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The Great Strike at Nushagak Station, 1951: Institutional Gridlock

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Jonathan Hughes
Jonathan Hughes
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201.
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Abstract

In the summer of 1951 the Bering Sea fishermen's union strike against the Bristol Bay salmon packers signaled the end of old-time industrial labor relations there. The issues of the strike and its conduct offer a case study of deteriorating symbiosis in industrial relations, which is not untypical elsewhere in American industry. This paper concentrates on events in 1951 and 1952 at a remote cannery site on the Nushagak River as a partial microcosm of larger evolutionary consequences in American industry.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1982

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References

1 The cannery doctor was William Mills, Jr., M.D. He fell in love with Alaska and went back there, to Anchorage, to practice. He had been a motor torpedo boat commander in World War II. He had agreed to come to Clark Point for the experience at the beginning of his medical career.Google Scholar

2 North, Douglass and Miller, Roger, The Economics of Public Issues (New York, 1971), pp. 104–08, contains an analysis of the Alaskan salmon industry in which legally-imposed technical inferiority, including sailboats, is used by government regulators as a conservation technique.Google Scholar

3 Ransom, Roger and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom (New York, 1977), p. 13.Google Scholar

4 There must have been an implicit interest charge in these operations, perhaps factored into wages or prices. I recall no discussion of this issue, oddly enough, when grub stakes were being calculated.Google Scholar

5 See Genovese, Eugene, Roll, Jordan, Roll, (New York, 1976), pp. 97–112 on the slaves and their owners when Emancipation came. We had a response similar to that of the slave owners when “our natives” went on strike.Google Scholar

6 Usually spelled lighter, a small square collection barge towed by motor launch to and from collection points: the fisherman's equivalent of a farm wagon. In Alaska, in our contracts, it was spelled as above, and I follow that spelling here.Google Scholar

7 A fish peugh is a long wooden handle with a thin steel blade affixed to the end, used to toss fish, one at a time, much as a farmer might pitch hay.Google Scholar

8 When prices of salmon at retail finally rose, then moved up dramatically, a rationale of the ancien regime and its inflexible arrangements, unknown to us at low prices, became evident. The Bristol Bay salmon price paid to the fishermen did not rise in response to the market, and this phenomenon and its causes are, at this writing, the subject of an antitrust suit under the Sherman Act brought by the newly-independent fish-sellers against the Bristol Bay canners. The charge is price-fixing. Why would Bristol Bay salmon price not rise when others rose? Who did not have to compete with anyone else to buy the fish from the residents?Google Scholar

9 McClelland, Peter D. and Magdovitz, Alan L., Crisis in the Making: The Political Economy of New York State since 1945 (New York, 1981).Google Scholar

10 Olsen, Mancur, The Rise and Decline of Nations: The Political Economy of Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (forthcoming).Google Scholar