On January 21, 1919, approximately 35,000 shipyard workers in Seattle, most affiliated with the Metal Trades Council, go on strike. Another 14,000 strike in Tacoma. The shipyard strike is the spark that ignites the five-day Seattle General Strike two weeks later, but the shipyard strike continues for a month after the end of the general strike. It will end on March 11 with no gains for the strikers.
The Macy Award
It all began over an arcane ruling known as the Macy Award.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917 it needed ships and needed them fast. To meet the need, the U.S. Shipping Board incorporated the Emergency Fleet Corporation to handle the construction of a merchant fleet for the government and the corporation contracted with private shipyards nationwide, including in Seattle and Tacoma, to build ships. Later that year the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board was created to arbitrate labor disputes between employers and workers in an effort to keep defense production running as smoothly as possible, and shortly before the war ended in November 1918 the board issued a ruling -- known as the Macy Award after its chairman, V. Everit Macy (1871-1930) -- setting wages for skilled and unskilled workers in shipyards across the country. Most shipyard owners were bound by the terms of the award, and if they failed to comply they faced the threat of the government pulling their contracts, crippling their operations if not putting them out of business entirely.
The ruling had a side effect of reducing wages for some workers. These workers had been grandfathered into a higher wage before lower wages were set by the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board, and they were allowed to keep these wages so long as they kept the same job. However, if they started a new job at another shipyard they could expect to receive a maximum of $4.64 a day for unskilled labor and $6 a day for skilled labor, regardless of whether they had previously earned a higher wage for the same work at another shipyard.
The Macy Award was the catalyst that spurred the Seattle Metal Trades Council, an alliance of more than 20 local metal-trades unions (representing welders, sheet metal workers, and the like), into action. (The Seattle Star reported there were 22 unions in the alliance, but both The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer put the number at 21.) In January 1919 the council demanded a pay scale of $6 a day for unskilled workers, $7 for craftsmen, and $8 for skilled workers such as mechanics. The employers said no. As the threat of a strike loomed, employers tried to split the strikers by offering an increase to $6.92 a day for mechanics while leaving less-skilled workers in the lurch. The council said no. Despite appeals that all of the union members be given a chance to vote, 57 delegates representing the 21 unions affiliated with the Metal Trades Council voted on January 16 to call a strike in Seattle's shipyards, set to begin five days later.
The Strike Snowballs
Efforts to resolve the dispute failed, and at 10 a.m. on January 21 more than 25,000 metal-trades workers -- most quietly, though at the Duthie shipyard some waved their hats and grinned for a Seattle Times photographer -- walked out of Seattle's shipyards. Most of them came from the "big four" yards: the Skinner and Eddy shipyard (where approximately 15,000 workers struck), the Ames Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, J. F. Duthie and Company, and the Seattle North Pacific Shipbuilding Company. They were joined by another 10,000 workers who handled other lines of work, primarily carpenters. (Though many of these workers didn't favor the strike, they couldn't do their jobs if the metal-trades workers weren't there to do theirs.) Fourteen thousand shipyard workers in Tacoma also went on strike that day (early accounts that 15,000 workers struck in Tacoma were subsequently corrected), and several thousand shipyard workers in Aberdeen later joined the strike.
Within 24 hours there was already talk of a general strike in support of the shipyard workers -- in Tacoma. Bert Swain, secretary of the Metal Trades Council, quickly went on record saying that a similar move was not being contemplated in Seattle, but the truth was that such a move was already happening. The council appealed to the Seattle Central Labor Council, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor consisting of more than 100 local unions, for a general strike in the city. On the evening of January 22 the Central Labor Council voted to submit a general strike proposal to each of its unions, with a tentative strike date set for February 1.
It wasn't the first time the Central Labor Council had called for a vote on a general strike. It had happened twice before, in 1916 and 1918. Both times there was a vote, but both times there was a settlement before a strike. This time there was no settlement. The employers and the U.S. government were as firm in their positions as the shipyard workers were in theirs. Though many in labor cautioned against a general strike, more favored it. Other workers simply found themselves caught up in the rush. The unions approved the strike, which began on February 6 in Seattle. (Despite the public posturing, there was no general strike in Tacoma.)
"No One Knows Where!"
The Seattle General Strike was doomed almost from the start. It did not have widespread support (in fact, many in Seattle saw it as a workers' revolution), but a bigger problem was that the strikers had set few clear goals for the strike to achieve. Instead, as acknowledged by local labor radical Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970) in the Seattle Union Record two days before the strike began, there was only a "road that leads -- NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!" ("Union Record publishes ..."). Without a clear vision, the strike soon began to stagnate. Seattle's streetcar workers defected two days into the strike, and over the next few days more workers returned to work.
Seattle's general strike fizzled out after five days and officially ended on February 11. But the shipyard workers' strike continued for another month, though the strikers battled dissent in their own ranks much as the general strikers had battled dissent in theirs. On the same day the Seattle General Strike ended, Tacoma's shipyard strikers submitted a proposal for ending the shipyard strike, but only in Tacoma. Aberdeen strikers also threatened to go their own way. Ultimately, both cities stayed in until the bitter end.
The shipyard strike rolled on through February, and the arguments, threats, and negotiations to nowhere rolled right along with it. Finally, during the first week of March, the affected unions in all three cities voted to end the strike, based on the hope that wages would be increased when the Macy Award expired on April 1. All of the unions that voted in Tacoma and Aberdeen voted to return to work, and even in radical Seattle 15 of the 19 shipyard unions that voted approved the return. Shipyard workers in Seattle and Tacoma went back to work on March 11, while Aberdeen workers did so a day earlier. After seven weeks of idleness, it took nearly a week to get the plants back to a point that approached normal operations.
Back to the Beginning
The labor-friendly Seattle Star estimated that the strike had cost Seattle $20 million (equivalent to $275 million in 2015). Though arguing in a March 10 editorial that "strikes on the part of the workers are often necessary," the paper conceded that "a general strike was not justified in our opinion" ("The End"). The employer-friendly Seattle Times took it a step further, estimating that the strike, including the general strike, had cost Seattle $35 million ($480 million in 2015), and proclaiming in its own editorial that "the movement was from the beginning a strike against the government rather than the shipbuilders -- in other words, a revolution ... there was for a few days real fear in this great country of ours that Bolshevism [communism] might actually gain a foothold ... [but Seattle] has proved to the whole country that Seattle is not the home of anarchy, sedition or any other form of revolution" ("Post Mortem").
Perhaps the only thing everyone agreed on was that the strikes had hurt most those who could afford it least -- the workers themselves. The unknown road described by Anna Louise Strong was a circle that led back to the beginning. Not only did workers return to the same conditions and pay, but they lost a good deal of respect among many Western Washingtonians who had been relatively sympathetic to their position. Just by its sheer numbers labor would remain a force to be reckoned with in the region, but now it was a divided and weakened force, and it would take years to recover.
