California agricultural strikes of 1933
"[7] In Pixley, California, two strikers, Dolores Hernàndez and Delfino D'Ávila, were murdered and eight others wounded after "local sheriffs handed out six hundred citizen's permits to carry concealed weapons.
Wages for cotton pickers in the San Joaquin Valley were set by the Agricultural Labor Bureau, an employers' organization.
[10] In 1929, the Great Depression lowered the demand for cotton and many marginal planters lost their assets to Bank of America and others who held the notes.
[11] On September 18, the cotton strikes were organized by a group of seventy-eight men and women who "concluded that it took the average picker 10 hours to harvest 300 pounds.
[14] The Los Angeles Times reported that the rationale for the strikes was to obtain "a rate increase of 40 cents a hundred pounds for picketers over the rate established at the recent meeting of the San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Bureau, and which cotton growers throughout Kern county agreed to support.
Seventy-five Kings County planters gave pickers and their families five minutes to load all their belongings on trucks and then dumped them in the highway.
"The sheriff and I told the growers not to worry about the pickers' rights anyway," said Kings County District Attorney Clarence Wilson.
On the first day of the strike, a California Highway Patrol vehicle came through the town, two blocks from the railroad crossing, with a machine gun mounted.
Growers in Kings, Fresno, Madera, Merced Stanislaus, and San Luis Obispo counties armed themselves and their employees, announcing they would drive off any troublemakers.
After several hours confronting one another at the border of the employer's land, the two sides began attacking each other (the workers armed with wooden poles, the growers' men using the butt of their rifles).
The killings at Pixley and Arvin led to public condemnation of the growers' actions, and California Highway Patrol flooded the area to restore order.
[21] Public opinion supported the strikers so strongly now that California Governor James Rolph agreed to meet with union leaders to receive their demands.
Although Rolph declined to send in more police or disarm growers, he did announce that the State Emergency Relief Administration would spend federal money to provide financial assistance to striking workers.
He warned growers that the Roosevelt administration would suspend federal agricultural assistance to California if violence continued, and proposed a three-member fact-finding commission to settle the strike.
When state officials conditioned the receipt of relief payments on a return to work, striking workers refused to accept them.
CAWIU asked for 80 cents per hundred and recognition of the union, but Creel said relief payments would be completely cut off if the workers did not agree to the commission's rate.
