In May 1935 the U.S. Supreme Court declared the NIRA unconstitutional, due to its failure to define “fair competition.” The labor movement was not sorry to see it go, because of the act’s support for company unions and lack of enforcement authority.

But rules to resolve worker-employer conflict were still badly needed. On July 5, 1935—exactly one year after Bloody Thursday—President Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), or Wagner Act. It authorized the creation of a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to protect workers’ self-organization activities. The board was empowered to oversee union representation elections in workplaces, make decisions in workplace disputes, and enforce them with penalties. A key provision outlawed company unions.

The board would function like the U.S. court system but would focus specifically on resolving differences between workers and employers. The act guaranteed workers the legal right to create and join unions of their choosing, and to picket, boycott, strike, and bargain collectively in pursuit of their economic goals.

Called “labor’s Magna Carta” by its author, the NLRA was not without problems. Intended to level the playing field between workers and bosses, it contained flaws not immediately apparent. Left outside its protections were public employees, agricultural laborers, and domestic workers. Over time, court decisions and unabated employer opposition undermined the original intent of the act, tilting the field decisively back to capital. But for a dozen years, until after World War II, it empowered and emboldened workers to act collectively in their common interests.

Another extension of the ILA’s influence came with the “March Inland.” Longshore union leaders understood that to protect its wharf jurisdiction they had to organize the warehouses lining the waterfront and in nearby industrial districts. In the Bay Area Local 6 soon boasted nearly nine thousand members. In Los Angeles Local 26 began with a downtown pharmaceutical warehouse and expanded to several more. The local also organized a number of other industrial workplaces. Its most dynamic early leader was Bert Corona.

Brunswig workers were underpaid compared to unionized grocery stockers, had a heavier workload, and needed to be familiar with many more items on the shelves. Unlike union grocery stockers, Brunswig workers had no job security. In the fall of 1937, 150 workers held a secret meeting of what became Local 26 in the basement of the Musicians Local 47 hall. Corona was elected recording secretary, since as a college student, he was considered “educated.”

The young warehouse worker was taken under the wing of an ex-Wobbly, Loyd Seeliger, who revealed to Corona a cornucopia of one-on-one organizing techniques. From Seeliger, Corona also learned to prefer a simple worker signup over NLRB elections.

Loyd couldn’t understand the idea of holding an election to decide whether or not workers wanted to have a right that, he believed, inherently belonged to them. . . . In his years of organizing, he never participated in an election. He just showed the bosses that he had signed up almost all of their workers and insisted that if they didn’t agree now to a contract, the union would strike. The bosses generally agreed.

In 1938 and 1939, with the assistance of a half-dozen UCAPAWA organizers (including former CAWIU organizer Dorothy Ray Healey), workers struck repeatedly for union recognition and higher wages. In October 1939—the same month John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published—more than a thousand workers struck cotton growers in Madera County. In the face of extreme grower violence fomented by the Associated Farmers, Okie families hung together with Mexican, black, and Filipino workers on the picket lines. Healey recalled,

All their lives they’d been on a little farm in Oklahoma; probably they had never seen a black or a Mexicano. And you’d watch in the process of a strike how those white workers soon saw that those white cops were their enemies and that the black and Chicano workers were their brothers.

The day after the election National Dollar Stores agreed to a closed shop and a wage increase. Two weeks later Shoong sold the factory to two of his former managers, who, taking the name Golden Gate Manufacturing, declined the union’s request that they maintain the agreement with their former boss. They also rejected the workers’ wage and hours proposal, and crucially, the demand that Golden Gate guarantee eleven months of work (the company’s average over the years) and convince National Dollar Stores to continue to stock its retail stores with the factory’s output.

On the morning of February 26 more than one hundred workers walked out and began picketing the factory along with three National Dollar retail shops in the city. It was a hard thing to do. In the tight Chinatown community, the wealthy Shoong was seen as a benefactor who provided work and contributed generously to the Chinese nationalist cause. Striker Sue Ko Lee recalled that mainstream Chinese organizations and businesses were not overtly hostile but “didn’t show us any support because we were all called troublemakers.” Backing for the strikers by leftist organizations didn’t improve the strikers’ standing with the more conservative elements in the Chinese community. And in San Francisco Chinatown, unions had traditionally meant one thing above all else: white organizations that discriminated against Chinese.

The National Dollar Stores struggle began to change that history. Although rare, strikes had not been unknown in Chinatown. None, however, had ever been supported before by the official labor movement. The difference this time was huge. The ILGWU gained strike sanction from the San Francisco Labor Council. As a result, the (white) members of the Retail Clerks union who worked in the National Dollar stores honored the factory workers’ picket lines in front of their workplaces, shutting down the shops. This moment of interracial solidarity on behalf of striking Chinese workers was a first in San Francisco.

In response, the biggest wave of strikes in United States history washed across the country in 1945 and 1946. Workers struck mass production industries and shut down several cities with general strikes. In the East, these occurred in Hartford and Stamford, Connecticut; Camden, New Jersey; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Rochester, New York. Citywide general strikes are rare in the United States: never before (or since) had so many occurred in one year. The cluster in 1946 demonstrated the widespread anger of workers at their unmet expectations and also the high level of organizational competence unions had built over the preceding years.

Across the bay from San Francisco, twenty-eight stores belonged to the antiunion Retail Merchants Association (RMA). During the fall of 1946, the RMA’s refusal to recognize a union in two stores set off a chain of events that led to a general strike of more than 100,000 workers from 142 AFL unions throughout Alameda County. In the process Oakland city politics, long dominated by conservative, antiunion forces, began a difficult makeover process, pushed by unions and their allies in minority communities. Although the Oakland General Strike of 1946 did not immediately achieve all of its objectives, its long-term effect was to give Oakland working people a substantial voice in running their municipal affairs for the first time.

Aligned with the RMA were the Oakland City Council and the powerful Oakland Tribune newspaper, headed by its wealthy antilabor owner, Joseph Knowland. The publisher, whose son was a U.S. senator, treated Oakland as his personal kingdom, in much the same way that Harrison Gray Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times, had done in that city in the early 1900s. The nine-member Oakland City Council had long been filled with Knowland allies. His control extended into all levels of Oakland city government. Knowland’s Tribune provided the RMA with one-sided news coverage of the dispute with its members’ employees. Utilizing an antiunion tactic spreading rapidly in the postwar era, Knowland’s editorials claimed that “Communists” were behind the strike.

Before daybreak on Sunday, December 1, escorted by hundreds of Oakland policemen, strikebreakers drove twelve truckloads of merchandise through seventy picketers stationed at six entrances to the stores. The drivers worked for the Veterans Trucking company, a Los Angeles firm established by the Merchants and Manufacturers Association for the express purpose of breaking strikes. Its drivers had traveled four hundred miles to Oakland at the invitation of the RMA. To make way for them, the police swept the union picket lines off the street, injuring peaceful picketers.

The union activists had received assurance from the Oakland police chief that they could legally park their cars in loading zones near the stores on the weekends and at night. Nevertheless, police towed away the strikers’ cars and those of their supporters as soon as the officers had removed the picket lines.

As daylight broke on Sunday morning, December 1, the small crowd of striking clerks and supporters regrouped, facing 250 police posted in front of the stores. The police roped off six square blocks surrounding the stores in the center of downtown and, at 7:30 A.M., herded the twelve trucks to Kahn’s and Hastings’ loading docks. The union leaders were disgusted that their own tax money was being used to protect strikebreakers. Chaudet later said he believed that the Oakland General Strike was born at that moment, in the bruises and indignant feelings of union leaders who had been lied to, physically assaulted, and found their own tax-supported police force used against them.

The next day, Tuesday, December 3, 1946, the city of Oakland came to a stop. Hundreds of buses and streetcars sat empty in their yards, resulting in massive traffic jams on the Bay Bridge. Remembering the furious antiunion propaganda produced by San Francisco newspapers during the 1934 General Strike, Oakland strike leaders made sure to halt the printing presses at Oakland’s three daily newspapers, including Knowland’s Tribune. Most places of businesses closed or were staffed with skeleton management crews. Only vital services, such as hospitals, stayed in operation. Strikers directed traffic.