When Workers Run a City
In the winter of 1919, Seattle was combustible. The 1918 Spanish Flu had ravaged the city, but officials kept shipyard workers on the job in order to continue making ships for WWI at a brutal pace. Many people were dying, and according to historian Cal Winslow, author of Radical Seattle: The General Strike of 1919, Seattle workers felt they had been lied to “by the president, the shipping board, and the city’s health officials. They were bitter, angry, and itching for a fight.” I spoke to Winslow about what happened during the resulting general strike, which lasted a week (though shipyard strikers held out another month).
Revolution was in the air
On February 6, 1919, tens of thousands of Seattle workers walked off their jobs. The strike coincided with a revolution happening across the world – in Russia, workers were taking over factories and peasants were taking over their fields and apparently managing them collectively. People were following these events in Seattle, and though “they knew they were not going to have a revolution in one city,” Winslow said, they were overwhelmingly “thinking about working class power.”
Workers built a powerful coalition
The end of WWI brought cutbacks in the shipping industry, and big military installations in the area were demobilized. Organized labor had been advocating for shortening the work week and sharing work, among other things. The metal trade workers sought an alliance with the soldiers being demobilized so that they would not act as strikebreakers, and the radical Wobblies (members of International Workers of the World or IWW) collaborated with the more institutional American Federation of Labor (AFL) to organize all kinds of people. “We find spokespeople for the movement amongst painters and barbers and waitresses as well as among metalworkers and longshoremen,” Winslow told me. Everyone went on strike because they wanted “the shipyard workers to get their demands, they wanted to put the authorities on notice that the Seattle working class was powerful, and they weren’t going to allow their masters to reimpose the open shop on the city.”
Planning won the day
The strike committee worked nonstop, ensuring that people were fed and the city was clean. They created stations where mothers with children could get milk, and many people were involved in meal preparation. “Thirty thousand meals in a day is a lot of food and a lot of work, and it wasn’t just women – it included those who you might think of as the most macho men,” Winslow said. (He emphasized that journalist Anna Louise Strong, who wrote about the strike, deserves credit for digging up many stories of worker self-management.) The strike committee gave garbage workers a special pass that allowed them to pick up trash as their contribution to the strike, and hospital workers continued their jobs. People on strike “were not just sitting at home,” said Winslow, but were “taking up the essential tasks of running the city.” By all accounts, he said, “they did a very good job of it.”
The police were kept out
Around the time of the strike, the city had recruited and armed vigilantes, and soldiers were everywhere. People were aware that ”the authorities were quite willing to provoke violence.”
Loggers had already been involved in violent labor struggles outside the city, and Wobblies had been shot. The IWW took it upon themselves to establish a presence in rough areas of town and keep a lid on any conflict. “They saw keeping the peace not as something that was liberal or pacifistic, but as not allowing themselves to be provoked, and not giving the authorities the opportunity to attack an unarmed city,” Winslow said. The police were “reduced to onlookers. There weren’t any picket lines to break up, no one to shoot – what were they to do? It was a problem for them.”
The Seattle strike is part of a long history of mutual aid
Seattle brings to mind “the whole legacy of mutualism, [going back to] the early workers movement when there wasn’t anything like a welfare state and public services were minimal. For Winslow, “it’s also a sign of the creativity of people because this was not done from the top down … reading about this should inspire us to think about what workers are capable of doing.”
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