Strikes and Lockouts in New Jersey During the Twelve

Months Ending September 30, 1915.

This compilation of strikes, covering the twelve months ending September 30, 1915, shows the total number to have been 127, which exceeds by twelve the record of the next preceding year. The total number of wage earners involved was 26,786; the aggregate number of days lost from work was 288,309, or an average of 10.7 days for each wage earner concerned. The aggregate wage loss was $598,989, or an average of $22.40 for each participator in the strikes. Of the total number of strikes, 22 were successful, 43 were partly successful, and 62, having failed to accomplish any of the purposes for which they were undertaken, were absolute failures.

Two of these strikes, one at Bayonne, which involved a sufficiently large proportion of the workmen in the great oil refining plants of that city to bring the entire industry to a standstill for nearly two weeks, and the other at the Borough of Roosevelt, Middlesex County, which closed up the several plants of the American Agricultural Chemical Company at that place during a period of four weeks, are quite extensively reviewed in the pages that follow. In each of these strikes the protection of property and the suppression of actual outbreaks of violence required the interposition of county authorities, the forces at command of the municipalities themselves not being sufficient for that purpose. In each case also clashes occurred between strikers and the forces of law and order which resulted in several men being killed and a much larger number more or less seriously wounded. Both these strikes were undertaken to secure increases of wages, and in their results, having gained part of the amount demanded, they are included on the table among the number that were "partly successful," although in both cases many months of steady work with the increase which they had won will be required to make up for the wages lost in the struggle.

Many petty misunderstandings between employes and employers occurred during the year which involved no question of

principle, and were settled with but little trouble and practically no loss of working time or wages; these were not regarded as strikes and consequently are not included in this record.

The two principal strikes of the year-that of the oil workers at Bayonne and the fertilizer workers at Roosevelt, are taken out of their chronological order and placed in the front of this chapter. The others follow in regular order with such details regarding each of them as seemed necessary to an understanding of both causes and results.

STRIKE OF THE STANDARD OIL COMPANY EMPLOYES AT

BAYONNE.

On July 15th a strike, in many respects one of the most serious that has occurred in New Jersey in many years, began among a comparatively small group of employes of the Standard Oil Company's plant at Bayonne, known as still cleaners, who quit work early (2 A. M.) on the morning of * Thursday, July 15th, because a request they had made for an increase of wages had been refused. These men were paid from $17 to $18 per week and worked in a temperature of 200 degrees of heat. The physical strain involved in working under such conditons is very distressing, particularly in summer time, and the men concerned reasoned that its extreme severity should be recognized by an increase of wages, the advance demanded being 15 per cent. The work being otherwise disagreeable and trying, the strikers appeared to believe that securing men to take their places, in case the management of the plant should decide on that course, would not be an easy matter. Men were engaged for that purpose, however, and their first ap pearance at the gates of the plant at Constable Hook, around which the entire body of strikers had gathered on the morning of the day following the walk-out, was the signal for an outbreak of mob violence that, with brief intervals of comparative quiet, lasted nearly three weeks and taxed all the resources of the municipal and county authorities to keep under control. There were occasions, in fact, when the forces at command of the civil authorities appeared to be unequal to the task, and it seemed probable that the military power of the State would have to be invoked for the protection of life and property.

The first outbreak occurred when an attempt was made by the police to clear away the crowd that had gathered at the gates as two van loads of strike breakers were entering the plant. The crowd attempted to follow, but was held in check by the police long enough to permit the gates being closed and fastened securely. Toward evening a number of strike breakers seen leaving the plant were hotly pursued by the strikers, but all but one of them escaped; this man took refuge in a barber shop, where he was surrounded by a number of strikers and beaten into insensibility. This outbreak was quickly suppressed by the police, and six of the number most con

spicuous in the assault on the strike breaker were arrested, five charged with assault and battery and one with atrocious assault.

The strikers were practically all Hungarians and Poles, and few among them had a sufficient knowledge of the English language to fully understand what was said to them in the way of admonition or advice. This circumstance undoubtedly greatly increased the difficulties of the authorities in their efforts to restore order. Residents of the Hook section, where the works are located, were active in displaying sympathy for the strikers, and during the entire time the disturbance lasted it rarely happened that a crowd composed largely of women and children were not assembled as near the gates of the plant as the guards would permit. The presence of women and children in this and other crowds that gathered in the vicinity of the plant made impossible the employment of such vigorous measures for dispersing them as might otherwise have been used. The local police were under instructions to prevent rioting in any form, and the City Recorder took occasion to say while passing on the assault and battery cases growing out of the strike, that riotous disturbances would be sternly repressed, and persons brought before him charged with rioting, or inciting to riot, would, if proven guilty, be severely dealt with.

Following the riot at the gates of the plant there was a meeting of strikers and their sympathizers at a large local hall, at which fully 1,500 persons were present. The men arrested for rioting, who had been released on bail, received a very enthusiastic reception from the assembled crowd; the speakers used very strong language in denouncing their erstwhile employers, and a resolution was passed binding all to insist on the 15 per cent. increase in wages being granted as a condition precedent to their return to work. Plans were openly made at this meeting for extending the strike so as to completely tie up the works, if that should be possible. One of the consequences of the plan, if successful, would be to delay the loading of several vessels lying at the company's wharves with cargoes of oil destined for English and French ports. Meetings were held in every part of the city, and plans for bringing about an early and total cessation of work in the great plant were pushed with a degree of energy and intelligent application of means to the end in view seldom, if ever before, shown by men of their class in a strike. Paralyzing the operations of the plant seemed to be the real objective of the movement; wage increase and improvement in working conditions, the ostensible purposes of the strike, appeared to be relatively unimportant. So energetically was the strike propaganda pushed within, as well as without the plant, that on the morning of the 19th, two thousand employes of the barrel department quit work after demanding a 10 per cent. advance in wages. The time for striking selected by these men was shrewdly chosen, as the company was said to be under contract to deliver many hundred thousand barrels of oil, and large quantities of empty barrels, to both England and France. At all events there were six or seven British vessels at the Standard Oil Company's dock waiting to take on the loaded barrels, and other ships were expected within the next few days to take on the empty barrels. No more effective move could be made for stopping, for a time, the export of oil.

Numerous meetings were held at various points in the city, the most important and most largely attended being held in a hall in the Hook district near the works. In this place from 1,500 to 2,000 persons, strikers and their friends, were in the habit of gathering each day for the purpose of listening to addresses, mostly in the Hungarian or Polish languages, in which the Standard Oil Company was unqualifiedly condemned, and the efforts being made to close up the works were applauded as praiseworthy manifestations of civic virtue.

The sympathies of practically all residents of the Hook section seemed to be with the strikers, and this circumstance was seized upon and made the most of by those who were directing the movement on their behalf. Responsibility for the "starvation," alleged by speakers at these meetings to be impending over the workmen's homes, was charged against the Standard Oil Company, while the strikers who had, by the voluntary abandonment of employment and wages, made starvation of wives and children a possibility, were applauded as heroes.

Besides the employes of the barrel factory, between five and six hundred workmen from other departments joined the strikers on the morning of the 19th, the fourth day of the strike, and at the close of the day so many others had been induced to quit that only a few hundred employes in the pump house and about one hundred dock laborers remained in the entire plant.

The situation was now such, because of the growing boldness of the strikers, as to require the adoption of the most stringent measures by the city authorities for safeguarding the company's property, and protecting employes who still refused to abandon their places, while passing back and forth between the works and their homes. The first serious clash between the strikers and the police occurred when a number of the latter, under command of an inspector, endeavored to keep an open way for the men on their way to work. The inspector, with one officer, was standing just outside the gates of the employes' entrance when they were suddenly showered with bricks, stones and other missiles thrown by a large body of angry strikers who had rapidly closed in about them. The inspector was struck several times and received a serious cut across the forehead. The officers were thrown to the ground by the attack, and on recovering themselves fired their pistols over the heads of their assailants. A number of policemen stationed inside the plant came to their assistance and the crowd was forced back. During the rioting, three men, said to have been ring leaders in the attack on the police, were arrested and held to answer a charge of rioting and assaulting an officer.

Immediately following this display of a disposition toward violence on the part of the strikers, "strike lines" were established by the police at a distance of about one-third of a mile from the works, inside of which unauthorized persons were not permitted to go. The strikers, on their part, established picket line just outside the forbidden police limits and a close watch was kept on everyone entering or leaving the plant.

Daily metings of the strikers were held in the largest public hall in Bayonne, and plans were made for forming a permanent organization of

Standard Oil Company employes; meanwhile the two divisional groups"still cleaners" and barrel makers, had agreed not to settle their differences with the company separately, and both bound themselves to stay out until satisfactory arrangements should be made with the company by each. Increasing boldness among the strikers and contempt for the restraint upon their actions, imposed by the police, seemed to follow the increase in numbers among the strikers, and day by day they were becoming more difficult to handle. Crowds congregated about the works from early morning until late at night, and the entire police force of the city was kept busy in keeping them from closing in upon the works, particularly when, in the early morning and at the close of the working day, employes of the company, some of them taken on to fill the places they had vacated a day or two before, were seen under police escort coming to or from the plant. This spectacle never failed to intensify the excitement of the thousands gathered at the most advantageous points for viewing it. The fact that these crowds were largely composed of women, the wives, sisters and daughters of the strikers, made the task of maintaining control over them more difficult than it would have been if they were not there.

The First Collision Resulting in Death.

These were the conditions in and about the strike area when, on the 21st of July, shortly after 8 o'clock in the morning, a number of men who had been engaged to work in the oil yards were being escorted to the entrance gates by the police. At the intersection of Twenty-second street and the road leading to the yards, the cortege was attacked by an angry mob that had gathered there and showered with bricks, stones, fragments of iron and other missiles, while a chorus of thousands of voices furiously denouncing the men seeking admission to the works as "scabs" and demanding that they be killed, rang out over the general tumult. The police force on duty at this and other nearby points, about forty in number, among them some mounted men, rallied to their defense, but after a short time found themselves unable to resist the determined onrush of the mob. One mounted policeman was knocked from his horse, and several of the men whom they were endeavoring to protect were disabled and rendered helpless for the time being by missiles or weapons thrown by, or in the hands of the strikers. Ambulances conveying the wounded strike breakers, with policemen seated by the drivers, were attacked by the mob on their way to the hospital, and reached there only after having run the gauntlet of the thousands of angry men and women armed with sticks and stones who crowded in upon them from all sides. Flying stones disabled six policemen, one of them an inspector, and the ambulances carrying the wounded strike breakers were perforated by large jagged rocks, and the already wounded men within them narrowly escaped further injury. The small group of policemen, finding the rioters hemming them in on all sides, drew their pistols and pointed them toward the crowd. It was while this was going on that a shot, claimed to have been fired by a policeman, struck John Sterancsak, 19 years old, a striker who was with the crowd confronting the policemen, and killed him