The Detroit Woolworth's Strike

women working at Woolworth’s that morning stepped back from their positions and stopped working. An organizer for the Waiters’ and Waitresses’ Union of Detroit, Floyd Loew, paced to the center of the stores first floor and blew his whistle and yelled at the top of his lungs, “STRIKE! STRIKE!” (61) and cheers rose from all around the store. The Detroit Woolworth’s Strike was between the Waiters’ and Waitresses’ Union of Detroit and one of the largest and most powerful companies in America in the 1900’s, Woolworth, who by 1937 had over two thousand stores all over the country. The strikers presented their explicit set of demands to the store manager, William F. Mayer. In those demands were the following: “ they would refuse to work and would
Furthermore, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 prompted a wave of strikes. The Woolworth workers had read and heard about all the success other strikers were having all over Detroit and had finally heard enough and decided to stand up for their own rights. The Woolworth sit-down strike lasted seven days from February 27,1937 to March 5, 1937. Besides the threats of the Woolworth’s district superintendent, A.J. Dahlquist, to “lock out the workers at all its other thirty-nine stores in Detroit” (79) and Louis Koenig, a Waiters’ and Waitresses’ union business agent’s threat to “close all forty Woolworth stores in Detroit, with their 1,000 employees.” (99), the strike was a peaceful one. Not only was the Woolworth strike peaceful, but also a successful one, “the company agreed to a five-cent an hour increase for all female employees – a 20 to 25 percent raise, depending on each woman’s previous rate. New employees would start at $14.50 a week for the first six
Kelley wrote about the unremarkable yet unforgettable New York Musicians strike in 1936 by the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) against theaters for firing their musicians due to the beginning of sound pictures. The Musicians wanted theater owners to return live musicians to the movie theaters. On October 10, 1936 in the Times Square Theater the AFM had detonated a tear gas bomb and on October 29 the movie bombers struck again but this time they attacked at eight different theaters simultaneously and instead the bombers used soda bottles to create the bombs leaving at least sixty-two patrons injured and requiring medical attention due to the flying glass shards. In response to the bombings the police arrested over thirty to people of the AFM, but the bombings continued up until the middle of November. The New York Musicians then began to “…Parade, picket, and propagandize to bring attention to their struggle.” (123), however, they then realized they needed a more confrontational strategy to persuade the theaters to bring back live music so they organized a parade through Harlem to bring attention to their cause. After seven months with no progress, one of the leaders of the AFM met with president Leo Weber “to discuss the possibility to turning their citywide struggle into a national campaign, promising to draft a resolution on the matter for the upcoming national convention, but the convention shot down the proposal. On July 8, 1937, eight months after the