In May 1933, the United States was at the height of the Great Depression and it was decades before the Civil Rights Revolution ended the racist apartheid Jim Crow system. The rallying cry of the Communist Party was “Fight! Don’t Starve!” Work was hard to find nationwide, especially for women. Demand for relief in major cities almost doubled from August 1932 to August 1933. In St. Louis, Black workers could only take on very low wage jobs and Black women were often confined to domestic work. Despite the low wages, many of these women preferred to work in the nut industry.
Across St. Louis, 3,000 women were employed by 16 pecan factories, seven of which were owned by the R.E. Funsten Co. Black women made up almost nine out of every 10 workers in the industry. They had longer hours, shorter lunch breaks and lower wages than their white counterparts. Many described the conditions the women worked under as “sweatshop conditions,” and their wages had been cut multiple times in the two years prior to 1933.
Though it was part of the food industry, there were no health regulations for the workers. Removing nuts from their shells created a lot of dust which made workers cough regularly. The nutmeat could permanently stain clothing so workers had to wear aprons, the cost of which was deducted from their pay. Despite all of this, most of the women believed the work was necessary to support their families, though pay was so low that around 60% of them received federal relief.
Carrie Smith, a Black worker who had been employed at the Funsten Nut Co. for 18 years and eventual leader of the strike, said that her pay was highest in 1918 when she made $18 a week. By 1933, her weekly pay barely amounted to $4. Average weekly pay for all women was below $3, but for Black women it was less than $2.
Starting to organize
A recent recruit to the Communist Party, who had two family members working at Funsten, talked with them about the possibility of organizing their coworkers into a labor union. Three women, the recruit, and local Communist Party leader, Ralph Shaw, met together to discuss organizing. Over the next few months, 20 women were attending the meetings. The demands they agreed to present to Mr. Eugene Funsten, president of the company, were to increase wages to 10 cents for a pound of nut halves, four cents for a pound of whole nuts, a guarantee of equal wages for Black and white workers, and to recognize their union.
“We Demand 10 and 4” was the rallying cry of the women, and by late April more than 100 women from one plant had joined the union. One dozen were elected from this group to deliver their demands to Funsten on the morning of April 24, joined by 100 women from one plant who stopped work to wait outside Funsten’s office for an answer. They were told their demands would be taken up with the company and would be answered later. After three weeks they had not heard back and began expanding their efforts to other plants. By May 12, 15 more women had joined the union and leadership decided that waiting any longer to take action would cause them to lose momentum. On the evening of May 13, a mass meeting was called and the decision was made to strike. Carrie Smith declared, “Girls! We can’t lose!”
The beginning of the strike
That Monday morning, workers from the plant where the union was born went to the office to demand an answer and planned to strike if their demands were not met. They were rejected and the strike began with 900 workers, mostly from one plant, walking out on the first day. On the second day, workers from two more factories and two separate companies, the Liberty Nut Co. and Central Pecan Co., joined them. This brought the total number of striking women to 1,400. They were joined by their families, the Unemployed Councils and the local Communist Party. Sympathizing workers provided support in the form of food, feeding nearly every striking worker each day.
After the fourth day of the strike, Funsten offered workers a pay raise of one-third of their original wages, promising the white workers they would receive more than the Black workers. He claimed that anything more would ruin the company in the midst of the Depression, though a Saint Louis University history student and Marxist, Myrna Fichtenbaum, calculated in 1976 that the company was actually earning a profit of 10%. The offer was rejected, as well as another offer of three cents per pound of shelled nuts. After this, Funsten began calling in strikebreakers who were escorted by police. The strikers fought back by smashing at least two police cars. Over a dozen arrests, including a leader of the Communist Party, Bill Sentner, prompted 1,500 women, Black and white, to march on City Hall, demanding Mayor Bernard Dickmann order police to stop protecting the strikebreakers and to help end the strike. Dickman appointed a committee to find a solution to their grievances.
On the ninth day, an all-day meeting was held between Funsten, his lawyer, the central strike committee and the mayor’s appointed committee. Funsten made an offer equivalent to eight cents per pound of half nuts, four cents for pieces, and the end of any differences between Black and white workers. The central strike committee, along with Mayor Dickmann, recommended that the workers accept the offer, which they did unanimously, doubling the wages of 3,000 women.
Lessons from the strike
The Funsten Nut Strike inspired the women of the Sopkin Dress Manufacturing Co. in Chicago to strike one month later, also winning their demands of higher wages and an end to racial discrimination. In 1934, Minneapolis and San Francisco held general strikes. All of these strikes happened in the context of the Great Depression and Jim Crow, and yet the workers still knew that by organizing and acting in solidarity with each other that they could still win.
Racism is often used to divide working-class people, notably during the suffrage movement that had ended only 13 years before the Funsten strike. At this point in time, pay differences between Black and white workers was seen as just a fact of life. The first offer from Funsten was a one-third raise for workers, including a higher raise for white workers, though they were not swayed and were able to win even higher wages for all workers at the company. The workers had been engaged in struggle with each other for four days by the time the offer was made, their class consciousness being shaped by being in the streets together.
The workers did not keep the strike to themselves and went to the people of St. Louis to garner support. They were provided food and clothing to help keep the strike going as long as it needed to. The political and organizational strategy provided by the Communist Party and Unemployed Councils was criticized by both the city and Funsten, though the workers insisted that negotiations continue with both involved in strike leadership. A leader of the Social Justice Commission, Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman, accused the employers of trying to break the strike by attributing it to communists, saying that communists did not cause the strike, but were leading it, the cause was “un-American” wages.
Working class people all understand their oppression at some level, but the system that creates that oppression, and the solution to it, only becomes clear to us when we are in struggle together.
Liberation News collage.
Sources: “The Funsten Nut Strike,” Myrna Fichtenbaum (1991), “Women and the American Labor Movement,” Philip Foner (1982).
