At the teach-in for the Stockton Spinach Strike article on 5/31, I recall a couple of people asking me about the specific racial/ethnic composition of the workers from the Stockton Food Products cannery who striked, particularly @Raiken_202 and @SeanHun, if I recall correctly. The sources I consulted while researching the strike were not specific about race/ethnicity. At most, all I could find at the time was that both men and women were involved in the strike, (with women in general making up the majority workforce for canning in California) as both cannery workers and supportive community members/family who helped picket. For cannery work, it was typical for a husband and wife, mother and her children, or brother and sister to work at the same cannery, which perhaps helped when it came to the union organizing the strike getting some of the cannery workers on the same page, as several cannery workers usually had at least one relative in the same line of work, and due to the migratory nature of seasonal work like canning, it’s likely that many workers knew and saw some of the same familiar faces as they traveled for work across the state of California, allowing for some built-in sense of solidarity. My source for this comes from Kevin Starr’s book on California labor history during the Great Depression, Endangered Dreams (1996), which provided a lot of pertinent details about the Stockton Spinach Strike:
Like all agricultural work, canning was seasonal. Living in tents provided by the canneries, women workers and their menfolk – a teenaged son, a younger brother, a dependent husband – migrated from cannery to cannery according to a harvest cycle that lasted six months of the year. Canneries preferred female workers, believing them to be more adept at sorting, coring, peeling, cutting, and otherwise preparing fruits and vegetables for cooking and canning. In the case of peaches, pears, and apricots, such skills were essential if a piece of fruit were not to lose its shape in the canning process. Women were also believed to be more docile as employees, in that most of them were usually providing secondary or supplemental incomes to their family units. The sight of women working in advanced states of pregnancy was commonplace. Men were frequently hired at canneries strictly because their wives and daughters were working there as well.
Starr, Kevin. “Seeing Red: Strikes in the Fields and Canneries.” Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 69.
On the same page, Starr goes on to say that most California cannery workers were foreign-born and in the 1930s mainly consisted of people of Portuguese, Italian and Mexican heritage. Dawn Mabalon in her book Little Manila Is in the Heart (2013) provides some additional context to the ethnographic makeup of California’s labor population in the early 20th century by detailing how Filipinos were deemed at the bottom of a racial labor hierarchy, only able to secure toiling, literally back-breaking agricultural work, almost exclusively from the 1920s - 1940s. It wasn’t until the 1940s post-WWII when the Filipino working class in Stockton and elsewhere in California/Pacific Northwest could find somewhat better paying positions at canneries and elsewhere like enlisting in the military or defense work such as shipbuilding, although many Filipinos, including college-educated ones who would have basically been middle-class in the Philippines, still struggled to break out of menial farm labor well into the 1970s. So, given the Spinach Strike occurring in 1937, it would have been unusual for Filipinos to have been working in canneries at that time.
From the late 1920s until after World War II, Filipinas/os were the primary laborers in the agricultural economy of San Joaquin County, primarily because racism barred them from any other jobs. Much less frequently, Filipinas/os found work in domestic service and in hotels and restaurants.
Bohulano Mabalon, Dawn. “Toiling in the ‘Valley of Opportunity.” Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o American Community in Stockton, California, Duke UP, 2013, p. 63.
If I were to make an educated guess, I would assume that the majority of the workers involved in the Spinach Strike were white, albeit it ethnic whites (Portuguese and Italian, as Starr mentions), along with white Dust Bowl migrants from the Southwest and Midwest, and maybe a small minority of Mexican workers in the mix. Because of the Bracero Program during WWII, Mexican labor in canneries became more common during the 1940s.
Although, while reading in Mabalon’s book about labor organizing from an independent, all-Filipino union from the late 1930s - early 1940s, the Filipino Agricultural Laborer’s Association (FALA), Mabalon does actually refer to the same union that organized the Spinach Strike, Local 20221. According to Mabalon, Local 20221 was the only AFL-represented union that allowed Filipino membership in its union, which was unusual for the time period as the AFL like most labor organizations was explicitly anti-Filipino labor and immigration. The FALA, during a celery strike it was organizing in the 1939 and 1940 harvest seasons, decided to ally with the AFL due to the union suffering from infighting between different Filipino ethnic groups and concentrated attacks from white landowners, growers and shippers, Japanese tenant farmers, and anti-union Filipinos. FALA’s decision to ally with the AFL and lose its independence resulted in FALA’s locals in Sacramento, Concord, Pescadero, San Jose, San Juan Bautista, and Delano to break off and form their own unions. Many of FALA’s membership were not interested in associating themselves with a labor organization like the AFL that had resorted to racist propaganda tactics against Filipinos for its own political agenda. A Filipino salmon cannery workers’ union in Seattle was somewhat perplexed that FALA hadn’t turned to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for help, given that the CIO was sympathetic to more radical elements of the labor movement, and that Filipinos were often the most militant labor organizers in California at this time, usually more inclined to internalize Communist tactics than other ethnic groups. The same salmon cannery union even called out FALA’s leadership as being “amateurs” for not considering this option. FALA’s tactical error resulted in its death by 1942, as American involvement in WWII began and many Filipinos were enlisting and finding work in the wartime economy, causing FALA to be unable to stop further losses in membership.
With this tidbit of information, I might be wrong that there weren’t any Filipino laborers involved in the Spinach Strike, but it was still probably unlikely. The language Mabalon uses in her book implies that Local 20221 was open to Filipino members, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they had any. Knowing that Local 20221 was quickly expanding and needed to take some collective action in order to maintain its legitimacy, they may have been trying to court allies from all potential labor sectors. It may have also been a purely symbolic move to appear as tolerant toward Filipino laborers in order for Local 20221 to distance itself from the AFL, which was not popular with more radical unions and hadn’t represented the local well during its strike efforts. I find this theory plausible because as I said before, the percentage of Filipinos in canning work during the 1930s would have been so negligible that it wouldn’t have made any real strategic sense to actually be courting Filipino canners that might have been out there unless all you were doing was just trying to make your union appear progressive.
Both Starr and Mabalon mention how canneries and growers often stoked competition and rivalry amongst different ethnic groups as a tactic to prevent unionization efforts. Mabalon elaborates that some of these tactics included: segregated housing, using different contractors for each group, differential wage scales, the relegation of different jobs based on your ethnicity (i.e., workplace segregation). Knowing that segregation was common in the agricultural industry, it’s possible that the Stockton Food Products plant might have had a more ethnically homogenous workforce that enabled the union to organize most of its membership primarily at that cannery in less than a year. This might also help to partly explain why membership seemed to stall at the other 3 - 4 Stockton canneries at that time. Gerald A. Rose in his three-part series on the Spinach Strike, “The March Inland” (1972), does detail the minutiae of the internal politics between the union local organizing the strike and the California American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) tendency to capitulate to the growers and the state government, but never went into specifics (as far as I recall) of worker ethnicity and if that played any prominent role during the strike, especially in the Red Scare tactics deployed by the local growers. Based on my research, I haven’t found any evidence indicating that ethnic/racial differences were exploited by growers to undermine the Spinach Strike. It’s possible that this tactic may have been used to prevent further unionization at other cannery sites, although Rose makes the argument that the union local’s failure to secure more membership at other canneries could be attributed more to a failure of outreach and of lacking genuine support from nearby unions and the AFL, which undermined Local 20221’s legitimacy.
In Ronald Isetti’s history on Stockton, Competing Voices (1st ed., 2019), he comments in his brief overview of the Spinach Strike that Tillie Lewis’s Flotill Canning Company here in Stockton didn’t face the same labor confrontations or workplace segregation on nearly the same level as most California canneries did. Isetti attributes Lewis’s gender and her parents having been Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants as factors that made her less willing to engage in discriminatory business practices, with Lewis having been shut out and dismissed by Stockton’s local elite for being a successful business woman and Jewish. As Starr mentions that the canning workforce in California was predominantly women, I’m sure Lewis’s cannery was much safer to work in, as Starr also mentions that most canneries were rife with sexual exploitation, what with men typically supervising virtually all women in enclosed quarters. Lewis is regarded as having hired workers at her cannery regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, or religion, particularly hiring Mexican workers before labor conditions in the 1940s enticed more canneries to hire Mexicans. While I know nothing as to dispute Isetti’s claims here about Tillie Lewis, there are other sections of his book where I feel he’s being more hagiographic than critical of his historical subjects. I’m aware of a biography about Lewis that Isetti himself refers to titled Tillie Lewis: The Tomato Queen (2016) by Kyle Elizabeth Wood that I’d like to read at some point. I don’t really expect to find any answers or “dirt” that portrays Lewis in a more negative light; I’d just like to read more about her to make the argument that a “business owner of any sort, no matter how ‘nice’ they are, still profits from other people’s labor.”
One thing that I failed to mention during the Spinach Strike teach-in was the living conditions of the cannery workers. Given the migratory nature of most agricultural workers, the farm owners or canneries probably would have provided workers with “housing,” although sub-par housing at best that, as Starr claims, was usually tents than real four-wall rooms.
I plan on posting more onto this thread soon. Dawn Mabalon’s book on Stockton’s Little Manila had more to say about Filipino labor history than I was expecting, as she devotes at least two chapters to that focus. I want to provide some additional notes about the typical experience of Filipino farm laborers in San Joaquin, and the discriminatory treatment they received from Japanese farm supervisors, who were higher on the racial hierarchy of farm labor until the bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese occupation of the Philippines, when Filipinos actively benefited from and participated in anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1940s. Mabalon’s commentary on the interracial tension between Filipino and Japanese laborers provides a clearer context as to the issues that made interracial solidarity difficult to maintain and pull off in the 20th century, along with how labor was divided up along ethnic/racial lines, given Stockton’s diversity. Mabalon also provides details about an asparagus strike in 1948 - 1949 carried out by Filipino agricultural workers that I feel would make an excellent article continuing some of the themes WCU explored with the Spinach Strike article. Whereas the Spinach Strike, in my opinion, showcased why top-to-bottom union leadership can actively harm local union efforts if the broader labor org they’re represented by is ineffectual and/or too accommodating to business interests, I think this asparagus strike shows a more successful version of a strike that might work better for our org’s interests of motivating people in the community, especially through tying our messaging to something that actually occurred in Stockton. For the Asparagus Strike, I’ll create a post separate from this one.