The 1946 Oakland General Strike: The Last General Strike in America

On December third, nineteen forty-six, the Oakland city government made a decision that ended Oakland. Not permanently. For fifty-four hours.

The proximate cause was a picket line at Kahn's and Hastings department stores in downtown Oakland, where female retail clerks were organizing for union recognition. The city deployed police to break the picket line. Oakland's labor movement, which had been building since the nineteen thirties through the dock strikes and their aftermath, responded.

Between one hundred thousand and one hundred thirty thousand workers walked off the job. KQED San Francisco and the California History journal both document the strike; the precise figure of workers involved is reported in those sources as a range from contemporaneous accounts. The city shut down. Taxis stopped running. Bars closed. The theaters went dark. The downtown that you might be passing through right now was, for fifty-four hours, a city that had decided to stop.

Labor historians, documented in the California History journal's scholarship on California labor movements, have characterized the nineteen forty-six Oakland General Strike as the last full general strike in American history, a characterization based on the city-wide scope and the spontaneous nature of the walkout. The nineteen thirty-four San Francisco General Strike is better remembered; the Oakland strike, twelve years later, was in some ways more radical in its character.

Union leadership called the strike off before the workers had secured their demands. The women whose picket line had triggered the whole thing did not get what they were asking for.

The city went back to work. The labor culture that had produced the strike continued organizing. What happened here in December of nineteen forty-six is in the footnotes of American labor history. The footnote deserves a longer reading.