A mere two months earlier, the organization of the Minneapolis capitalists-the Citizens Alliance-had easily disposed of an organizing attempt by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and then smashed a strike at seven furniture manufacturing companies. One of their representatives communicated to the Regional Labor Board (RLB), “An emergency exists in this city, whereby the life and safety of the public is menaced and endangered.”Ĭoal stocks ebbed away, and the city’s police were unable to defeat the strikers. The strike caught the ruling elite of Minneapolis by surprise. A second picket would flip the dump lever on the truck and the load of coal would be deposited in the street. Strikers’ trucks in hot pursuit would have one picket jump on the running board of the offending vehicle and reach inside the cab to pull the emergency brake. Where individual trucks, aided by police, managed to break through picket lines, strikers used a mobile technique dubbed “cruising pickets” to stop them. Now, within three hours, some 600 workers, comprising truck drivers, their helpers and the workers who labored inside the coal yards, had 65 of the companies shut down. Preparations for this moment had quietly begun three years earlier. The unorganized coal delivery workers, poverty-stricken and having borne the worst of the Great Depression, voted to strike. But on February 1, temperatures suddenly dropped below zero, and the following day the tight-knit group of workers leading the effort to secure improved working conditions, higher wages and union recognition called a meeting. Late in January, the upper-Midwestern city, noted for its fiercely cold winters, had been hit with unseasonably warm weather, and the need for coal had slackened. On the morning of February 7, 1934, workers who delivered coal to businesses and residences throughout Minneapolis, Minnesota, fanned out across the city, armed with mimeographed strike instructions and maps, to shut down the 67 companies that supplied the city’s source of heat. 1934: Police use tear gas against unemployed march on City Hall, Minneapolis Minnesota.
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