December 16 - No Justice, No Bagels!

On this day in labor history, the year was 1951.

That was the day New York City was struck by the Great Bagel Famine.

Three hundred members across thirty-two bakeries, of the Bagel Bakers of America, local 338 walked off the job over wages and working conditions.

Morris Siegal, business agent for the local, stated that the Bakers Association had been “lax in living up to the welfare-fund payments and sanitary provisions of the contract.”

The bagel bakers produced 1.2 million bagels weekly for New York City consumers.

The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle noted “the only ones welcoming this respite are the salmon.”

Diners, delicatessens, and Teamster delivery drivers were all rocked by the strike, which lasted for six weeks.

The two sides were so deadlocked that a mediator who had effectively settled a smoked salmon dispute three years earlier, was brought in to help settle the conflict. 

The bagel bakers won a $3 day wage increase and we're ready to return to work.

But the Teamsters would not begin deliveries until they were paid for lost wages due to lack of deliveries made during the strike.

The bagel bakers would engage in job actions effectively over the course of the next fifteen years until they too suffered the fate of many an industrial worker, that of automation.

Their labor would eventually be replaced by labor-saving bagel making machines by the late 1960s.