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Organizing the Aircraft Industry
The door to industrial unionism was opened for the IAM in 1934
when the AFL favored the IAM over the Carpenters in awarding
jurisdiction in the emerging aircraft industry. The Carpenters were a
factor because aircraft production in the 1920's required craftsmen
with both wood and metalworking skills. The Carpenters established a
beachhead in aviation when they chartered a local for mechanics who
repaired and overhauled the planes used by movie studios in Hollywood.
Workers from the Douglas Aircraft Company, on loan for the filming of
an early Howard Hughes production called Hell's Angels, saw for
themselves what studio workers had been able to achieve through
unions. Before long about 1,000 workers at Douglas signed up with the
Carpenter's local.
With each passing day, however, aircraft manufacturing became
less of a woodworking and more of a metalworking industry. At its 1934
session held in Los Angeles, the AFL Executive Council decided the
time had come to award jurisdiction in this new and highly promising
industry. After hearings, the Council ruled that both aircraft
mechanics and aircraft factory workers came within the IAM's
jurisdiction. The Council called upon the IAM to enlarge and step up
its organizing in this field and the Carpenters agreed to step aside.
When the IAM won jurisdiction, Wharton and most of the GVP's
still thought that organizing aircraft machinists was the same as
organizing railroad machinists. The business representative for Local
Lodge 79 in Seattle, I. A. Sandvigan, was more in touch with reality.
Known as Sandy, Sandvigan was a solid trade unionist and a mature,
experienced organizer. For many years he had been directing his
unemployed journeymen to jobs available at Boeing.
Boeing was then a comparatively small enterprise and relations
between management and labor were relaxed. Workers in this glamorous
new industry considered themselves lucky. Men had always wanted to fly
and those who worked on flying machines felt themselves part of a
certain mystique. While wages and working conditions were erratic and
out of line, the men in the shops generally considered management as
"good guys." Unlike most older basic industries such as auto
and steel there was no deliberate, mean exploitation, no clear-cut
anti-unionism at Boeing. In fact when an organizer from a federal
union of aircraft workers in Buffalo came out to set up a spin-off
local in Seattle the Boeing management gave him a room in which to
meet with employees.
Before Sandvigan could charter a Machinists lodge at Boeing he
had to convince the powers at Grand Lodge. Wharton hesitated for
months before he finally agreed to ratify industrial unionism in
aircraft by giving Sandvigan a go-ahead. The old railroaders on the
Executive Council feared that if the IAM asserted an all-inclusive
jurisdiction over aircraft workers, it would waive its traditional
claim to craft unions of machinists in other industries. Wharton would
have preferred to put the unskilled and semi-skilled workers at Boeing
into a federal union, allocating the craft skills to their individual
unions, with a council of crafts negotiating as a federation of
unions. This was the way it was done on the railroads. Fortunately,
Sandvigan persuaded Wharton that a different approach was necessary in
the aircraft industry.
In September, 1935 the staid and conservative old IAM took one
of the most momentous steps in its history by chartering what came to
be known as Aeronautical Mechanics Lodge 751. In time it mushroomed
into the largest local unit of organized labor in the country. And it
gave the IAM its start toward becoming the largest union of aircraft
(now aerospace) workers in the world.
In the Spring of 1936 Local 751 notified the company and the
recently established National Labor Relations Board that it had signed
up 70% of the employees. Boeing recognized the union without an
election. In June Sandvigan helped the new and inexperienced committee
of Local 751's officers negotiated their first contract. It consisted
of two and one-half typewritten pages plus a page and a half of seven
basic job classifications. It provided for minimum hourly wages
(ranging from 40¢ to a $1.00) and set an eight-hour day, five-day
week, with time-and-a-half for overtime, weekends and seven named
holidays. The first Boeing contract not only became the foundation for
those that followed at Boeing, but for the predominant position the
IAM has since won in the aerospace industry. When the UAW set out to
organize aircraft workers on the West Coast, they skipped Seattle
because the IAM's foothold was too secure. And when the IAM challenged
the UAW at aircraft factories in Southern California the Grand Lodge
recruited organizers out of Lodge 751. Wharton asked Sandvigan to go
to Southern California for a couple of months to help organize
Lockheed and Douglas but he was tied up in Lodge 79 negotiations with
canning companies. he recommended two young Lodge 751 members, Tom
McNett and E. L. Lynch.* McNett had been the first recording secretary
of Lodge 751.
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