This week’s guest article is by labor historian Harvey Schwartz, author most recently of Solidarity Stories: An Oral History of the ILWU.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has been famous for seven decades for its progressive politics, internal democracy, corruption-free record, and inclusive stance toward ethnic and racial minorities.

Since its landmark victory in the 1934 West Coast maritime and San Francisco general strikes, the union has enrolled numerous Latino activists and rank-and-file members on the waterfront and in the warehouses and cotton compress plants of California. Read the rest of this entry »

The United Railway Icemen’s Union sought to organize the people who produced the ice for the refrigerated cars that took produce to market.

One of the few written records of this organization can be found in Mary Heaton Vorse’s Labor’s New Millions: The Growth of a People’s Power. The book was written in 1937 as the CIO was chartering a variety of new unions in the afterglow of the triumphant 1936 presidential election.

Workers at the PFE plant in Roseveille move ice blocks along a conveyer belt from the storage room to the railroad car. Photo courtesy of the Roseville Historical Society.

The largest ice producer in California was the Pacific Fruit Exchange (PFE), a joint operation of the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads. It operated the world’s largest plant in Roseville, near Sacramento.

In 1936, the PFE provided ice to cool 339,336 carloads of perishable commodities.

Cutting 300-pound blocks of ice and moving them via a conveyer belt to the top of freight cars was a physically demanding job. Many of the workers were Mexican American. Latinos were among the key CIO leaders.

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Salt of the Earth portrays the Empire Zinc strike miners in New Mexico that turned into a celebrated historic struggle for Mexican American and women’s equality. It was shot on location in 1953 by blacklisted filmmakers.

Salt of the Earth movie poster

The miners were members of the CIO’s International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) Local 890. The politically active union was among the first to address the problem of discrimination on the job and in the community.

Last summer I traveled to the Silver City, New Mexico mining district to get a better feel for the strike and to research the union’s political activities during the 1940s.

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