Ingalls Shipbuilding in Wartime Pascagoula: Boom Town, Labor and the 1945 Strike

This article draws on a National Park Service lesson series on the World War II home front in Pascagoula, Mississippi, one of the designated American World War II Heritage Cities. Contemporary newspaper accounts show how the Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation grew the town and its workforce — the benefits, the strains, and the labor dispute that ended in a strike.

By the numbers

A boom town plans for peace

Summary of an editorial by Major James E. Crown, editor of the New Orleans Daily States*, printed there on January 29, 1944, and reprinted in the* Pascagoula Chronicle-Star and Moss Point Advertiser on February 4, after he spoke to the town's Rotary Club.

Crown called Pascagoula a boom town with growing pains: crowded streets, overtaxed schools, merchants who sometimes couldn't meet demand, and thousands of people in cramped quarters while building lagged behind the need for homes and shops. The war, he wrote, was almost entirely the cause. Ingalls, building several kinds of vessels for the government, was by his estimate employing 10,000 to 15,000 workers, many with families.

But the town, he said, did not mean to become a "ghost" city after the war. Businessmen had already formed an Association of Commerce to coordinate civic projects and were planning a city of homes, schools, churches, wide streets, playgrounds and parks. He expected Ingalls to stay, perhaps with half its wartime workforce; other industry to follow; and the town to become a permanent home for perhaps 25,000 or 30,000 people.

He based this on talks with Robert I. Ingalls, whose company ran steel and shipbuilding plants in several cities; W. R. Guest, executive vice-president of the Pascagoula yard; the banker W. B. Herring; and others. Ingalls told him the yard had been there before the war and would remain after it, building ships the world would need, and that he pictured a city of fine streets, homes, schools and churches. Several schools, under superintendent Thomas R. Wells, were already running two shifts to fit every child.

Labor and management pull together, 1943

Summary of a Chronicle-Star article of April 2, 1943.

Jennie Mae Turner, a welder at the Ingalls shipyard, 1943. U.S. Maritime Commission; Library of Congress.

Ingalls had just won the Maritime Commission's "M" Award for excellence in shipbuilding — a blue-and-white pennant, and production merit badges for the workers. The article profiled the 12 labor representatives on the yard's Labor-Management Committee, the channel for ideas between the "boss" and the worker. At the award ceremony, labor and management together pledged to double the yard's output in 1943.

• Mr. Shifalo credited the award to real cooperation between the people at the desks and the people at the welding torches — more, he said, than to men, money or materials.
• Mr. Stone said organized labor had three aims for the year: more production, more war bonds, and as little absenteeism as possible. His Carpenters union had bought about $10,000 in war bonds and kept buying; 96% of its members were putting 10% or more of their earnings into bonds, and one man bought a $100 bond every two weeks.

The good feeling did not last: in February 1945, Ingalls workers voted to strike.

The strike vote, January 1945

Terms:

Summary of a Chronicle-Star report of January 12, 1945.

On January 2, 1945, the Pascagoula Metal Trades Council, representing the A.F. of L. craft unions at the yard, filed notice with the National War Labor Board that it intended to hold a strike vote. Under the Smith-Connally Act, unless the dispute was arbitrated, the vote would follow 30 days after filing. The paper's headline reported the company's position that a "union shop" was the only real issue.

The unions' specific complaints:

• the company was dismissing trained mechanics paid $1.20 an hour and hiring trainees at 75 cents, and had refused to meet the council about it;
• it had agreed to pay $1.25 an hour for welding galvanized material — work that harms welders' health — from August 1, 1942, but was still paying $1.20;
• special apprentices were due a raise of 4½ cents an hour for every 500 hours worked, but weren't re-rated on time;
• the canteens moved inside the yard at the council's urging were unsanitary and nowhere near enough to serve the workers, and Lanier had told a council group he was interested in building ships, not in feeding people;
• R. I. Ingalls Sr. had once said, according to the council, that he would blow up his plant before signing a union shop agreement.

The strike, February 1945

• February 7, 1945: in a vote run by the National Labor Relations Board under the Smith-Connally Act, workers voted 3,774 to 1,428 to strike (Chronicle-Star, February 9, 1945). Mediation didn't change the result.
• February 25, 1945: the New York Times (p. 32) ran the headline "STRIKE OF 10,000 CRIPPLES SHIPYARD; WLB Calls Mississippi Union's Action 'Direct Interference With the War.'"
• The strike lasted five days. War Labor Board officials ordered the strikers back to work, and draft boards reclassified many of them 1-A — qualified and available for military service.
• Ingalls reported about 200,000 hours of work lost; Lanier called the strike useless, pursued despite repeated warnings. The War Labor Board's Shipbuilding Commission set a hearing on the grievances for March 13 (Chronicle-Star, March 2, 1945).

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Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: Ingalls Shipbuilding Corp. Workforce and Labor Relations in Pascagoula, Mississippi, World War II Heritage City," National Park Service, part of the series "Pascagoula, MS, WWII Heritage City Lessons," written by Sarah Nestor Lane for the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education under the National Council on Public History's cooperative agreement with the National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The lesson's worksheet questions are left out. It reprints excerpts from the Pascagoula Chronicle-Star and the New Orleans Daily States of 1943–1945 and two newspaper advertisements; the articles are summarized here and the advertisements are not reproduced; rewritten in hubnx's own words.