The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
ORGANIZING, STRIKES AND THE LONG SETTLEMENT · TO 1980
The strong years: Before the First World War, Fort Wayne was regarded — in Mark Crouch's study of the city's labor history — as one of the strongest union towns in the country, its standing built on community support for several militant strikes against the railroads. The strength was visible in the street: the Fort Wayne Sentinel's account of Labor Day 1907 describes one of the largest labor parades in the city's memory, division after division — railroad brotherhoods, stonecutters, stonemasons, letter carriers — marching behind the Packard band while the town turned out to watch. Organization reached into the new industries as it had the old: at Wayne Knitting Mills, twenty-five apprentices walked out in 1900 over Thieme's demand that they pay for broken needles and for mending poor work, and two years later a strike of the "fancy knitters" over low wages closed the factory for several days.
The defeats of 1919–1923: The postwar wave broke here as it broke across the country. The warm weather of 1919, in Tom Lewandowski's phrase, brought the Bowser lockout and a strike at the Bass Foundry; and between 1919 and 1923, Crouch records, strikes were broken at Bowser Pump, at Wayne Knitting Mills and at the Pennsylvania Railroad. The railroad defeat was part of the national shopmen's strike of 1922 — some 400,000 shopmen out across the country against wage cuts — and it left a paper trail in Fort Wayne: a damage suit arising from the strike, brought by a man struck over the head with a club while crossing the company's tracks at Hanna Street on a strike night, was still being litigated in the Indiana courts in 1924, reported in the Decatur Daily Democrat of 5 June 1924. The defeats had a racial edge as well: it was after 1922, Morgan records, that the hiring door closed on the Black workers the war had brought. Violence and disorder in these years, where the record documents them, are in the Crime section.
The return: The Wagner Act of 1935 reversed the terms. After its passage, Crouch records, the first National Labor Relations Board election in the country was held at the Wayne Knitting Mills — the very mill whose owner had built a welfare program to keep unions out became, on this account, the site of the New Deal labor system's first vote. Through the 1930s and 1940s the United Electrical Workers organized General Electric's production workers and many others in the area, becoming a potent force in the community with membership approaching 30,000 before the red-baiting and internal political struggles of the 1950s broke its strength; by the 1970s the United Auto Workers had become the dominant union in the Fort Wayne area. The settlement those decades built — seniority, grievance procedure, the pensioned career from hiring gate to retirement — was the social form of the factory city at its peak. Its stress test came at the peak's end: the 172-day strike of Harvester workers across the Midwest from November 1979 to April 1980, when 35,000 United Auto Workers returned to work largely satisfied, the News-Sentinel records, that they had won — while the company they had struck reported a loss of $479 million in the first six months of 1980 and began the contraction that ended the Fort Wayne plant.
Sources: Crouch, "Job Wars at Fort Wayne," Labor Research Review (1986) (the strongest-union-town standing, the broken strikes of 1919–1923, the first NLRB election at Wayne Knitting Mills as his account gives it, the UE's rise and ~30,000 membership, the UAW's later dominance); Fort Wayne Sentinel, 2 September 1907 (the Labor Day parade); the Immigrant Entrepreneurship biography of Thieme (the strikes of 1900 and 1902); Lewandowski, "The Warm Weather of 1919," as cited in Morgan (1999) (the Bowser lockout and the Bass strike); Decatur Daily Democrat, 5 June 1924 (the Richhart damage suit from the 1922 shopmen's strike); News-Sentinel, "1980–1989: Decade of Economic Turmoil & Transition" (the 172-day strike and its settlement); Input Fort Wayne, on Beatty's history (the $479 million loss).