Hollywood Black Friday - Aftermath

Aftermath

After meetings between IATSE and representatives of the studios in early September 1946 guaranteed IATSE workers to fill the positions of existing CSU employees, the studios came up with a plan to force CSU out of the studios once and for all. On September 23, the studios reassigned all the CSU members from construction supervisors, foremen and maintenance men to work as journeymen carpenters on "hot set", a position many of these men hadn't worked in many years and a violation of their job descriptions and cause for a union grievance.

These men protested and refused at which point they were given preprepared paychecks for their time and effectively sent home and subsequently locked out. Naturally, the pickets went back up, and the CSU was forced to assume the crushing burden of another strike.

Despite a walk-out by members of IATSE 683 film laboratory technicians in solidarity with CSU, open fighting between CSU members and studio security forces and a vote by the Screen Actors Guild to effectively turn their back on CSU hampered the CSU's efforts. This was a strike that the CSU would never recover from, lasting some 13 months before it voted to permit long-unemployed, impoverished members and supporters to cross the picket line and return to work. The CIO also came to the aid of the struggling CSU members and assisted them in finding jobs in other CIO industries.

The disorder in Hollywood helped prompt the Taft-Hartley bill which was passed in part with the studios' lobby and accusations of Herb Sorrell's (the leader of the CSU during the time of the strike) alleged Communist Party membership which prompted Sorrell and CSU's slow descent into obscurity.

Thomas Pynchon later would use some of these events as backstory in his novel Vineland.