Introduction

On February 25, 1946, the streets of Houston overflowed with garbage. 1 A thousand municipal employees, trash collectors among them, declared a citywide strike . As in other cities in the US and throughout Europe, Houston’s workers greeted the end of the Second World War intent on securing and extending wartime labor gains for the post-Depression, postwar future. Houston’s municipal workers left their posts and took to the streets to demand wage increases and improved working conditions. Inescapable and putrid, the uncollected trash evoked both the workers’ discontent and their centrality to the city’s functioning.

Far from being outraged by the inconvenience of overflowing garbage cans, Houston’s non-municipal workers quickly declared their solidarity. The city’s American Federation of Labor (AFL) union s called a citywide labor holiday. As many as 10,000 people marched on City Hall to demand justice for the striking municipal workers. 2 The general strike brought together a diverse alliance: municipal repair workers, taxi drivers, longshoremen, bakers, musicians, and office employees all joined the march. 3

Ultimately, the city agreed to investigate its wage rates and to bring wages in line with those in the private sector. It was not a resounding victory, to be sure. But this strike , the largest in Texas history, made clear that workers in Houston embraced their identities as workers. The strike united garbage collectors, dock and oil industry workers, and white-collar employees as part of a common class determined to forge the city’s future.

Sixteen years later, the city’s labor landscape had fractured. In August 1962, workers at Shell refineries across Texas struck to protest automation’s impact on blue-collar workers and the company’s contracting temporary maintenance workers in lieu of retaining a maintenance department. This time, the strike backfired. Shell appealed to its white-collar engineers, administrators, and managers to keep the plant open during the strike. Staffed by white-collar employees working around the clock, the refineries remained open during the strike and operated almost at capacity. 4 If the general strike of 1946 demonstrated solidarity, the Shell strike of 1962 made clear that blue-collar workers could no longer count on white-collar workers to identify with them. The Shell refinery strike ended in massive layoffs and no substantive change in the company’s contracting policy. 5

The transformation of the city’s most important industry, oil, from a primarily blue-collar to a largely white-collar workforce lay at the heart of this tremendous shift in Houston’s labor landscape. After the Second World War , Houston transitioned from a city organized around the extraction and refining of oil into the urban headquarters of the global oil industry. In the 20 years after the war, the city’s working class, and especially its oilfield tools manufacturing workers and oilfield and refinery workers orchestrated almost 1700 strikes in Houston, an unprecedented high of labor activism for the historically conservative city. 6 In response to these strikes, manufacturers, international oilfield contractors, and oilfield services companies launched a fervent anti-labor campaign, most visibly through their vehement support for right-to-work legislation. 7 At the same time, corporate interests pursued new strategies for overcoming labor unrest, including the international outsourcing of oil refineries and replacing manufacturing workers with professional employees exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act. By the beginning of the 1960s, two shifts had been effected: culturally, corporate interests had drawn a firm distinction between the blue- and white-collar workers; and materially, Houston’s oil industry boasted fewer blue-collar jobs and more white-collar jobs than it had in 1945.

Houston’s transition from a blue-collar to a white-collar city is not singular in postwar history; many cities in the US, the UK, and Europe experienced similar shifts during this period. However, taking Houston as a case study—and focusing in particular on the city’s oil industry—make two points clear. First, Houston’s shift from a predominately blue-collar to a white-collar workforce was not merely an accident of history; rather, it was a deliberate strategy pursued by oil and oilfield services company executives who sought to rein in unruly blue-collar workers. Crucially, oil refineries relied upon third-party oilfield services contractors to provide them both with flexible white-collar experts and with nonunion labor to perform any remaining blue-collar work. Second, Houston’s shifting reliance on white-collar labor carried transnational resonances. Increasingly, the work of the production of oil took place outside the United States —in countries with varying level of US and Western corporate influence—while the logistical and consulting functions of producing oil remained in the US, especially in Houston. This transnational division of labor reshaped prospects for US workers, labor conditions for workers overseas, and the cultural idea of the role of the US in the global oil industry.

Domestic consequences amounted to an end run around equal employment opportunity legislation. Battles among unions, management, the state, blue- and white-collar workers, and African-American and Mexican-American oil employees threatened the gains that African-American and Mexican-American oil workers had made in overcoming workplace discrimination . At the same time, the export of blue-collar labor remade the relationship between Houston and oil-producing nations outside the United States , as Houston executives increasingly managed blue-collar workers across the globe. Houston’s local labor struggles carried dramatic consequences, both at home and abroad.

The Geography of Houston’s Oil Industry

Oil lay at the center of the city’s economy and identity throughout the twentieth century. In 1901, wildcatters discovered oil at Spindletop, 145 km from Houston. The Texas economy revolved around oil by the 1920s, with almost 70 million barrels extracted during the first quarter of 1929 alone. 8 With more nearby oil strikes to follow, Houston boasted forty oil company headquarters and quickly became the regional headquarters for the Southwest’s oil industry. 9 High levels of production drove down prices, however, and oil production outpaced demand until after the Depression. The Texas Railroad Commission made repeated attempts throughout the 1930s to curb oil production in the state to manage supply and maintain prices. 10

The war solidified the importance of oil to Texas and Houston’s centrality in the state’s extractive economy. The astonishing demand for petroleum worldwide buoyed Texas oil production, especially when federal wartime regulation ceased in 1946. Prices rose from $.92 per gallon of crude during the war to $2.32 in December 1947, and the US oil industry was at peak production in 1948. 11 A booming population in Houston supplied the oilfields and refineries with labor. The Texas oil business had never been stronger.

Although commentators routinely referred to a unified “Texas oil industry,” the industry itself comprised several related but distinct components. Oil extraction was the most iconic and the most dominant cultural image of the industry in Texas. During the first half of the twentieth century, Texas produced millions of barrels of oil per year, rising from 375 million in 1935 to 992 million in 1951, then over a trillion in 1952 before beginning to decline in 1957. 12 The wildcatter—a tough, rugged individual who struck out on his own to go broke or strike it rich in the search for oil—emerged in popular culture as the central figure of the Texas oil industry. The lone wildcatter was more apocryphal than real, but, the wildcat oilman occupied a prime location in the national idea of Texas. 13

Refinery output in Houston continued to increase even as extraction declined in Texas. Refining was not new to the city at mid-century. By the end of the First World War , Texaco , Gulf, Humble, and Sinclair had all built refineries along the Houston Ship Channel. 14 Petroleum refining had become the top manufacturing industry in Texas in 1939. 15 After the war ended, the United States began importing oil at an increasing rate, from 74 million barrels in 1945 to 153 million by 1949. 16 Increasing oil imports from abroad and declining rates of production in domestic oilfields made refining an even more important segment of the Texas oil industry than extraction. Whereas oil drilling could be best compared with similar energy extraction industries like mining, refining was much more akin to industrial production. Working in large refineries in teams on a line to finish a product, refinery workers labored as assembly line employees working in an industrial setting not too dissimilar from a Ford plant.

In addition to the major oil companies, the refineries, and the independent wildcatters, Houston hosted another class of companies growing more quickly than any of the others: the oilfield services industry. Oilfield equipment companies like Hughes Tool , Brown Oil Tools, Baker Oil Tools, Halliburton, Schlumberger, and the Byron Jackson Company originated in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana during the early twentieth century to manage the oil rush that had accompanied the discovery of oil at Spindletop. In their earliest years of operation, these companies either sold oilfield tools or patented specific processes to extract oil more efficiently. Before the war, these companies primarily partnered with domestic oil producers and rarely ventured beyond the Gulf Coast.

During the Second World War , the oil and oil-related companies in Houston boomed because of the government spending on war materials. After the Second World War, Hughes—and other oilfield services companies like it—employed industrial workers in its Houston factories, manufacturing oil tools to be shipped abroad. But, increasingly, oilfield services companies turned their attention away from the actual manufacture of oil tools and toward the marketing of less tangible products. Before the war, their operations had focused on selling tools domestically, but after the war they turned their business strategy towards exporting tools to international markets. Even more crucially, they began to contract with international oil companies, American and non-American alike, to sell their expertise as consultants and logisticians on oilfields worldwide. Unlike the major oil corporations based in the US and Western Europe, oilfield equipment and services companies did not depend on their control of oil reserves. 17 Instead, their expertise and services were the product.” 18

At the end of the war, then, the oil industry encompassed three very different segments. The domestic extraction industry was becoming less important as the easy-to-reach oil wells in the state grew exhausted and imports from abroad grew. The refining industry was bustling, but it relied on industrial labor that managers struggled to control, particularly in the wake of the 1946 general strike. And the burgeoning oilfield services industry, which once consisted of predominately industrial workers, increasingly relied primarily on white-collar engineers and managers selling expertise to international oilfields instead. But as troops returned home to Houston and the war drew to a close, how these macroeconomic industry changes would affect the city’s labor dynamics remained unclear.

Houston’s status as the central node in Texas’ oil economy seemed well established, but precisely what that status meant remained in question. Months before the war’s end, the city’s Chamber of Commerce confidently pronounced Houston “the Petroleum Center of the World.” Importantly, they defined that title by the city’s postwar strengths—its crucial role in the extraction and refining of oil. The United States was the world’s largest oil source in 1945, and Texas was by far the country’s largest oil producer. Moreover, Texas boasted 56% of the nation’s proven oil reserves, making the future seem bright. And Texas also could claim the largest number of refineries in the nation, with an operating capacity of 1.5 million barrels per day. Clearly, the Chamber classified the “petroleum center of the world” as the world’s leader in producing oil for market—as a competitor in a global industry, not the facilitator of an integrated network of producers. 19

This understanding of Houston’s place in the world of oil carried with it a specific imagined geography. For most Houstonians in the 1940s, Houston was an oil city because of its location within a region that was the greatest oil producer in the world. “Within 100 miles [161 km] of Houston, 268 oil fields produced 193,667,589 barrels in 1944, and within 200 miles [322 km] of Houston nearly 65 per cent of all Texas oil is produced,” the Chamber explained. Richard Gonzalez, an economist employed by Humble Oil and Refining Company, echoed this sentiment: “The 19 counties in the Houston territory have 6% of the area in Texas but account for 21% of the state’s crude oil production and 40% of its refinery operations.” 20

The “Houston territory”—a stretch of land encompassing both the refinery-heavy city and its oil-producing hinterland—embodied the idea that Houston’s importance lay in its role as a producer of petroleum. In these statements, Houston elites made clear that oil’s geography was regional. Houston could best be imagined as a central node in a broader region dotted by oilfields, refineries, and ports shipping Texas oil to market. Indeed, they imagined Houston itself as primarily relevant to its immediate surrounding geography, the rural lands that had given birth to the mythic wildcatter cowboys who struck out on their own in search of oil riches.

If this geographic imaginary prioritized extraction and refining in determining “petroleum city” status, a subtle challenge to that narrative emerged at war’s end. In its analysis of the city’s oil industry, the Chamber of Commerce mentioned that “[i]n addition to the fact that Houston is the leading petroleum center of the world, it also manufactures more oil equipment, oil tools, and accessories than any other city.” In fact, one Houston company had recently “prepared to export shipments to Colombia , Venezuela , Chile, and Egypt, machinery that when created, totaled more than twelve million pounds.” 21 The presence of this segment of Houston oil—the oilfield services industry—would help change not only the geography of oil in Houston but also the city’s labor structure in the years to come.

Houston’s Labor Landscape

Houston’s power elite, in particular its oilfield services companies, had a long history of anti-union sentiment and action. During the First World War, for instance, Hughes Tool refused to honor the eight hour day standard. Its employees worked nine hours per day and earned less than their counterparts in other regions of the country. When the National War Labor Board (NWLB) decreed that employers in the defense industry, including Hughes Tool, had to pay their workers a standard national wage and employ them for no more than eight hours per day, Hughes Tool refused to follow the directive. Skilled workers struck in response. When the NWLB sent a representative to Houston to settle the dispute, Houston manufacturers joined forces to refuse to raise pay under any circumstances. Another strike followed, but the company ultimately triumphed. 22

The Second World War —and especially the federal government’s increasing role in regulating business—changed the ways in which companies could resist labor’s demands. Even as Hughes Tool was transitioning from primarily a manufacturer of drill bits to a services company, African-American blue-collar workers at Hughes launched a crucially important civil rights campaign. In 1940, 25% of Hughes Tool’s employees were African-American . Yet black workers’ hourly wages ranged from $0.48 to $0.62, while whites earned between $0.65 and $1.30. Jobs for black workers included “common laborers pulling metal chips, handling material, doing all the heavy lifting, fetching and carrying, and cleaning, while whites operated all machines.” 23 In 1943, CIO Local 2457, the segregated black local, filed an FEPC complaint against Hughes, alleging discriminatory hiring and promotion practices. Simultaneously, the local filed against the CIO on account of its contract, which continued to segregate job classifications by race . 24 As CIO member N.H. Shepherd put it, “It [is] unfortunate that the Hughes Tool Company sees fit to operate on the money of the United States Government on war contracts and could not see fit to abide by the laws of the United States .” 25

But the US government seemed more reluctant to challenge discrimination at Hughes Tool than Shepherd hoped. CIO rank-and-file members launched a wildcat strike in June 1944 to protest Hughes Tools’ violation of a NWLB order that the company had to recognize the CIO as the company’s collective bargaining agent. To the CIO leadership’s dismay, workers violated the wartime no-strike pledge to join the fray. The CIO and management were both unable to convince the three thousand strikers to return to work until a week had passed. Even at the strike’s conclusion, however, Hughes Tool continued to ignore NWLB orders, hoping that the federal government’s need for the company’s help would stop the president from intervening. Hughes executives were not so lucky. In response to the NWLB’s plea for federal intervention, President Roosevelt sent the army to seize Hughes in September. The army managed to negotiate a maintenance of membership agreement between the CIO and management, but they failed to address discrimination in hiring practices. Since the army remained segregated, army officials reasoned that forcing desegregation at Hughes would prove to be nothing but an embarrassment. At the beginning, black CIO staffer Robert Grovey had boasted, “In the old days every time there was trouble and white men walked off the job the boss would sidle up to the Negro. If they hang us this time they will have to hang us together.” Clearly, that solidarity extended only so far for white workers. 26 Formalized workplace discrimination would not end at Hughes Tool until black workers won a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case in 1964. 27

It was in this context that the 1946 general strike took the city by storm. In February, almost a quarter of Houston’s four thousand total municipal workers were on strike. 28 City trash collectors and street, sewer, and water main repair workers complained that their wages remained far lower than their counterparts’ in private industry and did not keep pace with the rising cost of living. Beyond bread-and-butter issues, workers protested the “‘caustic and insulting remarks and threats’ made by city officials.” Through their local chapters of the AFL City-County Workers Union, workers demanded raises ranging from 12 to 25%. When the city refused to negotiate, workers voted 179 to 41 to go on strike—the first municipal strike Houston had ever seen. 29

A casual observer in 1946 would have been surprised by this demonstration of labor militancy. Among city residents, trade unions members, or business leaders, Houston hardly had a reputation as a bastion of working-class radicalism. Before the war, the union presence in the city was moderate, heavily segregated along racial lines, and concentrated among blue-collar workers. 30 The labor-backed mayoral candidate in the 1942 election, for instance, finished dead last. 31 As one in a wave of postwar strikes across the country and internationally in 1946, Houston stood out as an unlikely site among cities with histories of more vibrant union activity, such as, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and Oakland. 32

In Houston as in these other cities with stronger labor histories, the war had transformed urban political culture, making the general strike a cause to support for workers citywide. During the war, workers had seen the federal government increase its support of unionized workers facing anti-union employers, especially in Houston where the city’s oil industry was heavily entwined with the nation’s war effort. And as the privation of the Depression and wartime lifted and the postwar United States promised broadly shared prosperity, workers saw unions—newly legitimated through the federal government’s defense of them during the New Deal and wartime—as a pathway to a share of the pie. As historian Robert Self explains, “The unprecedented growth in union membership between 1935 and 1945, the incorporation of both AFL and CIO leaders into wartime planning, and the institutionalization of labor relations within the New Deal state had in the space of a decade transformed organized labor in the United States into an influential axis of political and economic power.” 33 And this was true even in Houston.

Convinced that the labor upsurge would not last long, the city’s political leadership held a hard line at the beginning of the strike. Mayor Otis Massey and the City Council refused to negotiate with strikers until they returned to work and rebuffed union representatives altogether. 34 Acting City Manager J.M. Nagle argued that the city had simply fired employees who “had resigned by failing to report for work.” “These workers actually quit voluntarily,” he claimed. “We are issuing their final checks and they have lost all their Civil Service, seniority and pension rights.” 35 Mayor Massey agreed: “So far as I’m concerned, those who are off the job are no longer in a position to bargain with us. They are simply former city employes [sic].” 36 The city council planned to call on state officials and the Texas Rangers to declare martial law. Massey encouraged Houstonians to weather the strike by volunteering to pick up garbage and clean streets. 37

Yet the strikers did not fold quickly, as city officials predicted. Houston workers’ support for the strike grew as the fight wore on. After 6 days, several thousand more AFL sympathizers declared a citywide work holiday on February 26. “Taxi drivers, bakers, barbers, longshoremen, musicians, office employees, packinghouse workers and railroad clerks” swelled the ranks of the striking workers, with twelve hundred dockworkers and seven hundred taxi drivers, for instance, joining the original thousand striking municipal employees in an overwhelming demonstration of solidarity. 38 Spurred by the solidarity strikers, Houston Labor and Trades Council secretary George A. Wilson called on sixty-five AFL locals in the city to March on City Hall in support of the fired workers to respond to “the arrogance and utter lack of consideration of the mayor and city council of the welfare of the city employees and citizens of Houston.” 39 By some estimates, as many as ten thousand workers marched on City Hall. As Building Trades Council president L.E. Patrick put it, “It’s not only a city employee fight now, but it concerns all labor.” 40

The citywide work holiday and mass march on City Hall made city officials’ position untenable. The Houston Chronicle, hardly a friend to labor, declared the march and work stoppage “the greatest mass demonstration of organized labor’s strength in Houston’s history, or for that matter in Texas’s history.” 41 In the face of such clear opposition, Massey relented and agreed to meet with AFL representatives. Before the crowd amassed in front of City Hall, Massey and an AFL representative embraced, announcing that the fired workers would be reinstated and wages would be studied. 42 The city’s Civil Service Commission agreed to compare city wage rates with rates in private industry, to bring municipal employees’ wages in line with the private sector. 43 The strike’s momentum lasted through the end of 1946, when Massey was ousted in favor of labor-friendly Mayor Oscar Holcombe. 44

The emerging political climate of the Cold War complicated this labor triumph, in Houston and elsewhere. Prominent anti-communist political figures like Joseph McCarthy leveraged the Cold War fears of communist encroachment into the United States to launch witch hunts against suspected communists, particularly in trade unions . Moreover, following the passage of the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947 , many states passed the so-called right-to-work laws in the postwar years, which “prohibited collective bargaining and striking by public employees” and limited the ability of unions to gain members. 45 Texas passed its right-to-work law in 1947, an unprecedented move for the state which had had little labor legislation on the books in Texas before the 1940s. 46

Houston’s general strike constituted the largest, most vivid example of labor power in the postwar city, but it was hardly the only one. In the same year, unionized construction workers went on a 77-day strike and won a closed shop on all construction jobs in the city. The next year, workers threatened another citywide construction shutdown after the Associated General Contractors and Houston Building Trades Council announced a plan to draft a contract banning the closed shop. 47 In March 1950, a thousand AFL dockworkers in Houston went on strike demanding higher wages, with another thousand striking in Galveston. 48 And in November 1950, 1200 CIO bus drivers and mechanics went on strike to demand “a 25-cent hourly wage increase, better working conditions and pensions.” 49

African-American workers continued the prewar and wartime fights to end racial discrimination in the oil industry. Workers at Houston’s Shell plant launched another fight in 1953. In Shell’s 57 departments, only one—the labor department—hired African-Americans , at a wage of $1.69 per hour. Whites hired in similar positions started at a wage of $1.98 per hour. 50 Black workers appealed to the CIO Oil Workers International (OWIU) , but found that the union contract actually codified this discrimination. They visited Roberson King, an African-American Texas Southern University law professor, who filed suit against the OWIU in the Texas courts. 51 Black workers simultaneously filed a case against Shell with the President’s Committee on Government Contracts. Army officials stepped in to work with management at Shell’s offices in New York. In the eventual agreement, the company pledged to open all job categories to African-Americans if they had a high school diploma and could pass a qualification test. 52

Beyond these localized struggles, the NAACP placed oil workers at the center of a highly visible national campaign for workplace civil rights. In 1955, the NAACP represented black workers at Esso, a Carbide Chemicals Company plant in Texas City, and the Lion Oil Company in Arkansas in a joint suit filed with the President’s Committee on Government Contracts and with the NLRB. The complainants argued that both the company and their unions discriminated against black workers in hiring practices. As government contractors, Robert L. Carter of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund argued, these discriminatory companies “deprived complainants and all other Negroes employed of rights and privileges guaranteed to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States .” The NLRB denied pursuing the case, but the President’s Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC) pursued it to great effect. At the PCGC’s urging, Esso “opened all but professional and clerical jobs to African-Americans and promised to promote twenty-five black workers to newly opened jobs.” However, the PCGC had little enforcement power, and its officials favored a company-by-company tactic that “left cooperative unions vulnerable to raids by competitors who promised to restore the discriminatory status quo ante.” Meanwhile, employers could blame white workers’ resistance for their reluctance to implement change. 53

By the mid-1950s, African-American workers could trace a long line of wins in oil workers’ civil rights cases beginning during the war. And like African-American workers, Mexican-American workers were able to mobilize the state to intervene on their behalf in the wartime and postwar period, most dramatically in a wartime FEPC case at a Shell refinery. Ultimately, continued FEPC pressure led the union to broker a compromise: a few skilled jobs for African-American and Mexican and Mexican-American workers would be set aside in segregated departments. 54 Although workers remained stymied by resistant companies, the 1940s and 1950s seemed to offer hope for progress in the future.

Corporate Responses

Workers’ hopes notwithstanding, companies were finding new ways to resist laborers’ power. In the refineries and at oilfield services factories like Hughes Tool, African-American and Mexican and Mexican-American workers won concessions, albeit limited ones, during the 1940s and 1950s. Despite these limited successes, capital flight and automation undermined workers’ hard-won gains. The peak of domestic refinery employment in the US came in 1953, when 206,000 Americans worked in refineries. 142,000, or about 70%, of these workers, worked in production rather than management or engineering-related functions. Just 5 years later, total employment declined to 6.8%, but production workers declined at a rate of 14.8%. 55 Meanwhile, production increased to 9.8% during these years. 56 Generally speaking, blue-collar oil industry workers worked on an oil field or in a refinery, doing the manual labor of extracting and refining oil. Blue-collar workers also worked in ports and on ships transporting oil from one city to another. White-collar workers, on the other hand, managed these workers and the manufacturing processes they operated. The blue-collar employment for which black and Latino Gulf Coast workers had fought was actively disappearing.

This labor shift was not merely an unfortunate coincidence of history; in many cases, it was a deliberate management strategy. Employers actively countered labor and civil rights gains by shifting their employment structure. When three Mexican workers brought a wage discrimination case against Humble Oil’s refinery , for instance, Humble responded by raising the complainants’ wages, but they also pursued a strategy of “rid[ding] [the company] of its minority workforce by contracting out to the [the oilfield services firm] Brown and Root Company for all of its laboring work.” 57 In the process, the company avoided conflict with white workers while seeming to obey federal mandates. 58

Other companies cut their workforce as well. In just 1 year, from 1948 to 1949, Hughes Tool’s employee base shrunk from 4000 to 2600. Ten years later, only 2000–1600 white and 400 black—remained—even though production had increased. The total number of employees at Gulf declined throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Despite black employees’ organizing successes, Gulf employed 883 black workers in 1957 but only 741 by 1959. 59 And at Shell , the company’s agreement to open all job categories to African-Americans with a high school diploma had little actual effect. Only 11 of the plant’s 250 black employees had high school diplomas. As one onlooker pointed out, in the future, “the company could avoid Negroes from being upgraded by refusing to hire Negro high school graduates.” 60

At Hughes, Gulf, and Shell, the 1940s and 1950s witnessed the beginning of a decline in blue-collar as opposed to white-collar oil industry jobs. 61 This development undermined the gains of African-American and Mexican and Mexican-American workers in two ways: first, by reducing the number of jobs that blue-collar workers (disproportionately Mexican-American and African-American) were eligible for; and by cementing the relationship between whiteness and white collar. During the 1940s and 1950s, challenges to the dual-wage and dual-tier labor system in the blue-collar oil industry had sought to challenge cultural associations between white masculinity and unionized, blue-collar work in refineries and oil tools plants. As one observer commented, the “sentiment among white workers [was] that mechanized jobs are automatically white jobs”—and workers’ successes in advocating for African-American and Mexican-American access to these jobs had succeeded, at least provisionally, in undoing that association. 62 Esso, for instance, had “set aside twenty-five skilled jobs for African-Americans” in the wake of the PCGC case, a coup for black workers. However, the industry’s—and Houston’s—increasing reliance on white-collar labor, which had not seen the same legislative victories in civil rights organizing, essentially evaded this challenge by claiming white, white-collar workers as the true agents of the modern Houston oil industry. At Esso, after the original twenty-five positions were filled, the company ceased promoting African-Americans and, in fact, laid off a third of its employees in 1957, spurred by a recession and automation. Yet as Esso’s white-collar workforce expanded, the company refused to hire African-Americans to these positions. 63 The material and cultural decentering of blue-collar labor in the domestic oil industry undermined the civil rights gains of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans .

Houston-based companies augmented automation and promoted white-collar labor with another union-busting strategy: moving blue-collar labor overseas. Houston’s Brown & Root , an international construction company specializing in oil-related projects, is perhaps the starkest example. The company, best known for its domestic and international contracting work constructing oilfields, pipelines , military bases, and government buildings, was a key proponent of right-to-work legislation in Texas. Texas passed a right-to-work law in 1947, which “prohibited collective bargaining and striking by public employees.” 64

Herman Brown, president and co-founder of Brown & Root , sought to make sure that the law would be enforced as strictly as possible. After campaigning in support of right-to-work legislation in the 1940s, Brown helped launch a landmark case to extend the law in the 1950s. In 1950, Brown & Root sued the AFL Building Trades Council under the state’s right-to-work law. The company’s case alleged that the Council had violated state laws prohibiting the closed shop and secondary boycotts and the state’s antitrust act. The controversy had begun when Brown & Root won a contract to work on the Bull Shoal Dam in Arkansas. Eight other contractors from across the country were collaborators on the project, and all eight operated with a closed shop. An AFL union official pointed this out to Brown & Root executives and requested a meeting. The AFL representatives demanded that Brown & Root operate a closed shop at Bull Shoals, use only union members on its Texas highway projects, and sign an agreement that the company would hire only union members at all of its projects nationwide. Brown & Root executives refused. 65

The AFL would not be thwarted so easily. In the 10 months that followed, AFL union members protested at Brown & Root construction sites across the country. At an oil pipeline compressor station site outside Beaumont, Texas, union members unaffiliated with the job picketed the project site, drawing crowds of up to one hundred and fifty. The company alleged the union members used violence and harassment against the work crews. Union members picketed at two different Houston construction sites. According to company officials, the Houston Lighting & Power Company refused to connect electricity to Brown & Root job sites out of fear of retribution from the electrical workers’ union. These kinds of protests followed the company to Austin, with more threats of pickets and boycotts springing up nationwide. According to company officials, the chief of police in Beaumont sided with the workers: “There is another epidemic here of Brown & Root, and we are doing all we can to exterminate that terrible dreaded disease,” he said. “You boys have helped exterminate that disease, and with your help, we will eventually get rid of all those festered sores in Beaumont.” 66

Outraged, Brown & Root executives and supporters appealed for sympathy. “Our company has been in business over 30 years and have worked on an open shop basis all of this time,” Herman Brown explained. “It is an arduous and expensive task” to sue the union , he continued, “but we intend going through with it with the idea that it will help the employees as well as the employers in this State in the future.” 67 The company’s lawyer was even more livid in his address to the Texas State Bar. “Not once have Brown & Root employees engaged in a strike . Not once in a period of nearly 40 years have Brown & Root workers walked off the job for so much as a single hour because of dissatisfaction with wage, hour, or other policies of the company,” he exclaimed. “Brown & Root employees have no union and have sought no union… [This] is the story of a Texas contractor ensnared in the fetters of a giant labor conspiracy and compelled to fight for the right to obey the law and stay in business.” 68

The company claimed that their resistance to the closed shop was about liberty rather than the bottom-line, but in private, executives suggested otherwise. Herman Brown explained to another contractor on the Bull Shoal Dam project that if the project was not “operated on an open shop basis… it would probably cost us from a million to two million dollars extra in the increase in labor rates.” Brown went on to assure him that the AFL’s arguments against Brown & Root were “a pure bluff” and that the labor leader already knew that “they have lost the battle at Bull Shoals.” 69 The Houston Building Trades Council estimated that Brown & Root’s wages in Houston ranged from $0.50 to $0.75 per hour lower than the union rate, and argued that “working conditions are also far below the standards in like employment in this community established by years of work, sacrifice and organizational endeavor.” 70

These facts notwithstanding, Brown & Root won its suit. Courts ruled against the AFL and enjoined the union from picketing Brown & Root in Texas, although the court made a point to say that “legal picketing” (left relatively undefined) would still be allowed. 71 Brown & Root’s legislative victory, and its staunch anti-union stance, reverberated across the industry. At Humble Oil Refinery, for instance, workers complained that 300 Brown & Root contract workers had replaced the unionized maintenance workers, all of whom had been laid off. 72 In other words, “the battle of Bull Shoals” mattered beyond Brown & Root’s worksites. It enabled companies to evade worker demands by contracting out jobs to anti-union companies.

Using right-to-work laws at home represented only one anti-union strategy. In fact, in the 1950s, Brown & Root increasingly operated overseas. The company repaired war damage in Guam and built new air bases for NATO and the US Air Force in France and Spain. But Brown & Root’s primary expertise lay in oilfield construction. The company was among the first to develop offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s and soon moved on to the North Sea, the Persian Gulf, and Peru. 73 The company continued its overseas work, consulting with the Turkish government to construct a pipeline spanning Turkey, Syria, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. 74 Based in Houston, but performing work elsewhere, Brown & Root was everywhere and nowhere, giving a double meaning to the term “offshore.”

Oilfield services company Halliburton, Brown & Root’s parent company, also invested an increasing amount of its resources—and gained an increasing percentage of its profits—abroad. By 1960, Halliburton operated in 26 countries outside the US, “serving all the principal drilling areas of the free world.” This strategy proved extensively useful when political upheaval, declining oil reserves, or labor unrest threatened a particular drilling site; in 1960, for instance, “expanded drilling programs in Argentina and Libya , as well as increased activity in Mexico, Peru, and the European countries, offset the further decline of operations, and resulted in an increase in Halliburton’s foreign business.” 75 By 1959, Halliburton employed over 200 US employees who had been in foreign service to the company, averaging 5 years each working abroad. The company also employed over 1,000 non-US citizens internationally. 76

The fact that Brown & Root promoted right-to-work legislation at home and benefitted from international construction abroad was hardly coincidental. The Cold War constituted the zenith of government-sponsored corporate growth, as construction contractors like Brown & Root negotiated federal contracts at home and abroad that boosted their bottom lines. International projects made good business sense as the Cold War chilled during the 1950s and 1960s.

In addition to this federal largesse, the unruliness of blue-collar labor at home encouraged the company to focus its efforts abroad, often in locations where government regulation protected labor less thoroughly. Moreover, the company and those like it benefited directly from the expansion of manufacturing overseas, often at the expense of US manufacturing. From the 1950s onward, Brown & Root built factories and oil refineries in countries as diverse as Japan, Botswana, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Spain, and fought for a contract in Syria that they lost to a Czechoslovakian construction company. 77 At the same time, the percentage of global oil refining performed in the US declined while refining abroad increased. 78

This shift of manufacturing overseas corresponded with an emphasis on white-collar labor in the domestic oil industry. For staunch anti-union companies like Brown & Root , this constituted a deliberate strategy of sorts, since many white-collar workers were not protected under existing labor legislation. Furthermore, white-collar workers like engineers had largely been unsuccessful at organizing unions. At oilfield services company Sperry Gyroscope, an engineers’ union was decertified, demoralizing engineering union members across the country. In 1960, observers predicted, “the Engineers and Scientists of America, a professionals-only national union, ‘will fade out of existence this month’”. They worried that “there have been no new units of any significance formed within the past several years… Even the AFL-CIO, with all its resources, has been completely unable to record any real progress.” TVA Engineers Association President Gene M. Wilhoite worried that “each group [has] made the same mistake, they underestimated the power of the non-member, and allowed their membership to drop so low that the non-member voted them out.” 79

Although US companies like Brown & Root began building refineries overseas during the postwar years, moving existing refineries offshore often proved challenging. The fixed cost of refinery equipment was high, making automation and replacing blue-collar workers with white-collar workers more profitable for many companies. 80 By 1958, professional, managerial, and technical refinery workers outnumbered unskilled workers. Of the refineries’ 13,000 Houston workers, 3300 were management, technicians, clerical and sales workers, or services employees; the majority of the remaining numbers were skilled and semi-skilled workers. 81 It was this new balance of labor in the refineries that would factor into the labor defeat at Shell .

The Strike at Shell

These industry developments—the oil industry’s investment in union busting, its shift toward white-collar employment, and its relocation of the blue-collar labor of extraction and refining abroad—culminated in the Shell strike of 1962. On August 18, 1962, 2200 workers at the Shell Oil Refinery in Houston went on strike to protest unfair work assignments, problems with seniority and employment security, and the increase in contract workers at the expense of unionized employees at the refinery. 82 The plant, which boasted more than two thousand blue-collar workers producing 135,000 barrels of oil every day, was the Gulf Coast’s largest. 83

The company responded to the strike by replacing the blue-collar workers with 1170 white-collar staff members. As the strike wore on, Shell argued that the refinery “continued operating at better than pre-strike levels with 1000 less workers” with “the only cutbacks… in engineering work, research and technical studies, and some maintenance” because “those normally engaged in work in these areas are manning the production equipment.” 84 Nonunion “supervisory, clerical and technical personnel” operating the refinery proved embarrassing to the union fighting for the right of workers to having a say in the plant while it also underscored Shell’s case. 85

For Shell , the strike was “an opportunity to try new methods of operating.” “Supervisors, engineers, researchers, clerical workers, accountants, secretaries and stenographers” took charge of the plant, working 12-hour shifts seven days a week. Shell vice president for personnel and industrial relations John Quilty explained the white-collar workers’ enthusiasm this way: “The supervisors, the engineers, they’d been wanting to get their hands on those units for years… They’d been wanting to show these operators that they could run them.” 86 Shell’s strong resistance was unprecedented. Union representatives claimed that it was “the most extreme position [in bargaining] by a major oil company” and was an attempt to “force contract retrogression.”

Fundamentally, what was at stake was the question of whether the oil industry in the US would be a blue-collar or white-collar one. Workers protested the impact of automation in replacing them, as well as the company’s policy of contracting out for maintenance and other blue-collar workers rather than hiring union-eligible employees. The company argued that it should have “the right to determine whether plant work should be done by its own employees or by those of outside contractors,” and said that the strike had demonstrated that the plant could run on fewer workers. The company announced plans to lay off almost 400 workers at the strike’s end. Strikers pointed to the fact that Shell had already laid off 600 workers in the past 5 years, making a tremendous impact on the Houston economy. 87

The strike lasted almost a year, making it the longest in the oil industry’s history. 88 The settlement was a tremendous blow for organized labor in Houston. Shell reduced the workforce by 400 while offering a 5% wage increase for employees who kept their jobs. The union’s biggest fears, concerning automation and management prerogative, were decided in favor of the company. 89 The new contract “allow[ed] the company to continue contracting out construction work” to anti-union companies like Brown & Root and “g[a]ve the company more flexibility in using workers for several duties.” 90 In other words, the strike served as a boon to rather than a check on the anti-labor politics Brown & Root represented.

White-Collar Wildcats

The popular image of Texas oil traditionally focused on the wildcatter, the fiercely independent, virile (and white) oilman who struck out on his own to strike it rich. Blue-collar oil workers sought to reframe that image to celebrate an unionized collective of workers who were more likely to call a wildcat strike than to identify as wildcatters. But the Shell strike cemented a different image of the oil industry employee, one that would be increasingly important in Houston in the coming decades. This worker combined the fierce autonomy of the wildcatter with the shrewd expertise of the engineer. It was this worker—not the refinery worker or oilfield tool manufacturer—who would represent the future of the US oil industry.

Houstonian Will Wilson evoked this slippage between the wildcatter and the engineer-manager eloquently in a speech he gave to the General Press Club opposing Democrat John Connally’s bid for Governor of Texas in 1962. “John Connally’s career in the oil business was not on the Horatio Alger formula of the poor but proud boy who, by hard work and saving his money, became successful,” Wilson told the crowd. He went on to explain: “[Connally] is not a geologist, an engineer, a landman, a roughneck, or a production man. He did not work his way up in the oil business,” Wilson noted with disdain. By contrast, Wilson bragged, “I have a degree in geology, have rough necked on drilling rigs, have been a land surveyor in the oil fields , and have practiced oil and gas law.” Connally was nothing more than an “‘aide’ to a big rich man,” famed only for being Lyndon Johnson’s campaign manager. “I respect a lot more the man who stands on his own feet and makes his way,” he concluded. 91

Blue-collar roughneck or production man, white-collar geologist, engineer, or lawyer—these occupied the same realm of masculine oilfield authenticity for Wilson. But this slippage ignored the displacement of blue-collar labor that white-collar workers had wrought in the Houston oil industry while bestowing the engineer or manager with the rough-and-tumble Texas oilfield spirit. In an impressive sleight of hand, the engineer who replaced the “production man” in the Shell refinery became equivalent to him, enchanted with the wildcat spirit. The wildcat strike was nowhere to be seen; the enemy, instead, was the effete “aide,” a political elite. The production man and the engineer, the manager and the worker, it seemed, could stand together against this decidedly non-wildcat figure.

At the same time, the geographical imaginary of oil in Houston had shifted decidedly. Increasingly, Houston as an oil city was understood as a sprawling metropolitan area that carried important financial functions for a global oil market. In this new mental map of the city, Houston was no longer a central node in a regional system, but a large urbanized area with connections extending nationally and globally. Now, the role of oilfield services was central: “Houston [has] 43.3% of the nation’s petroleum equipment and suppliers,” the Chamber of Commerce boasted. 92 And even beyond the city, Houston’s reputation as an oil city had spread. In 1965, Pennzoil relocated its headquarters to Houston after 75 years in Pennsylvania in an “attempt,” as one company spokesperson put it, “to be more centrally located in domestic and foreign oil operations.” 93

Now, Houston was the center of a metropolitan region, which “sustain[ed] an expanding population in the seven contiguous counties” but also “support[ed] population growth and prosperity in the second—and even in the third—tier of surrounding counties.” Houston was no longer a central node in an oil network, but a shopping center where “consumers within the wholesale trade territory of Metropolitan Houston” could come to exert their “expanding purchasing power.” 94 In this new calculus, the white-collar suburb was a central part of what made Houston an oil city. In fact, Houston had embarked on a tenacious annexation campaign that had made it, by 1960, “the largest incorporated urban area in the world.” In a span of 12 years, the city had “increased its land area by about five and one-half times.” 95 And this process of annexation further established the city as a sprawling metropolitan area rather than an urban center bound to its rural hinterlands.

Moreover, one of the city’s fastest growing sectors was petrochemical manufacture, an industry that involved industrial manufacturing along with large investments in research and development. “In a mere 20 years the Houston area has become the principal center of petrochemical manufacture in the United States ,” du Pont plant manager Thomas Chase proclaimed, and one of the main reasons he noted was “access to skilled employees.” 96 As Executive Vice-President of the Houston Chamber of Commerce, Marvin Hurley, explained, “We are now in an era of technologically-based, science-oriented industry, and our continued economic development will depend increasingly upon the application of the fruits of science and technology to our natural resources… The face of Houston has been remade, as the urbanized area has reached into the countryside in every direction.” 97

And the imagined future of oil involved as few blue-collar workers as possible. A.W. Rose, president of the Houston-based Petroleum Equipment Suppliers Association, predicted that “substantially before the year 2000 it is conceivable that an automated oil well drilling rig will be operated at a control console in an air-conditioned cab; information and instructions will be fed back and forth by computers located at an information center miles from the drilling site; [and] robots on the ocean floor will do underwater drilling and well completion.” In fact, a prototype for an automated drilling rig was slated to be shown at the 1966 International Petroleum Exposition. 98

Conclusion

If the 1946 general strike announced Houston’s emergence as a self-conscious working-class city, the Shell strike symbolized the strategic and cultural importance of white-collar labor to the city’s image by the early 1960s. Whereas white-collar employees had joined in the general strike after the war, by 1962 they were being relied upon as strikebreakers, with engineers and managers stepping in enthusiastically to prove that they could operate a refinery—indeed, to demonstrate that the modern, high-tech refinery should be the realm of white-collar experts rather than blue-collar industrial workers. This development signified a new division in the oil industry, as well as a new imaginary of what the domestic oil industry was and who its workers were. Not coincidentally, the Shell strike dovetailed with the rising importance of the white-collar oilfield services industry and the transfer of much oil extraction and refining outside the United States .

The transformation of Houston from an extraction- and manufacturing-based municipality to a metropolis driven by corporate headquarters and oilfield services firms effected a transnational renegotiation of labor power. Materially, blue-collar jobs moved overseas, while a greater proportion of Houston’s oil workers were in white-collar occupations with fewer bargaining rights. At the same time, for oil industry executives to promote a corporate vision in which extraction and productive activity like refining occurred abroad, with management the only industry function occurring onshore, they would have to transform manufacturing from the symbolic birthright of the white middle class to a job category that was understood to be performed most efficiently by workers of color outside the United States .

This transition occurred at the same moment when African-American and Mexican and Mexican-American oil workers were making unprecedented gains in reducing workplace discrimination , particularly in refineries. However, the rebranding of oil in Houston as a white-collar rather than blue-collar industry both undermined blue-collar civil rights advances at home and cemented the relationship between whiteness and white-collar job categories. Outsourcing and the championing of expertise were both responses to domestic labor unrest and imperial strategies. The relocation of oil refining overseas reduced domestic workers ’ power while promoting a new ideology of American imperialism that imagined the US as a manager of integrated global production rather than as a producer or exporter in its own right.

This local story carried profound transnational consequences. Centering the white-collar oil employee, both materially and imaginatively, in Houston reracialized the American oil worker as white and male in a moment when African-American and Mexican-American workers were making unprecedented gains. At the same time, the relocation of the blue-collar labor of oil production abroad—to countries including Venezuela , Brazil, Nigeria , Iran, and Saudi Arabia—helped to forge an association between productive labor and “elsewhere.” In this formulation, the US was the home of oil experts and expertise, responsible for teaching those elsewhere to do the dirty productive labor. This transition helped to displace a producerist vision of American empire—one which imagined the US as a Fordist land of production engineering material goods for export to the rest of the world—to a service vision. This new vision of US global power celebrated the engineer, the manager, the expert as the central figure of American capitalism. While the oil industry would increasingly send its extraction and production work abroad, US experts would continue to oversee the increasingly global assembly line.

Notes

  1. 1.

    “End Threat to Shut Houston Utilities,” New York Times, February 25, 1946.

  2. 2.

    George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 137.

  3. 3.

    “40,000 Workers Plan March on Houston’s City Hall Today,” The Washington Post, February 26, 1946; “700 City Workers End 7-Day Houston Tie Up,” New York Times, February 27, 1946.

  4. 4.

    Tyler Priest, “Labor’s Last Stand in the Refinery : The Shell Oil Strike of 1962–1963,” Houston History 5, no. 2 (2008): 12. Priest also identifies the strike at Shell as a crucial turning point in Houston’s labor history and in the labor history of oil more broadly.

  5. 5.

    Priest, “Labor’s Last Stand,” 13.

  6. 6.

    Ruth A. Allen, George N. Green, and James V. Reese, “Strikes,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/oes02), accessed July 31, 2015. Uploaded on June 15, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

  7. 7.

    See Sophia Lee, The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  8. 8.

    Roger M. Olien, “Oil and Gas Industry,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/doogz), accessed October 7, 2014. Uploaded on June 15, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association; David G. McComb, “Houston, Texas,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hdh03), accessed October 7, 2014. Uploaded on June 15, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

  9. 9.

    Michael R. Botson, Jr., Labor, Civil Rights, and the Hughes Tool Company (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005), 12; McComb, “Houston, Texas,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hdh03), accessed October 7, 2014. Uploaded on June 15, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

  10. 10.

    Olien, “Oil and Gas Industry,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/doogz), accessed July 31, 2015. Uploaded on June 15, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

  11. 11.

    Ibid.

  12. 12.

    Railroad Commission of Texas, “Crude Oil Production and Well Counts (since 1935),” available at http://www.rrc.state.tx.us/oil-gas/research-and-statistics/production-data/historical-production-data/crude-oil-production-and-well-counts-since-1935/.

  13. 13.

    Karen R. Merrill, “Texas Metropole: Oil, the American West, and US Power in the Postwar Years,” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (2012): 197–207.

  14. 14.

    McComb, “Houston, Texas”; Botson, Labor, Civil Rights, and the Hughes Tool Company, 37.

  15. 15.

    Clara H. Lewis and John R. Stockton, “Manufacturing Industries,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dzm01), accessed October 7, 2014. Uploaded on June 15, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

  16. 16.

    US Energy Information Administration, “US Imports of Crude Oil,” available at http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRIMUS1&f=A. The United States had imported over one hundred million barrels of oil during the early 1920s, but imports declined until after the Second World War due to increasing demand. Oil imports rose steadily until reaching an all-time high of 3.695 trillion barrels in 2005.

  17. 17.

    The Seven Sisters included, “the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Exxon), the Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony, later Mobil , which eventually merged with Exxon ), the Standard Oil Company of California (Socal, later renamed Chevron ), the Texas Oil Company (later renamed Texaco), Gulf Oil (which later merged with Chevron), Anglo-Persian (later British Petroleum), and Royal Dutch /Shell.” See “Milestones: 1921–1936,” US Department of State Office of the Historian, available at http://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/RedLine.

  18. 18

    For a full history of oilfield services companies’ shifting business strategies, see Betsy A. Beasley, “At Your Service: Houston and the Globalization of US Global Power” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2016).

  19. 19.

    Houston magazine, April 1945, 8.

  20. 20.

    Houston magazine, September 1945, 63.

  21. 21.

    Houston magazine, April 1945, 8.

  22. 22.

    Botson, Labor, Civil Rights, and the Hughes Tool Company, 41–50.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 135–136. Later Local 2457 dropped these charges under pressure from CIO whites, who promised that they would work with the WLB to rectify union segregation .

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 136.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 128–141.

  27. 27.

    Ibid.

  28. 28.

    Marilyn D. Rhinehart, “A Lesson in Unity: The Houston Municipal Workers Strike of 1946,” The Houston Review: History and Culture of the Gulf Coast 4, no. 3 (1982): 137.

  29. 29.

    “City Workers Strike in Houston,” New York Times, February 21, 1946; Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 136; Rhinehart, “A Lesson in Unity,” 137.

  30. 30.

    Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 136.

  31. 31.

    Rhinehart, “A Lesson in Unity,” 139.

  32. 32.

    Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 136.

  33. 33.

    Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 35.

  34. 34.

    “Ask Volunteer Workers’ Aid in Houston Strike,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 25, 1946.

  35. 35.

    “40,000 Workers Plan March on Houston’s City Hall Today,” The Washington Post, February 26, 1946.

  36. 36.

    Ibid.

  37. 37.

    “Houston Faces Martial Law in Strike Threat,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 23, 1946.

  38. 38.

    “40,000 Workers Plan March on Houston’s City Hall Today”; “700 City Workers End 7-Day Houston Tie Up,” New York Times, February 27, 1946; Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 137.

  39. 39.

    “40,000 Workers Plan March on Houston’s City Hall Today.”

  40. 40.

    Rhinehart, “A Lesson in Unity,” 147.

  41. 41.

    Ibid.

  42. 42.

    “Union Leader Hugs Houston Mayor at Municipal Strike End,” Daily Boston Globe, February 27, 1946.

  43. 43.

    “NY Transit Strike Averted; Houston Walkout Settled,” Washington Post, February 27, 1946.

  44. 44.

    Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 137.

  45. 45.

    Rhinehart, “A Lesson in Unity,” 137–138.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 140.

  47. 47.

    “Strike Looms in Houston,” New York Times, June 29, 1947. The planned strike would have affected more than $150 million in industrial building, and in response, oil refineries and chemical plants laid off craftsmen and limited operations.

  48. 48.

    “Houston, Galveston Hit by Docker Strike,” New York Times, March 18, 1950.

  49. 49.

    “Houston Buses Stalled: Strike of 1,200 Halts Traffic in South’s Largest City,” New York Times, November 5, 1950. Bus drivers were operating buses for public transportation, but the buses were operated by a private company rather than the city.

  50. 50.

    Ibid.

  51. 51.

    Sophia Lee, The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right, Loc. 1896 (Kindle edition).

  52. 52.

    Ray Marshall, “Some Factors Influencing the Upgrading of Negroes in the Southerns Peroleum Refining Industry,” Social Forces 42, no. 2 (1963): 186–195.

  53. 53.

    Lee, The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right, Loc. 1926–2129 (Kindle edition). Lee shows that the Taft-Hartley Act “had bifurcated the NLRB,” turning over jurisdiction in this case to a general counsel “closely allied with the administrations probusiness, anti-New Deal, and antilabor wing.” Had Taft-Hartley not had this effect, the NLRB likely would have considered the case.

  54. 54.

    Emilio Zamora, “The Failed Promise of Wartime Opportunity for Mexicans in the Texas Oil Industry,” in Texas Labor History, ed. James C. Maroney (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2013), 333.

  55. 55.

    Marshall, “Some Factors,” 187.

  56. 56.

    Ibid.

  57. 57.

    Zamora, “The Failed Promise,” 322–323.

  58. 58.

    Ibid.

  59. 59.

    Marshall, “Some Factors,” 190.

  60. 60.

    Ibid.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 187.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 188.

  63. 63.

    Lee, The Workplace Constitution from the New Deal to the New Right, Loc. 2181 (Kindle edition).

  64. 64.

    Rhinehart, “A Lesson in Unity,” 137–138.

  65. 65.

    Everett L. Looney, “The Issues in the Brown & Root Case from the Standpoint of Management,” July 6, 1951, in Folder 4, Box 14. Brown & Root Collection. Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.

  66. 66.

    Ibid.

  67. 67.

    Herman Brown to Fred A. Hartley, Jr., December 5, 1950, in Folder 4, Box 14. Brown & Root Collection. Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.

  68. 68.

    Looney, “The Issues in the Brown & Root Case.”

  69. 69.

    Herman Brown to Jack B. Bonny, Morrison-Knudsen Co., Inc., Boise, Idaho, letter, March 25, 1949, in Folder 6, Box 9. Brown & Root Collection. Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.

  70. 70.

    Houston Building and Trades Council, “Please Put Brown & Root, Inc. on Your Personal Unfair List,” in Folder 4, Box 14. Brown & Root Collection. Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.

  71. 71.

    A.R. Johnson to J.E. Tyson, September 11, 1951, in Folder 4, Box 14. Brown & Root Collection. Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University; Everett Looney to Herman Brown, February 6, 1952, in Folder 4, Box 14. Brown & Root Collection. Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University; Ben Powell to L.H. Durst, July 2, 1952, in Folder 4, Box 14. Brown & Root Collection. Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University; “Brown, Root Plea in Union Case Refused,” Houston Chronicle, May 21, 1952.

  72. 72.

    Baytown Employees Federation, “The Record Does Speak for Itself,” November 2, 1960, in Folder 3, Box 14, Brown & Root Collection. Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University.

  73. 73.

    “Company History.” Folder 11, Box 9. Builders: Herman & George R. Brown Book Research Files, 1898–1989. MS464. Woodson Research Center. Fondren Library. Rice University. Houston, Texas.

  74. 74.

    “Company History.” Folder 11, Box 9. Builders: Herman & George R. Brown Book Research Files, 1898–1989.

  75. 75.

    1960 Halliburton Annual Report.

  76. 76.

    1959 Halliburton Annual Report, 9.

  77. 77.

    D. Moreno to Ben Powell, Jr., Herman Brown, George Brown, L.T. Colin, L.H. Durst, and C.J. Rollo on Middle East projects, February 24, 1956, Folder 3, Box 24, Brown & Root Collection.

  78. 78.

    “A Summary of Brown & Root, Inc. for Chamber of Commerce of the United States.” Folder 11, Box 9. Builders: Herman & George R. Brown Book Research Files, 1898–1989.

  79. 79.

    “Unions Fear Bog-Down in Drive for Engineers,” Engineering Employment Practices Newsletter, November 11, 1960.

  80. 80.

    Werner, “Labor Organizations in the American Petroleum Industry,” 828–830.

  81. 81.

    Kenneth E. Gray, A Report on the Politics of Houston (Cambridge, MA: Joint Center for Urban Studies of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, 1960), I–21.

  82. 82.

    “Year-Long Shell Oil Strike Ends on Vote of 1,500 to 40,” New York Times, August 7, 1963; “Shell’s Strike Talks Recessed,” The Austin Statesman, July 25, 1963.

  83. 83.

    Ed Townsend, “People at Work: Union Gets Foreign Aid,” Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1963; Priest, “Labor’s Last Stand,” 8.

  84. 84.

    Townsend, “People at Work.”

  85. 85.

    “Strike at Shell Oil Refinery in Houston Settled after a Year,” Wall Street Journal, August 5, 1963; “Strikes and Automation,” New York Times, August 12, 1963.

  86. 86.

    Priest, “Labor’s Last Stand,” 12.

  87. 87.

    Townsend, “People at Work.”

  88. 88.

    “Year-Long Shell Oil Strike Ends on Vote of 1,500 to 40.”

  89. 89.

    “Strike at Shell Oil Refinery in Houston Settled after a Year.”

  90. 90.

    “Shell Oil Workers Return to Jobs,” The Christian Science Monitor, August 8, 1963.

  91. 91.

    Will Wilson, “Speech before Fort Worth General Press Club Luncheon,” January 16, 1962, 4–5. In Folder 13, Box 4, Frankie Carter Randolph Papers.

  92. 92.

    Houston magazine, May 1965, 58.

  93. 93.

    Houston magazine, July 1965, 46.

  94. 94.

    Houston magazine, March 1965, 114.

  95. 95.

    Gray, A Report on the Politics of Houston, I-2, I-3.

  96. 96.

    Houston magazine, February 1965, 25.

  97. 97.

    Marvin Hurley, “As I Recall It…,” Houston magazine, October 1965, 27.

  98. 98.

    Houston magazine, March 1965, 38.