Adapted from: A Century of Democratic Unionism,
the San Francisco Typographical Union Centennial book
celebrating the 100th birthday of San Francisco #21 and the
1972 International Typographical Union Convention, held in San Francisco.
The employers laid plans
to use the just-completed transcontinental railroad to bring in non-union
printers from the east and midwest. On August 12, the union yielded and dropped
its rate to 65 cents per thousand ems. The dispute, however, spread to Sacramento,
Marysville, and Stockton. The printers were defeated; the Sacramento union
suspended its bylaws and constitution. The rate dropped further to 60 cents.
The result was complete disruption. The defeat in the strike against the Call
and Bulletin took its toll. Rising unemployment and weakening economic
conditions contributed. So did the transcontinental railroad which could
now bring non-union workers to San Francisco inside of a week. For two years--and
for the first time in twenty years--San Francisco printers had no union.
Unions
Had to Struggle
The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 marked the onset
of hard times--a decade and more of depression, unemployment, discontent,
violence. The opening of the Central Pacific turned loose thousands of construction
workers, many thousands of Chinese among them. The new railroad brought
new tides of immigrants from the East, looking for work, many hungry and
broke. Eastern goods flooded local markets and local producers were hard-pressed
to meet the lower-wage competition. Land values tumbled, prices fell, exports
declined, factories closed their doors. Tens of thousands were jobless. Unions
lost much of their bargaining power; many were faced with sharp demands for
reductions in pay. Many collapsed under the weight of widespread unemployment
and cheap labor competition.
The people had numerous targets for their discontent. They were angered by
the railroad monopoly and its land-grabbing speculations. Large-scale, machine-worked
farms in the central valley dumped large gangs of workers on the cities after
their all-too-brief harvest seasons. Charges and countercharges of corruption
in government were flung about endlessly. Sandlot meetings focused their
ire on the Chinese.
Dennis Kearney, a ham-fisted, sharp-tongued drayman, capitalized on the anti-Chinese
feelings to build a short-lived political force. It won a handful of sensational
election victories, helped to rewrite the state constitution, then disintegrated
almost as rapidly as it had been built. It won a hearing for the complaints
of many working people, though it did very little about them. It helped to entrench the anti-Oriental tradition
that was to persist for years to come. Out of the anti-Chinese agitation,
though, came two weapons which organized workers later put to good use. One
was the economic boycott; the second, the union label.
Against this background, the printers sought to reorganize and re-establish
their union. In 1871, Horace Greeley, the famous New York printer and editor,
and first president of Typographical Union, Local 6, became the Democratic
candidate for the presidency of the United States; he was backed in San Francisco
by the Greeley Printers' Club. In January, 1872, printers were summoned to
a meeting from which came the San Francisco Printers Association. Its purpose
was to maintain the rate of wages paid on the daily newspapers, on some
weeklies, and in several book and job shops. The Evening Post (edited by
Henry George, himself a printer, later the arch-prophet of the single tax,
and a candidate for mayor of New York) reported that the association "would
govern the rates of compensation to be accepted by members--nothing more."
It would recruit members by "argument only." A. A. Stickney, a former president
of Washoe Typographical Union in Nevada, was its president. Its vice-president,
James K. Phillips, was a vigorous unionist who later served the printers'
union in many capacities and played an active role in later attempts to form
a central labor body.
These attempts at organization culminated August 25, 1872. The association convened and promptly adjourned sine die to make way for the first meeting
in two years of the San Francisco Typographical Union. The ITU chartered
the reorganized group as Local No. 21--the number of its predecessor. Heading
the reorganized union were J. M. Hurd, president, John O'Brien, secretary,
George F. Meek, John Collmer, R. A. James, J. N. Larkin, M. Cuddy, and A.
Aulbach. It established its scale at 60 cents per thousand ems--the level
that had prevailed following its disastrous dispute two years before with
the Call and Bulletin.
The old scale remained in force until 1876 when the Chronicle spearheaded
a successful drive to reduce the rate to 50 cents per thousand ems. In 1880,
Charles De Young, publisher of the Chronicle, asked for a further reduction.
When the union rejected the request, De Young installed a crew of non-union
printers and the union men walked out. The strike, however, came to a sudden
halt a week later when De Young was killed. His killing was the outgrowth
of a personal feud and was totally unrelated to the strike. Nevertheless,
the union ended its strike and allowed its members to work at the Chronicle,
if and when it returned to the union rate of pay. The paper remained non-union
until 1883. With better times and a shortage of compositors, the employees
asked for--and got--the union scale. The Examiner, by then, was also a union
office.
A sharp and persistent thorn in the union's side, though, were the continued
non-union composing rooms at the Call and the Bulletin. In 1883, the union
tried again to organize the two shops. When the publisher refused to discharge
the non-union printers, some sixty men walked out. The publishers denied
any intent to discriminate against union men and maintained that they paid
the union scale. The union charged that a union man could only work at the
papers if he kept his membership secret. The Chronicle, so recently a quarrelsome
antagonist, happily joined in the fray on the union's side. Organized labor
rallied behind the printers' cause. Nevertheless, three months and some $4,000
later, Fitch and Pickering were still successfully resisting the union's demands.
In 1886, the quarrel broke out again. This time, the boycott won the support
of Knights of Labor units and of the Federated Trades and Labor Organizations
of the Pacific Coast, a recently organized central council of trade unions.
Under the pressures of the boycott, the Call and Bulletin chapels' applied
for membership in the union. The union objected to some printers as "notoriously
unfair." In the end, a board of arbitration, headed by F. K. Krauth, onetime
director of Eureka Typographical Union and now publisher of the Alameda
Encinal, resolved the cases of the disputed men.
The settlement with the Call and Bulletin secured the union's place in the
city's newspaper offices. It enabled the union to survive, virtually untouched,
the bitter war that broke out in the following decade between organized
labor and organized employers. Scarcely a segment of the city's industry
escaped the employers' anti-union attack. In 1894, the employer association's
president proudly reported: "The general success of this Association can
best be understood in the light of the fact that among the industries of
San Francisco there remains but a single union which imposes its rules upon
its trade. That union is the Typographical Union. The reason why this union
still continues to dictate terms is because the employing printers have never
combined to resist its demands."
For eighty-two years, Local 21 and the newspaper publishers kept the peace.
It was often uneasy, often angry, but peace nonetheless. Frequently, they
marched to the verge, only by some means to pull back. As far as the book
and job trade--the commercial printing industry--was concerned, though, the
fight had only begun.
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