “the trucks stopped running.”
In Newark, New Jersey, 25 workers were arrested and “accused of participating in alleged violence to company truck drivers,” after a group of workers blocked trucks with their cars while another group hurled stones at them. Management in Newark said they “planned to keep the plant closed until the entire strike was settled,” according to the Brooklyn Times Union. Pickets not only went up around the factories, but “workers, their wives and friends” picketed grocery stores that continued to sell National Biscuit products–three Staten Island grocers would later have their windows smashed in for continuing to sell NBC’s products. Three striking bakers were arrested on January 11 for painting “Boycott Uneeda Bakers” on an abandoned building near 5th Avenue and 26th Street. On January 19, 2,800 workers paraded peacefully through Chelsea with banners “asking for public support of the strike,” according to the New York Times.
The next day, NBC put out ads looking for drivers in the Sunday papers, but on Monday morning, striking workers were there to keep them out. What began as a sympathy strike grew into something more when workers “remembered their own situation,” wrote the New Masses. Fifty cops were sent to the factory gates, ten on horseback to protect the strikebreakers. “Fist fights ensued,” according to the New York TImes, leading to the arrest of six strikers. One bystander was beaten by police after being “mistaken for a striker,” according to the Daily News.
Peter Gaches, a 33-year-old striker on his way to picket duty was approached by four men and stabbed “at 9 o’clock in the morning, under the eyes of police by the armed thugs of the biscuit company,” according to Galvin. National Biscuit, in addition to having the NYPD cracking down on its striking workers, enlisted hired muscle as strikebreakers to join in on the brutalizing. Nine of these “professional strikebreakers” arrested in Newark on February 26 had all been “convicted of highway robbery and similar crimes” and were carrying “dangerous weapons when arrested” according to the Daily Worker. “Of nine gunmen arrested it was found that two of them had only been out of jail eight days,” Galvin told the Catholic Worker.
The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union assured that none of its 102,000 members would buy National Biscuit products while the strike was on and the Women’s Trade Union League’s Grace Childs–wife of the anti-union businessman Richard Childs, owner of the chain of Child’s Restaurants–took to the radio to urge consumers to boycott and “let the National Biscuit Co. know their attitude” toward the strike, according to Brooklyn Times Union. The slogan “You Don’t Needa Biscuit,” a play on the popular Nabisco product Uneeda Biscuit, became the rallying cry of strikers and their supporters. New Masses claimed that “eating or selling products of the National Biscuit Company today means eating or selling stale warehouse stock, some of it baked as far back as last August, and it means eating or selling products of scab labor.” Competing biscuit companies Bond and Ward even began utilizing their factories to produce and package NBC products, which Gavin called “a united move of the large corporations to smash the union,” according to the Daily Worker.
Strike headquarters were formed in “every borough of the city from which picketing of all stores which handle Nabisco products will be directed,” wrote the Daily Worker. Groups of ten strikers formed units, each headed by a captain, who handled picket duty at the plant and throughout the city.
On January 31, a worker correspondent wrote into the Daily Worker saying that the strike had been successful “till now” and that “the spirit is weakening because of lack of funds and news.” The letter continues, saying “some of the strikers are beginning to feel that the strike is pretty useless and futile” and that “I am sure if there would be more daily news of the strike” and if a strike fund were set up “it would help considerably.”
When strikers attempted to attack a delivery truck on February 5, a police officer who was “backed against a wall dodging missiles,” fired two shots into the air to disperse the crowd, who instead “continued stoning him and the biscuit company’s trucks parked in the block,” according to the Daily News. Three strikers were arrested for throwing rocks. Delivery drivers took “an active part in the picketing,” according to the Daily Worker. With Teamsters Local 807 workers out, any truck leaving the factory gates had a scab behind the wheel. “Afraid to send out their cakes in their own delivery trucks,” according to a postal worker in the Daily Worker, the company started shipping products to New York through the mail in a sly effort to avoid confrontations with strikers. “We can not allow ourselves,” the postal worker correspondent continued, “to become the tools of the bosses to break this militant strike of our own fellow workers.”
When the NBC reopened the factory on February 11, strike activity intensified. “Window panes crashed under a barrage of stones and ice” in one of “the worst disorders since the walkout was called,” according to the Daily News. On that bitter, snowy morning, 400 strikers–”many of whom were women,” according to the New York Times–clashed with 50 cops on 14th Street and 10th Avenue. Striking workers “attempted forcibly” to block trucks from getting through the gates. “They hurled stones and pieces of ice through the windows and the main door,” and tried to overturn trucks in the street. Two cops were stationed inside each delivery truck, while countless others were put on duty in and around the factory. When strikers were dispersed, police cordoned the massive bakery, allowing it to resume production.
Meanwhile, 50 female strikers “assisted by prominent members of the New York Women’s Trade Union League,” passed out flyers along Fifth Avenue from 34th to 42nd Street, “telling the workers’ side of the conflict,” according to the New York Times. The United Council of Working Class Women, who had successfully stopped many stores from stocking NBC products, held open air meetings “to win support behind the strikers” and “to make more effective the consumer strike against Nabisco products,” according to the Daily Worker.
Pickets were held outside grocery stores that continued to sell National Biscuit products. The majority of chain groceries were decidedly anti-labor and refused to boycott, but a number of independent restaurants and grocers at least temporarily dropped the company’s products, especially those that received consumer pressure. The FWIU claimed to have barred “all Nabisco products in the stores where its 1,000 members work,” according to the Daily Worker. In one day alone in Jersey City, three picketed stores had their windows smashed. At one of them, “a bread box was hurled through the window,” according to the Daily Worker.
On February 21, at 5:30 p.m., as strikebreakers were leaving for the day, a group of pickets–carrying placards reading “non-union labor made crackers shipped to your grocer”–shouted “scab!” and attacked, in what the New York Times called “a riot in which fists flew freely and which resulted in several bloody faces.” Strikebreakers, armed with “all sorts of weapons,” fought back as 50 cops “closed in” and called for backup. It wasn’t uncommon for fights between strikers and strikebreakers to involve sticks, crowbars or, in one case, a monkey wrench. Two cops went home “slightly injured,” according to the Daily News, while 21 pickets were arrested, 10 of which were women and included Eleanor Mishmunn, organizer with the Women’s Trade Union League. Police called her a “bum” as they arrested her. She was charged with using “boisterous language.” Meanwhile, other striking workers toured upper Broadway with a portable puppet show “as a means of drawing attention to their cause.”
Strikers, most of whom had “little or no previous experience in labor struggles,” according to the New Masses, were shocked and enraged “beyond measure” by police repression. Police officers who had been “nearly human” during their first hour of picket duty would be “called into the company office” and come out looking for blood. Police dispersed pickets “a number of times” by firing into the air. Countless strikers ended up stuck at home with injuries from horse hooves and nightsticks. One month into the strike, striking workers received letters that their group life insurance policies were expiring. Regardless, The Militant wrote “the workers are showing remarkable militancy for an eight months’ old union.”
Some blamed the violence on William Galvin, president of the Inside Bakery Workers Federal Union, and other union leaders for not setting up a publicity committee, putting only him in the position of disseminating information to the press and public. National Biscuit were aggressive advertisers, spending $7 million in its first decade alone. Newspapers that relied on NBC ad revenue were unsurprisingly hesitant to cover the strike, sparing them some well-deserved bad publicity. A 20-block-long strike parade received almost no coverage, and “dozens of pictures” of turned over scab trucks “by competent staff photographers” “didn’t find their way into the papers,” according to the New Masses. Where strike coverage did occur in the capitalist press, it was often in support of the company, such as the Daily News “glorifying the heroic cops” or the Daily Mirror, who “implicitly called attention to the strikers’ vandalism,” according to the New Masses.
Galvin even actively prevented writers from talking with rank-and-file strikers, which the New Masses called “entirely in line with Galvin’s general policy of running the union singlehanded.” They called it “a large strike without a strike committee which functions as such.” There was little room for discussion at strike meetings, with “all important decisions” being “made by Galvin alone,” according to the New Masses.
Workers, now two months into a strike spanning factories in five cities, held a “flying squadron” and picketed 1936 Republican presidential candidate Ogden Mills' three-and-a-half-story Fifth Avenue home. Mills, a prominent New York politician who had been appointed by President Hoover to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, was a major shareholder in the National Biscuit Company. One hundred strikers chanted “Ogden Mills has locked us out,” under the close watch of a dozen police.
On March 13, workers picketed an annual stockholders meeting, where inside one stockholder suggested suing the union “to force these rats to pay for the damage they cause,” according to the New York Times. Galvin “crashed” the meeting of “one of the most dignified and conservative of industrial companies” and defended the workers, giving stockholders “an unaccustomed thrift” and saying NBC had broken a verbal contract to pay equal wages for equal work and that officials had refused to sit down and discuss arbitration. Roy Tomlinson, president of the National Biscuit Company, refused to respond to Galvin–even when encouraged to do so by stockholders–when the union leader pointed out that 3,000 workers in the New York plant “were doing as much work as 8,000 did some years ago,” according to the New York Times. One mechanic on the picket line recalled having to handle 12 packing machines, 12 conveyors, 12 closing machines and 24 carton folders. “He and some of the girl strikers,” wrote the New Masses, “had a difference of opinion as to what was worse, rushing from one conveyor to another or standing before one of the relentless belts.”
National Biscuit–being the “dignified and conservative” company that they were–began reaching out to local churches for assistance in procuring “young women” strikebreakers “to take the place of ‘reds’” according to a statement by the Brooklyn Church and Mission Federation sent to 300 clergymen.
“Various inducements are being offered,” the statement continues, “to attract strike-breakers through church channels. It is natural that pastors of churches that have large numbers of unemployed young people might be misled by propaganda of this type which is false and which would make our churches strike-breaking agencies, thereby depriving people, who are already suffering through a prolonged strike, which the company refuses to arbitrate, of a livelihood.”
When the church refused to help break the strike, NBC turned to the courts, suing the union for $100,000 and demanding an injunction against picketing and what NBC’s attorney, former New York Supreme Court Justice Morgan J. O’Brien, called “the circulation of false and scurrilous charges concerning the company and its products,” according to the New York Times. A temporary injunction was signed into order on April 6, three months after the walkout began. It would quickly prove to be ineffective at breaking the strike.
On April 10, four days after the signing of the temporary injunction, 1,500 National Biscuit Company strikers and sympathizers rallied at Union Square before marching west to the factory. Along the way they were met by 100 cops, ten patrol cars and “a police emergency squad” who violently attempted to disperse the crowd using blackjacks and clubs, according to the New York Times. About a dozen workers had to be treated for injuries after “police charged into the tight ranks with flailing clubs,” according to the Daily News. Norman Thomas, six-time Socialist presidential candidate called it “one of the most vicious and inexcusable attacks upon men and women in a picket line,” according to the Times. Ten pickets were arrested. Mayor La Guardia promised to have a representative present on future pickets to ensure they were “not broken up by similar violence.”
Days later, 2,200 workers picketed outside the National Biscuit plant, led by a procession of roller skating pickets. Strikers were joined by Gifford Pinchot, wife of the former Governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot wore a strike sign over her brown fur coat and called the demonstration “magnificent,” according to the New York Times. Fifty police watched but kept their distance this time, but the peace wouldn’t last long.
The next day when several hundred striking workers tried to stop a group of scabs led by a police escort from entering the bakery, “the police went into action” and attacked pickets with “fists and clubs,” according to the New York Times. Seven pickets were arrested under a slew of charges such as disorderly conduct, hitting a strikebreaker, “kicking a patrolman,” “abusing the police and refusing to move on” and “attempting to take a nightstick” from an arresting officer.
On March 7, police discovered an undetonated bomb “along the wall of the boiler house” of the York, Pennsylvania National Biscuit Company factory, while on March 23, four strikers were arrested in Jersey City for bombing the home of an NBC foreman “who has remained at work during the employees’ strike,” according to the Daily News.
On April 28, union officials and Nabisco reached a settlement, ending the 95-day strike, which was ratified by a membership vote of 1,654 to 47 at a meeting in Stuyvesant High School. The next morning workers in New York and Philadelphia returned to work, or at least those that could did. As part of the settlement, the company agreed to reinstate striking workers “as far as practicable,” with preference given to “married workers and those with family responsibilities,” and taking into account “length of service and proficiency,” according to the New York Times. The agreement allowed the continuation of pre-strike wage rates, but granted union recognition, making collective bargaining for future wage increases a possibility. The agreement also called for the withdrawal of all court action against strikers. The company agreed not to bring in products from unorganized shops into areas serviced by the New York City factory. Both sides agreed that no future strike or lockout could be taken without 72 hours advance notice in writing. Those who NBC claimed could not be hired back immediately were placed on a “preferential list,” that they were required to hire from for the next year, but despite the company’s promise of a “gradual return,” by mid-May only 1,000 of the 2,800 strikers had been taken back.
The union published a resolution charging that the National Biscuit Company had failed to comply with the terms of the settlement agreement and that the company was “discriminating against its employees for their union activities” and “using coercive tactics against the said employees in an attempt to destroy the Inside Bakery Workers Federal Labor Union, Local 19,585.” Many of the union workers who had been hired back were only given part time work, wages were cut, the speed-up resumed and nonunion factories continued to expand and export into union factories’ territories. On October 11, National Biscuit fired 224 union members from its New York bakery as it reduced the territory and product variety covered by the union shop. Union members were regularly discharged for not passing unreasonably rigorous physical examinations.
The union sued National Biscuit over the breach of contract, where Galvin told a courtroom that NBC “has not only breached its agreements with the union,” but that it caused “the union and its members irreparable damage” and that its “arbitrary, deliberate and unreasoned attempts to crush the union are not only violative of good faith and fair dealing, but are also in violation of the law.” The company argued that many of the details of the contract were decided orally and not embodied in writing, leaving the signed document vague and contractual requirements ambiguous.
The New Masses criticized Galvin for signing “an agreement which allows the company to retain union scabs while men on the picket line must wait indefinitely for reinstatement.” They viewed the agreement as a selling out of its membership, where “high-sounding promises” were thrown around before AFL leaders “backed down at the last moment.” The New Masses also criticized Galvin, “in typical AFL fashion,” for attempting to forbid mass picketing, discouraging militancy and perpetuating the red scare.
This is evidenced in a May 1935 issue of the Catholic Worker, in which Catholic Worker staff members visit the daily picket held outside the factory–which they call ”the only means the crowd of strikers have to indicate to the public the fight they are waging for justice”–only to find it had been “called off” by Galvin, “in order to avoid the interference of Communist groups.” When workers suggested that the union produce a leaflet “telling the union’s side of the story to be given wide distribution,” Galvin called it impractical and a “Communist method,” according to the Daily Worker. When workers proposed daily strike meetings, he shot them down saying they were “too expensive.”
Instead, Galvin turned striking worker’s energy towards sustaining a Nabisco boycott and maintained pickets outside of select stores, urging them to drop the product. The Catholic Worker article goes on to applaud the strike that “has been going on for fifteen weeks” for having “no spirit of class war” and makes sure to notify readers that they attended the picket “with no spirit of hatred towards individuals, whether they be scabs, strikebreakers, policemen, officials and stockholders of the NBC.”
It’s impossible to say now whether or not the strike would have been more successful had the workers had more control over their union and the strike, but it nonetheless stands as a lesson to organizers today that top-down, undemocratic organizational structures don’t win strikes. The self-emancipation of the working class must be done by the workers themselves.