Refinery Town Page 3
These left-wing gains were reversed when the federal government cracked down on socialists opposed to US involvement in World War I. To curb radical influence, many cities, like Richmond, made their elections nonpartisan and switched to the city manager form of government. The number of elected, full-time “strong mayors,” whether socialist or not, was reduced. More city council members became part-time and limited “to setting general policies carried out by trained professionals.”8
Similar preventive measures also kept Standard Oil in Richmond union-free for half a century. The first bid for bargaining rights occurred during World War I, when organized labor broadly made membership gains. However, as labor historian Harvey O’Connor observes, the newly chartered Local 38 of the Oil Workers International Union (OWIU) proved to be “no match for the most ruthless enemy of labor in California. In 1918, all its officers and outstanding members were fired.”9 Union sympathizers in the Richmond refinery were not able to regroup until World War II started.
One obstacle in the intervening years was Big Oil’s skillful deployment of its nationwide Employee Representation Plan (ERP). This system of plant-level committees, which included hourly workers and supervisors, operated firmly under the control of management. As part of its “union substitution” strategy, the company introduced a pension plan, sickness benefits, and paid vacations; it sponsored parties, picnics, sports leagues, and social centers for its employees. When the Great Depression hit and other towns became destitute, “Standard Oil helped keep Richmond alive,” one local admirer recalls. Refinery wages may have been cut, but “workers were still able to keep their homes and jobs in the area.”10
New Deal labor legislation forced Big Oil to convert its workplace committees into employee associations, less obviously dominated by management. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) began its successful late-1930s drive for unionization of auto, steel, and other basic manufacturing industries. But the struggle for collective bargaining rights in Richmond took longer because from 1942 to 1950 Standard Oil continued to prop up its company union as a tame, in-house alternative to the CIO-affiliated OWIU.
In 1946, after a representation election setback two years earlier, the OWIU finally defeated the not-so-independent Independent Union of Petroleum Workers (IUPW) and a craft union competitor from the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The OWIU made important contract gains in Richmond but was then decertified locally after a statewide strike in 1948. That walkout by fourteen thousand refinery workers at Shell, Union Oil, Standard of California, Richfield, and Texaco did not go according to plan:
Violence was provoked in the Los Angeles Harbor area and at Richmond. Injunctions began to rain down on the hapless strikers. Damage suits running to $28,000,000 were filed against OWIU and its locals. A hysterical press played up a back to work movement. The union ranks began to break. . . . The strike was settled on company terms and hundreds of OWIU’s best members were victimized. . . . Union Oil slashed gaping holes in the Long Beach and Rodeo locals by farming out its maintenance work to an outside firm that made a backdoor agreement with the AFL.11
In Richmond, the results were disastrous. Standard Oil mobilized anti-union workers and a hostile local press, provoking picket-line scuffles that led to the firing of sixty-two union activists (about two-thirds of whom later won reinstatement). Richmond police used tear gas against strikers. The company refused to cooperate with OWIU members on an orderly shutdown of the refinery during the strike and withdrew recognition of their union. The National Labor Relations Board stepped in, unhelpfully, to hold a decertification vote sought by an AFL union rival of the OWIU. This opening was exploited by the non-striking IUPW, which won the election. After two years of difficult shop-floor rebuilding, the Oil Workers finally regained their lost bargaining rights, by the narrow margin of 955 to 904, in June 1950. “Once again,” reports O’Connor, “the banner of industrial unionism waved over the most redoubtable fortress of open shoppery in California.”
Unfortunately (and with lasting consequences for labor-management relations over the next sixty-five years), the Richmond refinery remained, technically speaking, an “open shop.” Elsewhere in basic industry, by some point in the era after World War II, most national contracts negotiated by other CIO unions contained “union security” clauses. These obligated every union-represented employee to pay either membership dues or the equivalent in “agency fees” to help cover the cost of collective bargaining and individual representation. Standard Oil insisted that its employees remain free to quit the union and pay nothing for its services. To this day, when union leaders take independent and sometimes controversial positions on health and safety enforcement or environmental protection, refinery supervisors are able to quietly agitate among bargaining unit employees about getting out of the union that is “working against their interests.”
Contracting out is management’s other method of undermining workplace solidarity. The industry-preferred mix of directly hired workers and contract labor (even if unionized) makes it hard to maintain uniform standards for job training and safety. As one industrial union official explains, “Contractors can be working in one place one day, and then in another area the next. They get only a basic level of training to come into the refinery. Over the years, the companies have compensated for the attrition of [our] membership by backfilling with contractors. The level of training has obviously dropped off because of that.”12
The OWIU was created because most refinery workers wanted strong wall-to-wall union organization, not the old craft union system of separate bargaining units for machinists, painters, pipefitters, electrical workers, and boilermakers. Big Oil’s preference for farming out maintenance work has maintained that fragmentation and perpetuated company union influence. In modern-day refineries, this takes the form of conservative building trades unions, always eager to support Big Oil in politics and policymaking.
A TENUOUS EXISTENCE
Even with its world-class refinery, rail infrastructure, San Francisco Bay ferry connection, and deepwater port, Richmond never achieved anything close to Pittsburgh-like scale before World War II. It also remained a predominantly white working-class city. African Americans numbered less than three hundred when Richmond reached its prewar population peak of twenty-four thousand. According to Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, in her definitive history To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910–1963, these black residents “lived a tenuous existence on the outer edges of the city’s industrial vision, trapped at the bottom of its economic and social hierarchy. . . . While pre-war Richmond managed to avoid the race riots that plagued other American cities after World War I, Klan parades and minstrel shows reinforced the racial status quo.”13
Richmond’s prewar scale and racial status quo were both transformed between 1941 and 1945. With massive federal funding, California steel maker and dam builder Henry Kaiser hired thousands of workers from all over the country to build cargo ships in four newly constructed Richmond shipyards. For half a decade, this extraordinary industrial complex dwarfed even the Standard Oil refinery, which fueled the Kaiser-built vessels steaming off to war from the port of Richmond. The city was one of many World War II boomtowns, ballooning to a population of 133,000 within just a few years. By 1945, there were fifty-five defense-related plants in the Richmond area.
After Pearl Harbor and US entry into the war, Kaiser’s mission was launching ships “faster than the enemy could sink them.” His company revolutionized the labor process by breaking it down into many little pieces. Richmond’s Liberty and Victory ships were assembled like Legos, using mass production techniques pioneered by Henry Ford in the auto industry. The Kaiser operation built 747 vessels in three years, eight months, with the help of equipment like a giant whirley crane brought down from the Grand Coulee Dam. The company’s motto was “Ten down the ways in 31 days”; its fastest-built vessel took only four days, fourteen hours, and twenty minutes to complete, from the la
ying of its keel to launching into the bay.
In an era when group health coverage and on-site day care were virtually nonexistent, Kaiser became a pioneer. The Richmond shipyard’s child development center later became a model for the federal government’s Head Start program in the 1960s. Kaiser also created one of the first prepaid medical plans—funded by payroll deductions from Richmond shipyard workers—and built a field hospital in Richmond. In the postwar era, this innovative form of job-based medical insurance for workers and their families grew into the Kaiser Permanente health system, which now covers more than nine million patients in California and other states. Kaiser continues to brand itself, in the face of some union dissent, as the nation’s most labor-friendly health maintenance organization.
Driven by wartime labor shortages, Henry Kaiser’s best-known form of workplace social engineering—and the one that left a lasting mark on Richmond—was his hiring of African Americans for blue-collar jobs long restricted to white males. Kaiser recruiters targeted young African Americans eager to escape post-Depression hardship and Jim Crow constraints in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The results of that affirmative action stood in sharp contrast to Standard Oil’s employment record. The Richmond refinery’s wartime workforce of three thousand initially included just nine African Americans. By 1944, after federal government prodding, its nonwhite head count rose to only 114.14
Betty Reid Soskin’s family arrived in the East Bay from New Orleans more than a decade before the wave of southern black immigration encouraged by Kaiser. She became one of the thousands of African American workers who gained unprecedented job opportunities in Richmond during its wartime boom. Hired at age nineteen, she spent four years commuting from Oakland to a clerical job at the boilermakers’ union, where she kept track of its huge influx of new dues-paying members.
Now ninety-four and a Richmond resident, Soskin still reports to work at the Rosie the Riveter WW II Home Front National Historical Park. The visitors’ center there is located near the former shipyard site, between Marina Bay and Richmond harbor. Uniformed in a dark turtleneck, green shirt and slacks, and a vest with her gold name tag and badge, Soskin gives local history talks and leads Richmond tours. The nation’s oldest full-time national-park ranger, she also sports a brown, broad-brimmed Smokey the Bear hat.
Although a federal employee since 2006, Soskin pulls no punches when it comes to “home front” history. She reminds her audiences that A. Philip Randolph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had to threaten a march on Washington to win a Roosevelt administration ban on racial discrimination in defense industry hiring. “The Double V campaign launched the modern civil rights movement,” she points out, noting that her own wartime employer balked at accepting black members because it was “a Jim Crow union.” In Richmond, African Americans were initially hired at Kaiser as “helpers and trainees,” with black men finally gaining access to other shipyard jobs in 1943 and black women the following the year. Richmond’s waterfront army of new welders was only fully integrated, out of necessity, in the final months of the war in 1944–45.
African Americans were required to pay full dues to the conservative AFL-affiliated International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. Based on race, they were denied voting rights, couldn’t file grievances, and were consigned to the union auxiliary that employed Soskin. Nevertheless, as Shirley Ann Moore reports, their segregated Local A-36 served as a transitional vehicle to “union consciousness” for black workers with no prior labor movement experience. It became an “institution through which African American workers began to challenge workplace discrimination.” Rank-and-file activists formed Shipyard Workers Against Discrimination (SWAD), which picketed the Boilermakers’ Richmond office in 1943 to protest the union’s failure to provide equal representation. SWAD was a forerunner to the Richmond branch of the NAACP, established a year later and soon its most active affiliate on the West Coast.
By the end of the war, 20 percent of the Richmond shipyard workforce of one hundred thousand was African American. At the Ford automotive assembly plant in Richmond, blacks represented a similar percentage of a new United Auto Workers bargaining unit. Prior to 1941, when Ford was still operating on a nonunion basis in Richmond, management had been even more hostile to minority hiring than Standard Oil. A sign posted outside had clearly stated: “No Mexicans or Black Workers Wanted.”15
Throughout the war, no children of black workers were ever enrolled in Kaiser’s child development center. Eighty percent of Richmond’s black residents lived in hastily constructed public housing units that were racially segregated. After World War II, Soskin and her husband faced racial discrimination themselves when they bought a home in an all-white suburb east of Oakland. They received anonymous warnings and neighborhood hostility when they moved in, but they stuck it out. Soskin raised four children, got active in Democratic Party politics, and eventually became a Richmond field staffer for a California state legislator.
Thousands of other African Americans sought postwar acceptance in the very place they had been “invited to participate in making ships,” as Richmond minister Alvin Bernstine describes their Kaiser recruitment. Members of Bernstine’s family, originally from Louisiana, founded the Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church, where Alvin serves as pastor today. As Bernstine recounts in his book A Ministry That Saves Lives, the congregation experienced phenomenal growth because of the massive immigration of southern blacks. These arrivals worked in the shipyard and other defense industries, started small businesses and new churches, and “always believed that Richmond and the Bay Area would see value in including them in the benefits of California living.”16
But not everyone saw African Americans as “value added” to Richmond in the postwar era. As Lucretia Edwards, a longtime neighborhood leader recalled, “It was assumed by the pre-war original ‘core community’ that the shipyard workers would return to the far-flung states and towns from which they had come. But this, of course, did not happen. . . . The chaos of life in a town with a quadrupled population was compounded, post-war, by unemployment. . . . [M]any of the residents who came as shipyard workers had no feeling of participation in the life of the City. . . . They might experience strong emotional feelings of pride and commitment to the neighborhood in which they lived, but, for the city of Richmond, their feelings ranged from indifference to annoyance.”17
Annoyance turned to anger when Richmond’s fourteen thousand African Americans became victims of renewed housing and job discrimination and wholesale displacement efforts. By 1945, Richmond had the largest public housing program in the nation, with a population of seventy-three thousand.18 Its federally funded projects became a major postwar battleground because of decisions made by the powerful Richmond Housing Authority (RHA). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, nonwhite public housing tenants were showered with eviction notices warning that their apartment buildings were about to be torn down. The RHA’s demolition plans were protested by the local NAACP because they appeared clearly designed by Richmond’s then all-white city leadership to reduce its African American population. Tenants responded by signing petitions and attending mass meetings, picketing the RHA, and organizing rent strikes, all of which slowed the process. Nevertheless, by 1953, all seventeen of the public housing projects near Richmond harbor had been dismantled.
Private housing options in the city were far more limited for blacks than whites, as navy veteran and American Legion post vice-commander Wilbur Gary discovered. He tried to move his wife, Borece, and their seven children from the Harbor Gate wartime housing project when it was scheduled for destruction in 1953. The new home he bought, through a black real estate agent, was located in Rollingwood, a subdivision of eight hundred single-family homes that had been occupied by white defense workers during the war. The family was greeted by neighbors who planted a white KKK-style cross on their lawn. The office window of their realtor was shattered by a brick. In order to “restore harmony to our com
munity,” the Rollingwood Improvement Association, a group of fellow homeowners, tried to buy the Garys out, offering them one thousand dollars more than their purchase price before they could even move in.
On the night of March 7, 1952, after the family did move in, a menacing crowd of four hundred white men and teenage boys gathered outside the Gary family’s home to jeer, throw stones, and hurl racist insults at their new neighbors. They listened to the county sheriff read parts of a recent US Supreme Court decision outlawing restrictive covenants of the sort that white homeowners wrongly assumed would continue to protect Rollingwood from newcomers of the wrong color. They were similarly unmoved by the arrival of three white ministers who carried a US flag and a copy of the Constitution. The sheriff’s department made no arrests and little effort to disperse the threatening crowd.
Fortunately, hundreds of Bay Area progressives, both black and white, mobilized and came to the scene that night, and for several nights thereafter, to defend the Gary family. Among the first to arrive were Jessica Mitford and Buddy Green, two left-wing activists from the East Bay branch of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC). According to Mitford, author of The American Way of Death, their quick consultation with the besieged family led to “a many-pronged approach: physical protection of the house, trade union resolutions demanding police protection, [and] leaflets to be drawn up by the CRC, and distributed throughout the Bay Area.”19 The NAACP mobilized its members as well. And soon even a few brave white neighbors began to welcome the family.20