American Labor and the Cold War

The Battle for Standard Coil: The United Electrical Workers, the Community Service Organization, and the Catholic Church in Latino East Los Angeles

The Battle for Standard Coil The United Electrical Workers, the Community Service Organization, and the Catholic Church in Latino East Los Angeles
Kenneth C. Burt In 1952, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) battled the newly chartered International Union of Electrical , Radio and Machine Employees (IUE) in East Los Angeles. The two unions struggled for the right to represent electrical workers at Standard Coil, a secondary supplier that provided parts for the Sabre Jet. The UE had been expelled from the CIO in 1949 for following the Communist Party line, and the CIO chartered the IUE the same day to bring electrical workers back into the CIO fold. A close look at this previously unexamined campaign demonstrates two important points in the evolving understanding of organized labor and the Cold War. First, the election was not fundamentally a conflict between the right and the left, but a bitter battle within the liberal left. Second, local conditions and alliances were the principal determinants of election results. While the IUE utilized anticommunist rhetoric and drew support from a range of anticommunist allies in its battle for Standard Coil, it was ultimately grassroots issues, and not the national red scare, that decided the election. The rivalry between the UE and the IUE mobilized competing constellations of allied organizations. The IUE received aid from the CIO, the Catholic Church, the commercial media, and various federal agencies. The UE won assistance from the other unions similarly expelled from the CIO and from the Communist Party (CP) itself. As in many other representational elections involving UE, a majority of the workers at Standard Coil were ethnic Catholics. In contrast to the large General Electric and Westinghouse plants in the East and Midwest, the factory in Los Angeles was relatively small and the workforce was comprised overwhelmingly of young Latinas. In addition, the UE was not the largest electrical union in Los Angeles—Manufacturing Local 1710 of the AFL International Brotherhood of 118 Electrical Workers (IBEW) was larger. The most ironic twist in this case was that the UE was not nobly defending itself from a “raid” by another union. At Standard Coil, the UE was doing the raiding.1 The battle for Standard Coil took place amidst the sea change that transformed both labor and Latino politics in greater Los Angeles and especially on the east side, the heart of radical Los Angeles, between 1947 and 1952. In 1949 the Communist Party and its allies lost control of the Los Angeles CIO Council, which for a decade had enjoyed enormous influence and prestige within the liberal labor left. The CP also lost most of its influence in Hollywood. Contributing factors included the jurisdictional defeat of the Conference of Studio Unions by the International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE, AFL), the House Un-American Activities Committee’s targeting of Communists, and the blacklisting of suspected Reds by studio executives. During this period the Catholic Church increased its role within the labor movement and the ethnic community by establishing the Catholic Labor Institute and endorsing the Mexican American– oriented Community Service Organization (CSO).2 Through CSO, the frequently victimized Latino community achieved unprecedented power, including the 1949 election of Edward R. Roybal to the Los Angeles city council. CSO represented the first efforts by Mexican Americans to organize themselves with the assistance of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago-based, independent radical, and head of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). Alinsky hired Fred Ross as the CSO organizer. CSO fundamentally altered the political dynamic on the east side by registering 15,000 new voters and developing a membership of 1,000. It then leveraged this new power by forming multicultural alliances, particularly with liberal to radical Jews. Politically, CSO and Roybal created a new space between traditional Democratic Party liberalism and the Communist left, although it worked with elements of both; the CP and the CIO Council sought to gain influence among Latinos and endorsed Roybal’s election in 1949. In becoming the first Mexican American elected to the city council in modern history, Roybal had mobilized Latinos while forming a broad multicultural coalition. The core of the progressive coalition consisted of Latinos and Jews, the Catholic Church, the CIO United Steelworkers, and the AFL International Ladies Garment Workers Union.3 By contrast, the AFL Central Labor Council and the Building Trades Council opposed Roybal, preferring to stay with the pro-labor incumbent, Parley P. Christensen. So, too, did the AFL Labor...