This Day in Labor History: November 26, 1931. Cigar employers in Tampa ban the largely Cuban workers from having someone read to them on the job. Let's talk about this moment of worker militancy to control their own conditions of work and how radical that could be. 
While U.S. economic investment in Cuba had started early in the 19th century, it wasn’t until the 1860s that the nation saw significant Cuban migration back to the U.S. Much of it was based in Florida, which at the time was a rural economic backwater, as well as to New York.
In the Tampa area, Cubans made up much of the workforce of the growing cigar industry. The company town of Ybor City was founded outside Tampa by Cuban cigar manufacturer named Vicente Martinez Ybor, who moved production north to avoid revolutionary politics in Cuba.
The workers had engaged in a number of strikes over the years and this was a fairly militant and well-organized workforce, even in the era before the New Deal made this much easier.
Earlier in 1931, about 5,000 workers left the American Federation of Labor-affiliated Cigar Makers International Union and joined the communist-led Tobacco Workers Industrial Union.
That was affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League of the Communist Party, which had come out of a recent CP switch to give up on boring within unions and instead to promote so-called “dual unionism.”
Dual unionism gave workers a choice between conservative AFL-style business unionism or radical socialist industrial unionism. The AFL, who believed it was the only legitimate way to unionize American workers, hated this with great passion.
At least some of the workers were dedicated communists. 17 had been jailed for a having a parade to celebrate the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Workers went on strike to support them. That led the owners to eliminate the position of lector in the factories.
The lector was a reader. Workers pooled their resources to bring people into the factories to read to them. Given the drudgery of cigar rolling and the poison entering the skin of the workers, this was not a great job, but it was as good as a Cuban was going to get in Florida.
So to keep workers moving, someone read to them. What this did in reality was create a culture of radicalism. The lector would read radical literature, newspapers, or whatever. So in the aftermath of the communist strike, the employers banned the lector.
Employers put up with it because the Cuban cigar makers were highly organized and because of the long tradition of the lector.
You can see how it worked in the image at the top of the thread, which is from a Tampa cigar factory in 1929. The lector would sit above the workers and fill their day with words. It didn’t have to per se be political reading of course. Could also be entertainment.
This is a cool little oral history of someone whose father was a lector. You get a full sense of the job here.
herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/2491
herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/2491
In response, the workers returned to the strike for three days to demand their lectors return. But when workers returned on December 3, the cigar makers locked them out until they gave up the lector.
he lockout was possible because the cigar makers had already filled their Christmas orders so losing a little money to get rid of the radicals was a small price to pay.
The workers had a hard path in front of them because this was the south. And southern leaders were going to stop at nothing to stop a bunch of non-white communists from succeeding.
The employers won on December 15. While workers threatened to withhold their skilled labor, over the long-run, this was impossible as the workers were poor. They returned to work that day without their communist unions and without their lectors.
The lector never returned to the factories. Instead, employers invested in radios, which still provided workers needed entertainment to help while away the hours, but which was commercial based and would undermine the radical shop floor culture of the tobacco workers.
This was a big loss for the workers to control their own workplaces, which was near the end of a century of the slow decline for workers in industries throughout the nation to over these issues.
People often don’t understand that this was the single biggest issue in American labor history in the decades after the Civil War. It wasn’t wages, hours, working conditions, or even union recognition in the way we think of it today. It was control over the conditions of work.
This is why Taylorism was so strongly hated by workers, just to give one example. lawyersgunsmon.wpengine.com/2014/08/day-la…
The gigantic modernized industrial workforce where workers had unions but were treated as automatons was about to begin. Yet, it was not a total defeat for the workers. This was a heavily organized industry. Th cigar makers did not seek to destroy unionism entirely.
Control over the shop floor was enough. In 1933, the workers and owners agreed to a contract (not sure if it was actually written) that banned strikes and lockouts for 3 years and gave the workers a wage scale they felt comfortable with.
The cigar workers hardly gave up radical politics in the aftermath. Ybor City was a major fundraising place for the Spanish Republicans fighting Franco, just as one example.
Future posts in this series will explore more about the politics and work culture of this fascinating place. Today, it has the reputation of a place where #FloridaMan goes to get wasted, as the cigar industry is long gone.
Back tomorrow to discuss another lost aspect of workers' culture--the Pins and Needles play created by the ILGWU in 1937.
