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South Bay History: Major 1953 North American Aviation strike was disruptive, but not that productive

April 28, 2025

Three North American Aviation plants were hit by a strike as thousands walked off the job. In Los Angeles, picket lines formed after midnight when 5000 UAW members walked out, and later an estimated 21,000 more L.A. union members joined the work stoppage. Oct. 23, 1953 photo. (Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)

Marley Luster, 38, a leadman at strikebound North American Aviation, and his wife, Margaret, examine damage to his car which was hit by a mysterious explosion. He had parked it in the alley by his home at 4340 West 170th Street, Lawndale. Investigators said Luster had joined the strike but that he had returned to work a week after the walkout began. Dec. 3, 1953. (Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)

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When workers at North American Aviation went on strike on June 5, 1941, just months before the Pearl Harbor attack brought the U.S. into World War II, alarm bells went off in Washington, D.C.

The company, founded in 1928 and headquartered at 5701 W. Imperial Blvd. at the southeastern edge of Los Angeles International Airport, already had been producing airplanes for the Allied war effort even though the U.S. had not entered the war officially.

As I described in a 2019 post, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent in U.S. Army troops four days after the strike began. They took control of the plant and cleared the strikers off the picket lines. A week after it began, the strike was over and the plant returned to normal operation.

The 1953 peacetime strike against the company came just a few months after the armistice went into effect that ended the Korean War. Among other aircraft, North American produced the F-86 Sabre Jet fighter plane, a mainstay in the U.S. Air Force’s arsenal at the time.

Members of the main aerospace labor union at the NAA plant, Local 887 of the United Auto Workers – Congress of Industrial Organizations (UAW-CIO) had threatened to strike for higher wages during 1952 while the Korean War was still being fought.

President Harry Truman, anxious to keep those F-86s coming off the assembly line, had intervened in the negotiations and wrangled a 10-cents-an-hour wage increase in September 1952, avoiding the strike.

But the issue flared again with the looming expiration of the three-year labor contract on Oct. 22, 1953. The union began negotiations with management on Sept. 1. In addition to boosts in fringe benefits, they were demanding a 23.4-cent hour wage increase.

At the time, union workers at the company’s plants in Los Angeles, Fresno and Columbus, Ohio, were making between $1.42-$2.32 an hour. Adjusting for inflation, in 2025 that translates to $27.48 per hour.

On Oct. 4, union members voted overwhelmingly in favor of a strike if negotiations with NAA management failed to produce an agreement by Oct. 22.

The two sides met more than 20 times between Sept. 1 and Oct. 22, but negotiations grew testier over time rather than improving. Company spokesman said the union’s request actually amounted to 26.2 cents per hour, while union officials announced the company was offering only 6 to 18 cents per hour in response.

The Oct. 22 deadline came and went without an agreement. On Friday, Oct. 23, 1953, 33,000 union workers at the company’s three plants, including 14,427 in Los Angeles, walked off their jobs and picket lines around the plants were established.

A court order limited the amount of picketers allowed at the Los Angeles plant, and negotiators hunkered down for settlement talks. Both sides were intransigent in their positions, however, and the strike dragged on.

Recently inaugurated President Dwight D. Eisenhower seemed less concerned over the strike than FDR was in 1941. The government monitored the situation, but avoided direct involvement with the negotiations.

Most workers who were not Local 887 members continued to show up at the plant, which meant crossing the picket line and exacerbating tensions with the strikers. But generally the confrontations were peaceful.

Some employees did report incidents of vandalism at their homes, however. Luster Marley, who lived on 170th St. in Lawndale, reported an explosion in his car while he and his family slept. An incendiary device placed in its gas tank blew up.

Rayfield Norman, who lived on Stanford St. in the Watts area, reported that an oil-filled bottle had been thrown at his house while he was at work. No one was injured in either incident. In both cases, the intended targets had been employees who had returned to work after originally joining the strike.

A series of small homemade bombs exploded at workers’ homes in the Columbus, Ohio area as well. North American offered $5,000 rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators, but no arrests resulted.

Despite the incidents, many discouraged employees continued to return to work as the strike stretched on with seemingly little hope of a settlement. North American trumpeted these numbers in ads taken out in local newspapers.

Finally, the union threw in the towel and agreed to settle on Dec. 14, 1953, 53 days after the strike began. Workers voted overwhelmingly to accept the new contract the next day, and on Dec.16, they returned to their jobs.

So what did the union win as a result of the strike? Not much. North American management agreed to raises of hourly pay from 8 to 20 cents, numbers which already had been on the table early in the strike. Management also ended the “closed shop” rule requiring new employees to become union members.

Employees returned to turning out the new F-100 Super Sabre fighter jet, the first production model of which had been officially introduced two days before the strike began.

In September 1967, North American merged with the Rockwell Standard Corp. to become North American Rockwell Corp. In February 1973, the company officially was renamed Rockwell International Corporation. In 1996, it became part of the Boeing Co.

Sources: CPI Inflation Calculator, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Daily Breeze archives. Los Angeles Times archives. Strike Home: A Report on the 54-day Strike of 33,000 North American Workers, by Local 887, UAW-CIO, Los Angeles, undated, circa 1954.

South Bay History: Major 1953 North American Aviation strike was disruptive, but not that productive Orange County Register

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South Bay History: Major 1953 North American Aviation strike was disruptive, but not that productive

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