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The 1933 Yakima Valley strike (also known as the Congdon Orchards Battle) took place on August 24, 1933. Despite the inactivity of Communist farm labor organizers in the Yakima Valley the 1933 conflict, in which was the most serious and highly publicized agricultural labor disturbance in Washington history, was nonetheless inspired and precipitated by radicals, though of an older and different stripe. The fact which leads particular notability and consequence to the Yakima struggle is that it was the result of a brief revivification of the Industrial Workers of the World. ==Background== Since 1916, the Yakima Valley had felt the presence of the IWW and the "Wobbly activists" along with their immediate conflicts with the local authorities in the area. The meeting hall opened by the IWW in Yakima during the fall of that year was promptly raided by local police, who arrested its inhabitants, closed the building, and denied Wobblies the right to hold the street meetings which they regarded as essential to their organizational effort among the harvest workers flooding into the valley. The Yakima strikes began with hop pickers in the Yakima Valley. The demands of the hop pickers were not of anything uncommon during the 1930s, with striking for regular eight-hour work days, the end of child labor in the yards, and a minimum wage of 35 cents per hour for men and women alike. At the time, the current rate for common labor was 10 to 12 cents an hour, with hop farmers claiming that they could not pay any more than 12 ½ cents per hour for labor due to lack of profit they made in sales. In 1932, Yakima Valley hops sold for 11 to 14 cents a pound. Then, effective April 7, 1933, Congress legalized 3.2 percent beer and wine. States rapidly moved to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. The effect of these events on hop prices was dramatic: in April and May, Valley papers reported sales of the remaining uncommitted 1932 crops at 40 to 50 cents; the Yakima Morning Herald for nearly a month showed prices up to 75 cents per pound. The forthcoming crop for 1933 commanded 20 to 30 cents. Three- and four-year contracts were being signed for 18 to 25 cents. On the second day of the strike, the Yakima County Sheriff called the Washington State Patrol to send aid in which resulted with Twenty-two officers coming to the aid of the Yakima County Sheriff's office by the next morning. Although eight picketers were arrested, it did not discourage picketers from continuing their activities. The IWW attorney had contacted the hop growers to see if he could bring about a peaceful settlement to the strike, but the hop growers never responded to the attorney. The strike had fizzled out with little success when matched against the hop growers, sheriffs, and state patrolmen, especially with the Yakima Chamber of Commerce giving the law enforcement and business owners' their support. In order to attain that peace were kept on the hop farms, Chief Criminal Deputy H.T. "Army" Armstrong persuaded local growers to enforce a "night hop patrol" in which at least six men would be on patrol at all times during the harvest in order to protect the fields from the savages that would try to sabotage the crops in order to protest their working conditions. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「1933 Yakima Valley strike」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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