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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Ernesto Galarza is deserving of a full-length biography. The most influential non-elected Latino in Washington, D.C. during the Roosevelt years, Galarza did more than anyone during the fifties and early sixties to get Congress to end the bracero program, which served as a precursor to the successful farm labor union drives by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.

Thanks to the University of Oklahoma Press, readers have regained access to a mostly forgotten part of Galarza’s amazing career: organizing farm workers under the aegis of the AFL’s National Farm Worker Union. The NFWU grew out of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and expanded into California. The union enjoyed ties to the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas.

The material on Galarza lies in H.L. Mitchell’s Mean Things Happening in This Land: The Life and Times of H.L. Mitchell, Co-founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. The university press has released the formerly out-of-print book with a foreword by the late Michael Harrington and a preface by Samuel Mitchell.

Mean Things Happening in This Land sheds important light on Ernesto Galarza, farm labor organizing, and the tension between Socialists and Communists with the CIO’s United Cannery, Agricultural, and Packing Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), of which Southern Tenant Farmers Union was briefly part.

My review of Mean Things Happening in This Land appears in a recent issue of the Labor Studies Journal. See my website for additional reviews, articles and video.

During World War II, Latinas in San Francisco’s tortilla and tamale factories formed the “Tortilla Workers’ Union.” It was formally known Local 5-1 of the CIO’s United Cannery, Agricultural, and Packing Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA).

Conditions were bad.

“In some of the plants, notably the Mexicana, almost feudal relations have existed for many years, with the employer paying the employees in groceries, or with the employee working to pay off a continuing and growing debt to employer,” reported the union.

After organizing the plants, UCAPAWA used its goodwill with the Roosevelt administration to raise salaries during a period of wage and price controls.

The factories were located in a number of neighborhoods, suggesting that Latinos lived not only in the Mission District but in other areas as well. Read the rest of this entry »