The Strike Resumes
The union thought that it had the employers' agreement to include the "inside workers", the warehouse employees as well as the drivers and loaders. When the employers reneged on that agreement the strike resumed on Tuesday, July 17. Governor Olson again mobilized, but did not deploy, the National Guard.
The union's leadership had chosen to use different tactics in this strike; it ordered its members to picket without carrying any clubs or weapons of any sort. The police, on the other hand, armed themselves with riot guns which sprayed buckshot over a wide arc.
On Friday, July 20, a single yellow truck drove to the central market escorted by fifty armed policemen. The truck made the small delivery successfully, but a vehicle carrying picketers wielding clubs cut off the truck. The police opened fire on the vehicle with shotguns, then turned their guns on the strikers filling the surrounding streets. An eyewitness reported that as the pickets moved to aid their fallen comrades, "They flowed directly into buckshot fire...And the cops let them have it as they picked up their wounded. Lines of living, solid men fell, broke, wavering." He also said he saw one man "stepping on his own intestines, bright and bursting in the street, and another holding his severed arm in his right hand." By the end of hostilities, two strikers were dead and sixty-seven wounded.
The police violence sparked a show of support from other unions and a one day strike of transport workers. Each side stepped back from the confrontation: Chief Johannes and Mayor Bainbridge faced calls for their impeachment, while the union continued to urge its members not to give the police any justification for further attacks, disarming a number of picketers who wanted to return fire with fire. The union did not make any overt efforts to stop those few trucks accompanied by convoys of forty police cars apiece that tried to deliver goods, but sent so many cars with pickets to accompany those convoys that the police were never able to shepherd more than a few delivery trucks on any given day.
Read more about this topic: Minneapolis Teamsters Strike Of 1934
Famous quotes containing the words strike and/or resumes:
“Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then resumes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)