Into the Valley: The Beginning of Cotton Compress Unionism in California’s Central Valley (1937 - 1938)

The Dispatcher, January 1996
Edited by HARVEY SCHWARTZ

GEORGE LEE

“It was a little like it must have been in Mississippi” Organizing cotton compress workers in the valley was a little like it must have been to organize in Mississippi. Cotton was a southern industry. The supervisors and foremen were mainly from the South the whole company leadership was southern. Many of the workers had worked in the compresses back in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. When they followed the industry out here in the 1920s and 1930s, they brought that whole southern thing with them. We had some pretty tough times out in the valley. I stayed at a lady’s house one time. I had gone off to meet with some workers, and when I drove in the driveway I saw this big gang of white men there, with their big white hats and their cowboy boots, and they were saying, “Where’s that n—er agitator you got stayin’ here?” She said “I don’t know,” but—and this is what I call sort of informing on me—she had my little cardboard suitcase sitting out there on the porch, which if I attempted to redeem it, they would have been after my ass. So I just kept going, left my things sitting there on the porch, never did go back for them.

ERNEST CLARK

“They were slave drivers.” I was at Anderson-Clayton’s new Fresno compress in 1937. They were slave drivers. You would walk through a plant and see a foreman just standing right over atop of a man, he just working for his life, just driving for life. The foreman just be standing right over him, saying do it, do it, do it, do it! If he frown, don t say nothing—go off and get your check! You were working for nothing, thirty to thirty-five cents an hour. There was no machinery. Them people was picking up 500 pound bales of cotton stacked ’em on top of one another, trucking cotton with hand trucks, running all day. You checked in at 8 o’clock and you run ’til noon, pushin’ that bale of cotton on a truck with iron wheels. When they first built this Anderson-Clayton plant some of the sheds didn’t have paved floors, just dirt, dust and dirt. And you imagine a hand truck with a 500 pound bale of cotton on it, and you’re pushin’ and pullin’ it through that dirt. Or they’d be loading rail cars with bales of cotton off the press—they’d have them piled three high in there, with guys up there on their knees, with three foot clearance, rolling that cotton around for hours and hours, without a break. Man, with this weather up above 100 degrees, and the press runnin’ maybe 150 bales an hour, they’d have four-five guys up there pushing that cotton around. It was absolute slavery. It killed many a man, I mean, not actually took his life, but just broke down in his back, in the legs just wrecked men.

TOMMY BURSE

“He would have us runnin’ ourselves to death” When I first started at San Joaquin Compress of Bakersfield in 1933, they didn’t have no union. If you was a cotton cutter, band shover, tier, head sewer, lever puller, any of those crafts, it didn’t make no difference. The superintendent over there name of Carl West, if he found someone better than you was, he could say, “Don’t come back tomorrow. I got a man to take your place.” Only after we got the union, we got to the place where we had some seniority. We had a block foreman out there one year, name of Rip something-or-other. This Rip was a driver, he was a hard man. He wanted everyone to run with them hand trucks. He had this record player by the press, and he would put this whole stack of records on it, mostly what we called colored records, jazz. He would have us runnin ourselves to death, tripping all over one another to get back to that music. Until they caught on, which was pretty soon, and they made away with that music. That was around the time the union came in. Guys said “We got a union in here now, we don t have to do all that rippin’ and runnin’.”

ELIJAH FIFER

“We knew we had to be pretty secretive” I came to Bakersfield in September 1935 and went to work out at San Joaquin Compress that October. I was from Texas and had worked in compresses a little. That what got me on pretty quick—I already understood it. They paid 30 cents an hour minimum, and 45 cents maximum at San Joaquin. They’d hire you the way they wanted and if you did something they didn’t like they’d push you out. The superintendent wasn’t as bad as the foreman he brought in, a white man named ‘Tex.’ He was one rough bugger. I’m glad he came in here because he was so nasty, he made us organize faster. Tex got off a freight train, just the same as me. He got off there sometime in 1935 and come over here and wanted a job. He didn’t know nothing about no press. He was really nice, you know getting in here. Guys learned him everything, so he got to be block foreman. And then he got tough. If he didn’t like a guy he’d lay him off. He and I could never get along—I don’t know why since I’ve always been pretty easy with people. He would just keep aggravating; he’d move you around and get you in trouble with some other foreman. He just kept the pressure on all the time. The speed up was the worst thing. He’d get in and tie cotton like the devil for a few minutes, get the machine flying, and walk away. It was really on account of Tex we walked out. We wasn’t asking nothing, and he was just making it so hard on us. We was working 10 hours a day, straight time, and if you didn’t come in one day, they’d be likely to lay you off for a week. So in 1937 we got to talking about a walkout, me, Walter Foster, Kenneth Gatewood, a man named Walker, and some Mexican guys. You know, the bunch I was with were in sympathy with all those early ’30s strikes; in 1935, we used to go out to support the cotton strike at Shafter close to Delano. So we knew a little when we started to talk walkout. We knew we had to be pretty secretive, too. We had a signal all worked out, which was when the leverman blew the whistle, we just stopped the press. He blew the whistle twice—it was during the night shift, around 10 p.m., and everyone quit. It was pretty surprising—even I was surprised, because you know we were a pretty mixed up bunch, Mexican and blacks, and nobody thought we could get this together. Nobody expected S.G. Emby, the lever puller, to walk out with us either, but I knew he would because I had talked to him beforehand.

TOMMY BURSE

“We want a nickel more” The walkout was at a time of year when they had a lot of work, and for us to stop pressing fouled things up way down the line. So when the superintendent, Carl West, found out that we had quit, he came down out of his office. He cussed at us. He swore all the time. “Goddamnit,” he said, “what you want?” Somebody called out, “Mr. West we want a nickel more an hour.” “GodDAMN,” he says, you don’t want nothing, I thought you was striking for something. Y’all get back to work.” See, that was before we got the union. We was just getting into it, not knowing how things was going to be; we was just testing the waters. We could have gotten to fifteen cents if we had asked for it, but we were afraid to lose the whole thing. Besides, we thought five cents was pretty big money.

ELIJAH FIFER

“There wasn’t anything they could do” So many people were afraid that when we walked out West could have fired us all. But at that time there was only a few compresses in the state and help wasn’t plentiful like it was in the south with people who understood the compress. We got them in the middle of the season and there wasn’t anything they could do. Head sewers, lever pullers, cotton tiers, they was hard to get. We knew that. We knew that all the skilled people had jobs . We did our homework, we didn’t go into it just blind. We didn’t have no union yet, so Walter Foster called a guy who worked at the Laborers’ Union. They sent an old black guy out of the Waiters Union up from Los Angeles to talk to us. He come up two or three time to tell us to organize and about the advantages we’d get. I heard afterwards that the longshoremen were helping him. Pretty soon after that Hursel Alexander, a black CIO organizer from Los Angeles, came up to organize us into Local 272 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA).

OLLIE LEWIS

“We voted in the union” I was working at San Joaquin in 1938 when Alexander came to organize. We were really green, so I tried to learn as much as I could. Hursel was a labor man—he knew all the laws, all the ins and outs of it. At the time there was John L. Lewis of CIO and other guys like that, and they were trying to school us about the power that labor had. They was mostly drillin’ us to be good labor people. And, of course Hursel told us how they was payin’ more in other places. We voted in the union, struck for three days, and won a contract with better wages, overtime, holiday pay, seniority and a grievance system. After that we began to get very particular about the hours, getting’ time and a half and so on. And one hundred bales an hour became the production standard—the boss might get 103 or 105, or 97, but he wouldn’t be gettin’ no 125 bales like he used to. He would get a fair day’s work, that’s all.