The War on Communists in the Hotel Workers’ Union

New York hotel workers showed an early proclivity for radical unionism. In my new book, We Always Had a Union, I show how kitchen and dining room workers sparked a citywide 1912 strike, saw controversy with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and became early joiners of the Communist Party. In fact, in the period that the 1981 film Reds so memorably described as the battle over “the fine distinction of which half of the left of the left is recognized by Moscow as the real Communist Party in America,” they joined John Reed’s Communist Labor Party.

Their union, the Amalgamated Food Workers (AFW), was a stable and successful independent union with over ten thousand members in the 1920s, enforcing union shop conditions and a union hiring hall on dozens of hotels and restaurants. Loyal to the Comintern, it won an exception to the CP’s 1920s edict to “bore from within” the American Federation of Labor (that is, to quit or shut down independent unions and join the AFL union of their craft and contest for power within it). It was “strong numerically” — ten times larger than HERE’s NYC locals — and “actually function[ed] as a mass organization,” able to raise wage demands and adjust grievances for workers in the hotels; while HERE was basically a bartenders’ union operating in local taverns with little interest in challenging corporate behemoths, the AFW was deemed to be the hospitality union that was worth Communists joining and organizing for.

During the 1930s Popular Front that saw liberals and Communists make common cause,  AFW’s merger into HERE was encouraged, in order to rout the gangsters that dominated HERE’s tiny NYC locals from the union and to launch a campaign to organize the city’s hospitality industry. The Communist leaders from the independent union, Jay Rubin and Michael J. Obermeier, were paired with a HERE staff rep named Miguel Garriga. Their 1937 campaign plan asked HERE for a $25,000 match to the money the locals would raise through a 25-cent monthly per capita assessment, which would pay for up to fifty full-time organizers.

The organizers’ first win was a union certification and first contract at the fifty-two-location Childs Restaurant chain, winning $15 a week, no more out-of-pocket expenses for uniforms, and one week of paid vacation a year. Shortly thereafter, the union won voluntary recognition at 97 cafeterias organized under an employers association. The “blanket agreement” it negotiated brought another four thousand members into the union. Before the year was over, the Hotel Association signed a neutrality card-check agreement with the union, a framework that ended (most) bosses’ union busting and guaranteed an industrywide collective bargaining agreement at every hotel where the union could prove that a majority of workers wanted it. By 1947, 95 percent of New York’s hotel workforce — some 30,000 workers — were unionized.

In contrast to CIO-style industrial unionism, the Communists in HERE Local 6 revived an earlier model of “amalgamation,” achieving unity not through one big union but rather through a bargaining council that represented multiple AFL craft unions in one industrywide collective bargaining agreement. The New York Hotel Trades Council (NYHTC) was modeled on William Z. Foster’s 1916–19 organizing campaigns in the steel industry and Chicago’s stockyards, in consultation with the CP leader himself.

Unions affiliated with NYHTC included the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Painters, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). Since AFL organization in this era was marked by hundreds of small locals that came together in dozens of joint boards and district councils, the more than 50,000 members that CP activists led in the service industry gave the party significant influence within the AFL. The CP is usually thought of as a force in the upstart CIO, with influence in only a handful of scattered service trades in the AFL. CP influence in the labor movement should instead be considered as fairly widespread in the national CIO and in the AFL in New York; the city was, after all, where most Communists lived and worked.

The Communists, for a time, were tolerated in the older, more conservative labor federation, particularly during World War II when Allied cooperation between the US and Soviet governments supercharged Popular Front alliances. HERE Local 6, for example, raised so much money for Labor’s War Chest, which made charitable contributions of food and clothing for soldiers’ families, that AFL first vice president Matthew Woll, an inveterate anti-communist, publicly commended them for contributing their 1944 fundraising haul (second only to that of the entire International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union). Also in 1944, when Hotel Trades Council president Jay Rubin and HERE Local 6 president Michael J. Obermeier published a biography of HERE president Edward Flore that was not shy about celebrating his open alliance with the Communists, AFL leaders William Green and George Meany provided blurbs for the book jacket.

By 1945, the Communists in HERE, like those who rose into positions of power and influence within the CIO, were broadly accepted as both talented organizers and as labor statesmen. Unlike many left-led CIO unions, however, the Communists’ leadership in the New York hospitality industry predated their affiliation with the AFL, and in many ways the bonds between rank-and-filers and local leadership were stronger than those of the house of labor.

The unity of the Popular Front was broken with dizzying speed by the Cold War. The AFL embraced Communist containment. In 1946, fifty thousand people marched in the first May Day parade since 1941. The AFL forbade its affiliates from participating, on pain of suspension or worse. Local 6 got around the dictate by having its members march as individuals, without union banners. This small rebellion did not go unnoticed. In October 1946, at the AFL’s annual convention, the federation’s president, William Green, denounced its rival “Communist-dominated” CIO before delegates passed a strongly worded anti-communist resolution.

Also in 1946, Local 6’s education director, Charlotte Stern, was indicted for contempt of Congress, along with the board of the nonprofit Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee for refusing a House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena for “all books, ledgers, records, and papers relating to the receipt and disbursement of money.”

The fallout began with a power struggle in the New York Local Joint Executive Board (LJEB), the umbrella body of all HERE locals in the city. Local 6, along with CP-led Waiters Local 1 and Cooks Local 89, dominated the LJEB through numerical membership strength. The other dozen locals were led by rival social democrats, Lovestoneites, Trotskyists, and even some old-fashioned conservatives. These local leaders objected to the use of staff and resources on Communist front activities and tried — and failed — to elect more nonpartisan officers.

Locked out of LJEB decision-making, the anti-Stalinists appealed to HERE leadership to expand their jurisdictions, jealous of Local 6’s wall-to-wall claim on hotel workers. Local 16 wanted waiters in street-level restaurants operating under separate leases within hotels. Local 15 demanded jurisdiction for all bartenders across the city. The HERE executive board responded by ordering an investigation into the extent of “Communist domination” in its New York locals.

HERE leaders set up an office in the Hotel Pennsylvania in March 1946 and spent weeks conducting interviews and compiling dossiers on the accused Communists. The city and state AFL bodies took part, and lawyers were hired to take sworn affidavits. Disgruntled members hurled accusations of dubious veracity, but a number of ex-Communists provided details about how the party’s culinary industry fraction caucused before union elections to ensure that party members or allies — although a minority of union membership — would retain the most important leadership posts, claiming Jay Rubin directed the party activists in every LJEB local. Others complained about how Locals 1 and 6 used their extra waiter hiring halls to reward comrades and punish dissidents with good jobs, bad jobs, or no jobs as the case might be. One member reported running into Obermeier in Moscow in 1930.

The commission’s report concluded “substantial Communist sympathy and influence exists among some part of the leadership and some of the membership of our New York locals, notably in locals 1, 6 and 89.” Insisting that its report was “not a witch hunt” and armed with no clear powers, the commission encouraged locals to “to clean house themselves,” before constitutional amendments “be instituted to eradicate the evil practices above set forth and discipline the violators.” Someone, meanwhile, put some of the commission’s sworn affidavits to immediate use — by handing them over to the FBI.

It was in this context that the 1947 convention voted to ban Communists from holding union office. After the convention, the HERE executive board voted unanimously to direct Ernst to “take charge and control” of the LJEB. Miguel Garriga, by then the international vice president for HERE’s New York district, obsessively attacked the power of his ex-comrades, initiating a membership referendum to split the bartenders into their own craft local and encouraging three business agents of Local 6 to circulate petitions for members employed in private clubs to secede to form a local of their own. He spent union dues on a district conference that acted as a national anti-Communist caucus, and he funded an internal opposition movement within Local 6 called the “Committee for Democracy.”

In the midst of these attacks, Michael J. Obermeier was arrested at the union headquarters on September 8, 1947, on federal deportation orders. Obermeier, who first arrived in New York from Germany during World War I, never completed his application for citizenship (likely because in the ensuing decades he had traveled back and forth between the United States and USSR on Comintern business on forged papers). The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s case was based upon the FBI’s voluminous file on Obermeier, which included transcripts from HERE’s 1946 investigation and other damning materials that Garriga gave them.

Communist leaders in New York fought back with membership rallies, expulsion charges against Garriga, termination of the insubordinate club’s business agents, and a successful court injunction to block the trusteeship of the LJEB. The bartenders of Local 6 “virtually to a man” refused to participate, attending a union rally instead of voting on Election Day. Finally, NYHTC created a “Fighting Defense Fund,” ostensibly in response to the Taft-Hartley bill and an upcoming contract reopener with the Hotel Association. It asked members to voluntarily assess themselves a full day’s pay to contribute, raising a $100,000 war chest for whatever fights may come its way.

Finally, Ernst had enough of the disunity and called a peace conference in November 1947. All mergers and new union charters were called off. The rebel business agents were restored to union payroll (where they lost reelection later in the year). Garriga was ordered to shut down and cease financing “any opposition movements in any of the local unions.” He was also given the soft power to “supervise” the operations of the LJEB for one year, until a new leadership team of a radical secretary-treasurer and a “conservative” president could be selected by the voters.

The chaos and controversy of the anti-Communist drive, to say nothing of the fact that Garriga might not ultimately prevail, gave Ernst the political cover to broker the peace deal, but as a civil libertarian and a good trade unionist, he was always inclined toward maintaining the union’s coalition. HERE’s officially commissioned history, 1956’s Union House, Union Bar, would describe Ernst as a San Francisco waiter, a “dandy,” and a “lifelong bachelor” who “loved travel” as well as a cosmopolitan intellectual who gravitated toward the Socialist Party and industrial unionism. With twenty-first-century hindsight, he was clearly an outsider who embraced other outsiders, and he had been and would remain a strong ally to the radical New Yorkers since before their merger into the AFL.

Ernst declared his support for Obermeier at Local 6’s fifth biennial convention. “I will do all I possibly can, morally and financially, if necessary, to see that all these deportation proceedings are aborted and that Mike Obermeier will stay with us,” he told the assembled delegates. “They are not born out of Americanism but out of spite, and I cannot subscribe to them.”

HERE’s Communists managed to not only avoid a wholesale purge in 1947 but remained in a brokered leadership coalition with more mainstream trade unionists. Not only had they bucked history — AFL unions began expelling Communist activities almost as soon as they began “boring from within” in the 1920s — but they avoided the fate of the CIO’s left, which was headed toward a fratricidal battle with President Philip Murray, which would end in the expulsion of entire international unions in 1948–49. Whether the Communists could have remained in a leadership coalition in HERE is a fascinating road not taken, but events — and CP leadership itself — would fracture the coalition in no time at all.

Local 6 Communists entered 1948 in a tenuous peace deal with their friends and enemies in the international union. That they immediately strained the bonds of their fragile alliance is, with decades of hindsight, almost incomprehensible.

On December 18, 1947, HERE Communists played a timely role delivering a petition to former vice president Henry Wallace signed by forty-five leaders of both AFL and CIO unions, purportedly representing over 263,000 New York workers, urging an ambivalent Wallace to run a third-party campaign for president. With their union affiliations listed “for identification purposes only,” officers of HERE Locals 1, 6 and 89 (and SEIU Local 144) lent the ploy a good deal of credibility.

“I am against him,” AFL president William Green declared: “If Mr. Wallace’s candidacy helps any party it will help a reactionary Republican candidate” and “to that extent it will help the Communists, too.”

The Wallace campaign produced the first “crack” in the unity of the Local 6 administration. Jay Rubin shared the perspective that Wallace was a spoiler. He resented efforts to pressure him to personally endorse the campaign and responded by ceasing his involvement with the CP. The public identification of Local 6 with the Wallace campaign by Martin Cody, a CP loyalist who was elected to replace Obermeier, violated the spirit of the peace agreement with Hugo Ernst — and within just a few short weeks — which must have frustrated Rubin and created tension between the comrades.

CP fraction meetings grew increasingly acrimonious and hostile to Rubin’s administration. Cody and Local 6 VP Charles Collins took the lead in lodging criticisms of Hotel Trades Council bargaining strategies and grievance handling by Rubin and allies who also quit the party. The tenor of the meetings was so caustic that other business agents stopped attending or paying dues.

The “crack” in the union’s unity became obvious during the 1949 contract reopener. The Communists called Rubin’s deal with the bosses a “sell-out” and undermined its ratification. They harped on the lack of an across-the-board wage increase despite the fact, in a recessionary year in which many unions were taking zeros, Rubin had won, for the first time, the principle of overtime pay for tipped employees — a longtime union goal that cost the employers $1 million. The point of the agitation was to win a stronger majority of CP members to Local 6’s governing body in the next local elections and then use Local 6’s delegate strength within NYHTC to turn Rubin out of office.

Rubin hit upon the idea of restoring Michael J. Obermeier to the Local 6 presidency. Obermeier was the only Rubin ally capable of reunifying the Local 6 administration. Ernst waived the constitutional prohibitions that would have prevented Obermeier, a non-itizen facing federal felony charges, from serving again. At Local 6’s annual convention in December 1949, the misgivings and disagreements over the contract settlement were the hot topics. Delegates endorsed an organizing plan and making a wage increase the central goal of 1950. “Unity has to have a unity of purpose,” Obermeier declared in the main speech. “It has to center around principles that we are fighting for.” He was greeted with a standing ovation, and Martin Cody took the opportunity to nominate Obermeier to succeed himself.

The union solidified around contract demands for a 20 percent wage increase for members earning less than $40 a week, and 15 percent for everyone else. After a large rally of 7,000 members to “ratify” the negotiators’ demands, the union began singling out hotels with on-the-clock job actions. Tragically, in the middle of this campaign, Obermeier was convicted on three counts of perjury on July 17, 1950. His lawyers planned an appeal, but as a freshly convicted felon he now posed a greater threat than Charlotte Stern ever did to Local 6’s reputation and autonomy.

Obermeier’s resignation created a chaotic scene at the Local 6 Shop Delegates Council (SDC). Delegates vociferously refused to accept it. From the chair, Obermeier began to appraise the relative strengths of his potential successors, intending to endorse a Rubin ally as successor. From the floor, a CP loyalist nominated Martin Cody. Before Cody could be declared the new president by acclamation, a Rubin supporter was also nominated. Accusations about repeat voters and uncounted delegates swirled. The tellers’ count revealed Cody as having slightly more support, by a margin of 265–256.

Both sides of the looming civil war hid behind the fact that the SDC had not accepted his resignation to acknowledge Obermeier as continuing to be president while they figured out the next steps. An election was scheduled for October. In Cincinnati, Hugo Ernst received a flurry of petitions and telegrams from rank-and-file members complaining about the organizational dysfunction of the ongoing faction fight. Ernst dispatched a representative to New York to assess the situation. He walked past members of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) picketing the union office, protesting Communist domination. He met, privately and in groups, with officers from both factions. Each side, naturally, blamed the other for the discord, but insisted that it would be resolved by the election (which, each side swore, they would win).

After getting the report, Ernst discussed the situation with Rubin. Cody was popular with the members and likely to win. He was also a Communist and subject to expulsion under the HERE constitution. All of Local 6’s officers had been spared that fate by Ernst’s now-ruptured peace deal. Both men agreed that it was time to enforce the constitution. Justifying the trusteeship, he wrote on September 15:

For months now the local has been split into various factions and the Communist issue has been the cause of the dissension. As a result of this fight grievances of members have been neglected, the true functioning of the local for the benefit of the membership has been disregarded, and a struggle for power has been taking place among several factions at the expense of the rank and file membership.

Ernst’s trustee fired unelected staff who were known Communists, including a disabled veteran and an AFW leader whose activism dated back to 1917. When thirteen officers — four of the local’s eight vice presidents and eight of its seventeen business agents — circulated a leaflet against the trusteeship, they were suspended from office.

Martin Cody dragged out union hearings appealing the trusteeship and suspensions for weeks. By the time Cody’s injunction motion was heard in court, only five were still fighting to regain their positions. What seems odd is that few of the purged Communists fought particularly hard to get back into the union or to get their jobs back. Many seemed to have moved on with their lives. Charles Collins, for example, busied himself with the World Peace Congress in Warsaw, and by November 26 he was in a “peace delegation” to Moscow. Ordered by party leaders to make the fateful break with Jay Rubin and then to violate and fruitlessly challenge the trusteeship, they just faded from the union.

Communists were facing state repression that only intensified as relations between the United States’ and Soviet Union’s governments worsened and public opinion turned against them. Hundreds more foreign-born Communists would be rounded up in the government’s deportation drive, and by decade’s end the party’s national leadership itself would be prosecuted and jailed under the Smith Act. This made it hard for open Communists to function in most civic organizations.

But HERE’s Communists had an opportunity to remain in a brokered union leadership, with some political cover from respectable union leaders like Hugo Ernst and Jay Rubin, and to live to fight another day. That they threw it away seems unfathomable three-quarters of a century later. William Z. Foster’s psyche was key to understanding this fateful mistake.

Once a genius union-organizing strategist, Foster had spent the 1920s pushing left-wing activists to endure all manner of attacks from entrenched union leadership to maintain unity in the fight to win collective bargaining. With the practice of collective bargaining stable and well-established by the 1950s, Foster concluded that unity was no longer existentially necessary for unions. His biggest existential concern was the defense of the Soviet Union. Remaining part of union leadership coalitions wasn’t worth it to him if union leaders wouldn’t use their power and platform to advance causes in the interest of the survival of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps Foster’s plan was to return to the days of militant minorities, scoring points at the expense of “conservative” union functionaries by raising bigger bargaining demands and organizing more disruptive job actions. But the trusteeship that resulted decapitated the party’s leadership in the union. A similar demand to bend the knee or face opposition for reelection almost certainly occurred within the expelled CIO unions — like the Farm Equipment union and New York’s drug store union — that managed to survive decertification raids during the same period.

By now, it should be obvious that absent a mass movement, socialist organizations cannot be in a position of dictating union leadership slates. The position that the CP enjoyed in 1950, able to recruit hundreds of HERE members into the party, with half the officer core loyal to the party line, would be the envy of any socialist organization today: a strong voice, not a policy veto. The future of “rank-and-file” organizing must balance the organizational interests and ideological project of the socialist group with the immediate and practical wants of union members and must take into consideration the political survival of allies in union leadership.