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.