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Largest Strike Wave in U.S. History Begins as 5 Million Workers Walk Outtimeline_event

corporate-powerlabor-organizingstrikepostwar-economyunion-rights
1945-11-21 · 2 min read · Edit on Pyrite

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Largest Strike Wave in U.S. History

In the year after V-J Day, more than five million American workers engage in strikes that last on average four times longer than wartime strikes. According to historian Jeremy Brecher, the 1945-1946 strike wave represents "the closest thing to a national general strike of industry in the twentieth century" and the largest strikes in American labor history.

Economic Context

After the war, wages fell behind price increases for most consumer goods. Between 1945 and 1946, inflation reached 16% while wages of industrial workers increased by just 7%. Workers who had accepted wage controls during the war expected their sacrifice to be rewarded with fair compensation in peacetime.

Major Strikes

The scale of coordinated labor action was unprecedented:

  • November 1945: United Auto Workers strike against General Motors for 113 days. Walter Reuther leads 320,000 workers and wins a 17.5% pay increase.
  • January 15, 1946: 174,000 electrical workers strike.
  • January 16, 1946: 93,000 meatpackers walk out.
  • January 21, 1946: 750,000 steel workers strike - the largest single strike in United States history to that point.
  • March 1946: John L. Lewis, who had worked in the mines as a teenager, leads 350,000 coal miners into a coal strike.

    • Corporate and Political Response

    The strike wave galvanized conservative opposition to labor unions. Anti-labor bias in news media portrayed strikes as unpatriotic and harmful to the postwar economy, even though corporate profits had soared during the war while wages stagnated.

    In the 1946 Congressional Elections, the Republican Party gained 55 seats and control of the House for the first time since 1930. Conservative sentiment was galvanized by opposition to the strikes while liberals were divided by President Truman's actions.

    Legislative Backlash

    In 1947, Congress responded to the strike wave by enacting, over President Truman's veto, the Taft-Hartley Act, which significantly restricted the powers and activities of labor unions. The act remains in force as of 2025 and represents a major corporate victory in rolling back New Deal labor protections.

    Historical Significance

    The 1945-1946 strike wave demonstrated the potential power of organized labor when workers act collectively across industries. The subsequent corporate and political backlash - manifested in Taft-Hartley - shows how quickly such power can be legislatively constrained when business interests mobilize politically.

    The strikes also revealed the limits of Democratic Party support for labor: while Roosevelt had supported collective bargaining, Truman's willingness to use government power against strikers foreshadowed the party's future drift from its working-class base.