Overview and Organization Structure

Throughout its history, beginning in 1901 with the formation of the Everett Trades Council, the organization that became the Snohomish County Central Labor Council in 1957 has supported affiliated unions in contract disputes with employers, organized new unions, advocated for labor interests, and served as a center for union members. When the Council judged that an employer had violated a contract, it sanctioned strikes called by member unions and it informed members and the community by a "Do Not Patronize" list. Political action, particularly in the state legislature, was advanced through affiliation with the statewide labor body, the Washington State Federation of Labor, organized in 1902, and its successor, the Washington State Labor Council. Political action also meant endorsing local, state and congressional candidates, educating union members about candidates and issues, and promoting voting in support of labor interests. Over time, labor interests broadened steadily as council officers became influential in many facets of regional affairs, including business, education, social welfare, and relations with state and federal agencies.

The oldest document in the collection that states the aims and the procedures of the Everett Central Labor Council, the successor of the Everett Trades Council, is its 1926 Constitution and By-Laws. "[The Council's] object shall be to unite the various Trades Unions of Everett and vicinity, to assist in the formation of Labor Unions, to mould public opinion in favor of the cause of labor, to hold mass meetings for that purpose, to discuss and examine all questions affecting the interests of the working classes, to act as arbitrators between Unions affiliated with this order and their employers, and to do any other work for the benefit of wage earners." 1 The document declares that strike "action must be concurred in by the Council before it becomes operative as in relation to other affiliated Unions." 2 The goals and strike statement were repeated when the Constitution was republished in 1944 and 1950. The 1944 Constitution was the first to list the committees in the Everett Central Labor Council. In addition to those for council procedures, the list included civilian defense, education, legislative, political welfare and Union Label.

The merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 provided a new Constitution and list of objectives for the renamed Snohomish County Central Labor Council. The 1969 version of the document, showing amendments approved by AFL-CIO President George Meany, lists "Objects" as furthering federation policies, exchanging information, supporting local unions, supporting or opposing legislation affecting labor interests and encouraging member registration, voting and exercising "their full rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and to perform their rightful part in the political life of the local, state and national communities." 3

The labor group emphasized legislative lobbying and political education of its members throughout its history. In early decades, much of that work was conducted by the Washington State Federation of Labor, although not always with the support of the Everett group. In March 1922, the Trades Council secretary told the president of the Washington State Federation of Labor, "I was instructed to ask you where you get the authority and information to voice the sentiments of the Labor movement of the state in such an important matter." 4 In 1946, the Everett Central Labor Council endorsed Henry M. Jackson for Congress despite the state federation's distrust of his postwar advocacy of continuing wage and price controls. Jackson, who later became a long-serving U.S. senator, was supported by the Everett unions for his nearly perfect support of labor, "notwithstanding the fact that he has made an error in supporting legislation unfavorable to organized labor...." 5 Jackson later opposed the Taft-Hartley Act with its restrictions on organized labor and earned very high ratings from the AFL-CIO. 6

The Depression, World War II and passage of Taft-Hartley accelerated attention to political interests in local labor councils. When the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged in December 1955, they joined their political action groups into the Committee for Political Education (COPE), centered in Washington, D.C., and organized for effective local action throughout the U.S. 7 As COPE was being organized, the Snohomish County Labor Council argued for separate management of councils and political action. The plea was rejected by the AFL-CIO. The Council president and financial officer were assigned the same roles in the council COPE. 8 The Council's COPE rules adopted December 21, 1977, require a two-thirds vote of delegates to endorse a candidate or recommend an endorsement. Criteria include "capability, intelligence, unqualified integrity and the past record of the individual" and demonstration of "support of the objectives to which the AFL-CIO is dedicated." 9

The Council was integral to Everett and Snohomish County from the outset. In addition to its actions on behalf of unions, the Council used the national Union Label program to bolster its ties to the community. 10 By 1906, the Women's Union Label League was meeting weekly in the Labor Temple. 11 On the eve of World War II, the Council promoted a boycott of German and Japanese products by urging customers to demand goods with a union label, a shop card or a service button. 12 In 1978, the Council took over the assets and records of the Everett Card and Label Council and assumed its management. 13

By 1944, war conditions had led to creation of a "civilian defense" committee in the Council. The 1944 Constitution is the first to show that the Council had a member serving on the board of the Everett Chamber of Commerce. 14 After the war, committees were added for the school board, veterans' welfare, and senior citizens' welfare. Correspondence from that time speaks frequently of interests in the junior chamber of commerce, the Community Chest (later United Way) charity drive, and the Boy Scouts of America. In 1967, P. L. Cope, council secretary, was appointed by county commissioners to the Community Health Board created to establish the Snohomish County Mental Health Clinic. 15 The continued expansion of community involvement was suggested in 1994 by Mike Sells, secretary, as he listed his activities: Everett stadium upgrade, candidate steering committees, economic development council, chamber of commerce, communities in schools program, Everett Housing Authority, Partners for Youth, Council on Family, Youth and Justice, and "letters to The Herald," the Everett daily newspaper. 16 Sells also managed the American Federation of Teachers Local 1690. 17 Council secretaries met some opposition from union officers for those activities, often with the complaint that the groups did not use union suppliers or contractors. In one case, Sells countered: "Every time we sit in a meeting you'll find non-union and in some cases anti-union employers. Since we're all in the organization for the same reason, it is one place where we bury the hatchet so we can meet a common goal." 18

The Council was integral to Everett and Snohomish County from the outset. In addition to its actions on behalf of unions, the Council used the national Union Label program to bolster its ties to the community. By 1906, the Women's Union Label League was meeting weekly in the Labor Temple. On the eve of World War II, the Council promoted a boycott of German and Japanese products by urging customers to demand goods with a union label, a shop card or a service button. In 1978, the Council took over the assets and records of the Everett Card and Label Council and assumed its management.

The Council headquarters is the Everett Labor Temple, 2810 Lombard Avenue. The building is on the site of the wood-frame structure that housed the Everett Trades Council, beginning in 1902. That year, member unions planned a permanent building, a structure with the name used by organized workers across the country, a Labor Temple. Within the year, the unions incorporated the Everett Trades Building Association, sold stock to unions and workers to finance purchase of a site and construct the building dedicated on Labor Day that year. The Everett Labor Temple was the first on the West Coast they believed. 19 The building in use now was completed in 1929, extensive remodeling was done in 1943, and an annex was added in the 1950s. 20

History

In 1900, several American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions formed the Everett Trades Council. The council structure had been adopted in four other Washington cities where, like Everett, unions faced organized employer resistance to recognizing new unions and reforming wages, job safety, and the length of the work week. Everett Trades Council included unions for many of the crafts that defined community life at the start of the century: carpenters, cooks, laundry workers, plumbers, printers, ironworkers, musicians and machinists. In the two previous decades, union officers in Everett, like others in Western Washington, had moved gradually toward regional union cooperation and away from independent unions. The economic depression of 1893-4 had shattered "the very fiber of Everett." 21 The region's economic turbulence still denied workers stable working conditions as the Trades Council took shape.

The Trades Council in Everett was at the center of a volatile Snohomish County economy based on logging and milling of lumber and shingles. Yet many of its members were narrowly defined by the crafts they pursued, and the Trades Council's early history reflected the national federation's disinterest in union organization that spanned industries such as logging and forest products or in organizing the new immigrants from Eastern Europe who were moving into the Puget Sound in significant numbers. 22 In that void, the International Workers of the World (IWW), supported after 1911 by growing numbers of socialist union members, provided a disruptive intervention in Snohomish County by 1916. 23

The largest and the strongest union in the Trades Council was the International Shingle Weavers Union, formed from several AFL locals. 24 From its formation to World War I, the Trades Council's efforts to get contracts or agreements with mill owners were led by the International Shingle Weavers and its executive secretary for much of that period, Ernest P. Marsh. (Marsh was president of the Trades Council in 1901-1902, a co-owner and editor of the weekly Everett newspaper, The Labor Journal , from 1909 to 1915, and president of the Washington State Federation of Labor from 1913 to 1918.) 25 The financial power of the mill owners repeatedly frustrated the union's efforts to gain wage agreements. "Forty mills circled the high ground [in Everett in 1910], darkening the sky with smoke and cinders as they turned out lumber and shingles twenty-four hours a day." 26

In 1915, as prices for timber products dropped sharply, the Everett mills reduced wages 20 percent and said they would hire without attention to union membership. When shingle weavers rejected the offer, the mills closed down. 27 Ernest Marsh, working through his offices in the Shingle Weavers, the Trades Council and the state federation, could not stop union members from taking the reduced wages and shifting their memberships to the IWW. When the Shingle Weavers tried to picket the mills that had locked them out, they were enjoined by the Snohomish County Superior Court. 28 A year later, the shingle weavers' effort to restore the wage scale they had lost the previous year was roundly rejected by the mills. The union struck, and its members were replaced with strikebreakers, backed by city police. IWW members moved into Everett, "at first by the dozen and then by the score." 29 On November 5, six days after 40 Wobblies were beaten and some nearly killed by police, 250 IWW members crowded onto the Verona in Seattle bound for the Everett docks. As the boat's lines were secured in Everett, and the sheriff and deputies approached, shots were fired from both the boat and the shore. At least five of the Wobblies were killed and 31 were wounded. On the dock, two died and 21 were wounded. The violence, known thereafter as "the Everett Massacre," introduced a period of community conflict and soul-searching that lasting through the decade.

As the nation prepared for war, the federal government pre-empted union organization in forest products by creating a government-run union, the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. One hundred thousand woodworkers in the Northwest abandoned both the IWW and the AFL. 30 By 1920, the Trades Council had only 10 AFL locals in its membership, while other locals were dying, unable to pay their dues. The historian Norman Clark described the aftermath of the tumultuous decade: "By 1921, there was no significant labor movement in Everett at all. 31

In the 1920s the weakened unions in Everett continued to struggle against the anti-labor policies of Governor Roland Hill Hartley, former mayor and owner of mills that had thwarted labor in the years leading up to the World War. After two unsuccessful runs for governor, Hartley was elected in 1924, and soon alienated Republicans, state agencies and organized labor. Despite an attempt to recall him, which was supported by the Everett Labor Council, he was elected to a second term, then ran unsuccessfully two more times. 32 Norman Clark argues that Hartley did not understand the difference "between government and primitive capitalism." Consequently, "he never accepted a society that was learning to protect those least able to survive in an industrial wilderness." 33

Early in 1936, the Washington Commonwealth Federation (WCF) held its second annual convention in Everett. The WCF had evolved from state and national groups responding to the devastating effects of the Depression. The group aspired to unite a number of diverse interest groups into "a strong and unified federation with sufficient power to bring social, political and economic reform to the Pacific Northwest." 34 The Washington State Federation of Labor aligned with WCF and urged councils to participate. The Everett Central Labor Council affiliated January 11, 1936. 35 The "diverse groups" in WCF included some with Communist Party members, an issue raised in the Everett convention that returned over time to engage the Everett Central Labor Council.

One of those "diverse groups" was the Workers Alliance, the state's affiliate of a national assortment of predominantly socialist and communist-led unemployment councils and leagues. When Works Progress Administration workers struck at the Everett airport and other projects, Workers Alliance told the Everett Council that it had taken over the strike. 36 Two years later, apparently a consequence of FBI monitoring of Workers Alliance, William Green, president of the AFL, ordered the Everett Council to break completely with WA, which he said was dominated by the Communist Party. 37 Green had responded to a letter from H. G. Walter, executive secretary of the Everett council, reassuring the AFL that WA members had been allowed to attend meetings, but "with neither a voice nor a vote." Walters insisted that members were capable of processing any radical ideas WA members might offer. 38

The collection documents the turbulent history of unionization of workers in the many mills in Everett, particularly from 1935 to 1955. H.G. Walter, who later served as secretary of the Labor Council, organized sawmill workers in 1933, then won quick approval from the AFL to take in loggers as well as mill workers. The union name was amended to Sawmill & Timber Workers Union. 39 Many of its members moved to a new Congress of Industrial Organizations union, International Woodworkers of America, after 1937, in reaction to the STW's parent union, the Brotherhood of Carpenters. Both unions worked to organize the big Everett mills, but only the IWA gained contracts with Weyerhaeuser and other mills in 1940. Weyerhaeuser's contract, which rejected the STW wage demand, provided the settlement standard that ended a two-week strike against Everett mills at the end of 1940. 40

From 1935 to 1955, the Council and its affiliates, such as the Lumber and Sawmill Workers, faced a succession of movements toward industrial unions. The IWW had offered a model in logging and milling, but was preempted by the federal government during the first World War. Industrial unionism emerged in the 1930s in the federal government's recovery program. In the 1930s, John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, promoted the model in the Committee of Industrial Organizations within the AFL. The 1935 convention of the AFL split the supporters of craft unions and industrial unions. The federation was attacked for failing to organize a major share of the country's workers. 41 A year later, the AFL expelled 10 unions that had joined the industrial union committee. 42 The dissident unions were joined in the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The two labor groups continued their strife until after World War II when they realized the conflict crippled a movement that needed solidarity in the face of growing political resistance. The 1955 merger forced reconciliation at the state level as well. The agreement that joined the Washington State Federation of Labor and the State CIO Council provoked opposition from the Everett Council on three issues: representation in the merged Executive Board based on congressional districts, carry over of officers, and the amount of the per capita tax. 43

In the war years, Council leaders managed issues both familiar and new to their experience. The War Manpower Commission imposed controls on industry wages, raising concerns in the Council's unions. Congressman Henry M. Jackson passed on a letter from Paul V. McNutt, chairman of the Commission, that assured Jackson that unions would not be adversely affected. 44 The collection includes extensive correspondence involving the Council, the War Manpower Commission and members of Congress. 45 Indeed, the Council officers corresponded regularly with all members of the state congressional delegation. After the war, the Council advocated return to the county of the dock at Mukilteo, south of Everett, which had been used by the military for ammunition storage. In opposition to claims from the State Parks Department, the Council supported commercial development by the Everett Port Commission, but the state acquired the dock in 1954 for a state park. 46

In 1983, council attention turned to a strike of 600 employees at the E. A. Nord Co. factory on the Everett waterfront. The maker of doors assembled from the region's Douglas fir and hemlock helped it prosper in the first years after the war ended. However, record door production in 1950 in Washington and Oregon was followed in two years with a drop to one-third the 1950 production level. The industry simply failed to meet the demand for new homes. In addition, the Nord panel doors, distinctive Northwest designs requiring vertical stiles and horizontal rails to allow combinations of panels, faced growing competition from makers of "flush doors," thin sheets of veneer over hollow frames. 47 By the early 1980s, the company cut pay and then broke with other manufacturers and rejected the terms of a new contract with the Lumber, Production and Industrial Workers Union.

The Nord Door Co. answered a strike on July 13, 1983, by 600 employees by replacing them with 700 non-union workers, whose wages were about half what union workers had received. 48 Banks, holding loans to Nord, pressured for more cuts in the work force. 49 Nord, with anti-union guidance from West Coast Industrial Relations, obtained several injunctions, including one against the Labor Council, which was removed, but at a cost of $7,131. 50 Backing the striking union, the Council targeted suppliers of Nord and outlets for its products and provided unions across the country with strike updates and requests for help for the strikers. 51 As the strike continued into 1985, an administrative judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the company had violated the National Labor Relations Act and set a new certification election. The Lumber, Production and Industrial Workers Local 1054 was certified as the sole bargaining agent at Nord by the NLRB in 1987 but the company had declared bankruptcy a year earlier and had been sold to Jeld-Wen, an Oregon company that also refused to bargain with the union. 52 In the strike aftermath, and closing of Weyerhaeuser mills in Everett, the ranks of union members in woodworking declined sharply. Mike Sells, the Council secretary-treasurer, told The Herald, the city's newspaper, that the community failed to see the need for unions. "We want to get labor involved in as many phases (of the community) as possible. That will help us get more respect, get things done, and build a more viable political force." 53

A proposal in 1984 to create a US Navy Home Port in Everett prompted meetings that led to an endorsement 54 and frequent letters to and from members of Congress, including many from other states. 55 Washington Senator Slade Gorton assured the Council in August, 1986, that "Locally, the Navy will provide a large, steady contribution to the economy." 56 A month later, Ohio Senator John Glenn said the Home Port proposal "makes little strategic sense." 57 The Port's carrier pier was formally opened in 1992.

In the 1990s, the Council again addressed the challenges it had faced since 1901. Michael S. Sells, the Council's effective secretary-treasurer for many years, asked the executive board to meet and assess the Council's strengths and weaknesses. Ramp up union member participation, increase political education, train better and communicate more effectively, the participants told Sells. 58

This historical overview was written by University of Washington professor Roger Simpson.