The opening of 1937 found much of Washington gripped by the maritime and newspaper strikes. The maritime strike was finally won after on February 5th, when the Maritime Federation was granted control of hiring halls, wage advances and a 6 hour work day.[1]. The strike had lasted 96 days.

The victory of the Maritime Federation came two weeks after the National Labor Relations Board demanded that the Seattle Post Intelligencer reinstate reporters Frank Lynch and Evenhardt Armstrong, fired at the outset of the PI strike that had begun the previous summer. The NLRB also demanded that the paper, a Hearst publication, recognize and bargain with the Newspaper Guild. The PI refused to reinstate the two men and went on to claim that their editors were entitled to form their own union.[2] The Guild launched a new round of picketing and called for a boycott. On April 24th, over a month after Armstrong's death[3], the company gave in and rehired Lynch.[4]

On January 25th,   the Works Progress Administration reclassified thousands of jobs, resulting in wage cuts for nearly half of the workers on WPA projects. In response 1500 WPA workers on 16 projects around King County sat down on the job.[5] By February 14th the strike had expanded to include 5,000 men and women, making it the biggest WPA strike in the nation to date.[6] On February 25th, the strike ended in success – reversal of the reclassification and the recognition of the Workers Alliance as a collective bargaining agent for WPA workers (although some foremen refused to let striking workers back to their jobs and others refused to pay them the proper wage.)[7] A month later the Workers Alliance in concert with the AFL and the WPA found that many of the workers that had been classified as skilled or semiskilled were being paid as unskilled laborers. On March 14th, twenty-two hundred WPA workers in Snohomish County also struck for better wages. By this time, however, there was a rival union of WPA workers, the American Project Employees Association, which did not favor striking. Suspicions that the APEA was a company union working in concert with firms handling WPA projects was confirmed when the union called in the state patrol to break a picket line. On March 30th the Everett workers voted to accept a deal similar to King County and returned to work the following week.[8]

Meanwhile, the two month long dispute between the Cannery Workers and Farm Laborers Union and the bosses of the salmon packing canneries came to a close on May 1st without a strike or boycott. The Filipino-led union won 30%-40% raises across the board, an 8 hour work day, a full union shop and union run hiring halls.[9] But since CW&FL  had sided with the CIO,  William Green, head of the AFL, claimed that the newly formed Alaska Cannery Workers Union (which did not represent Japanese workers) had jurisdiction over the canneries and demanded the CW&FLU be kicked out of the Maritime Federation. But the demand was refused.[10]

 On May 11th, the International Longshoreman's Association released a statement ridiculing the AFL both for the treatment of the CW&FL union and for their action in the case of five warehouses in Seattle saying “We are opposed to the dictatorship of the supreme court of labor that sits 3000 miles and knows nothing of the local situation. This is a local question, and it is up to us to Seattle it locally.” The ILA demanded that warehouses be allowed to vote on which union would represent them even though the AFL leadership had promised the warehouses to the Teamsters. Although the Teamsters agreed to the ILA demands in June, raids and jurisdiction battles continued.  In many ways this marked the end of a unified labor movement in Washington for years to come.[11]

On June 7th maritime workers responding to the increasingly paranoid culture of the AFL and lumber unions both convened (separately) to vote on weather or not they join the CIO. The decision was made first by the Lumber Federation after the AFL leadership directed the Teamsters Union and the Electrical Workers and Steam Engineers Union to forcibly take over local lumber unions.[12] Despite an impassioned plea from the head of the International Cutters and Joiners Union, most lumber unions registered under the CIO's Lumber Workers National Union when it was set up in late July.[13] After a long voting process, every chapter of the Washington ILA with the exception of the Tacoma chapter joined the CIO.

Throughout this process, the local and national leadership of the AFL was getting more and more paranoid. In May the leadership of the Snohomish County Labor Council decided to meet once a month instead of once a week and disbanded their committee on WPA projects, giving sole collective bargaining rights to the Building Trades Union.[14] Shortly afterwards the SCLC decided not to allow seats to new unions and to throw its support behind a new newspaper workers union in opposition to the Newspaper Guild.  The Guild had just been recognized as the collective bargaining agent for workers at several papers including the Seattle Star. The head of the Building Trades Union went so far as to threaten to pull the Guild’s charter when they leveled opposition to the move.[15] This lockout of new and CIO unions prompted the establishment of the Seattle Unity Labor Council, open to affiliates of both federations, on July 20th..[16]  Members of the Unity Council were bared from sitting on the SCLC.[17] In a speech at a later meting in October, Howard Costigan, executive director of the Washington Commonwealth Federation made the following plea: “The forces of reaction are gathering to defeat the New Deal, and yet the most dangerous enemy is not the reactionaries, but the civil war in the labor movement. The solution is the future progress of democracy; the foundation of democracy itself rests upon your healing the breach.”[18]

On July 20th the Seattle Star fired 19 workers in the circulation department who were members of the Newspaper Guild and replaced them with members to the Teamsters Union (one more was fired later). The Guild struck, requesting that their men be reinstated until the NLRB could rule on the firings, but The Star didn’t budge.  Mayor Dore, now a member of the SCLC, said the strike was illegal and called in the Seattle police to break up pickets.[19] The NLRB eventually ruled that since the Guild was a part of the AFL at the time of the firing the action was not a jurisdictional dispute but simply a question of the legality of the firings.  It later ruled that the firings were not justified and ordered the Star to rehire 20 laid off workers. The Star refused and the stalemate lasted through the New Year.[20]

At this point the power of labor to battle industry turned on itself. In October the Teamsters Union, in concert with several mining companies, tried to shut the CIO out of the mines.[21] On Labor Day, thirty thousand people peaceably marched in the Seattle Parade until police officers pulled floats with CIO and Unity affiliations out of the march and demanded that they be removed before the floats could continue.[22] Each week the newspapers reported new stories of beatings, threats and jurisdictional violence: taverns that sold CIO beer were vandalized, truckers that haul material from CIO factories were harassed and CIO work places picketed.

In December of 1937 three bombs went off in Seattle. The first exploded in a neutral wood yard in north Seattle; before the blast the owner had been threatened with an AFL picket line if he did not stop selling CIO wood.[23] A week later an independent dye plant was bombed after being threatened by the Cleaners and Dryers Association to join the union.[24] The third bomb went off in the last week of December, destroying a cafe with no obvious affiliations called Toms Coffeepot. Police found no suspects in any of the three cases.[25]

1937 ended with nearly 20,000 unemployed people living in Seattle and some unions posting as high as a 17% unemployment and 32% partial employment rate in October.[26] Even as the national talks between the AFL and the CIO were breaking down in Washington DC the WCF youth conference released its statement for the next year, calling for a young voters league, a boycott of Japanese goods and unity between the local Unions.[27]

Throughout 1937 the most powerful and active unions in Washington were the International Longshoreman Association, the Lumber Federation and the Teamster's Union. It is also necessary to mention the Workers Alliance and the various cannery and farm workers unions. The important thing about these unions was their attempts to organize the unskilled, transient, homeless and disenfranchised Americans of non European ethnicity. Although the WA wasn't given much support by other unions (until it signed with the CIO), it is interesting to note that both before and after the AFL-CIO split, the ILA and the Maritime Federation did their best to protect cannery workers whose unions had been affiliated with the federation for some time. In May the Sunday News speculated about the motivation behind the ridiculous attacks by the AFL leadership on the CW&FL union: “The membership feels that the old guard of the AF of L is using their Cannery Union, which is affiliated to the Maritime Federation, as a pawn, and that they are using the opposition union as the wedge to try and split the progressive Maritime Federation.”[28]

All in all it was a sad year for Washington's labor movement, a year that begun with a look at what a state run and dominated by labor could accomplish, and ended with the power of the movement slipping away into the same petty greed unions had fought against.