Daugherty, James

Biographical Sketch

James L. Daugherty (b. 1910) began his labor activism in his twenties when he was fired from an F.W. Woolworth store in Los Angeles for supporting the store employees in their campaign for better working conditions. He took a job with the Southern California Gas Company and soon became involved with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE), becoming president of UE Local 1414. A grassroots activist in the growing industrial union movement, he joined the Utility Workers Organizing Committee, one of the organizing committees affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) which took off in L.A. in the late 1930s. In the Los Angeles and California CIO organizations, Daugherty worked alongside L.A. CIO leader Phillip (Slim) Connelly, in an aggressive campaign to bring large numbers of L.A. workers into CIO unions. The Utility Workers Organizing Committee became the Utility Workers of America, CIO.

In 1946, Daugherty became president of the California CIO, a leadership position that was cut short when the U.S. labor movement was caught up in the anti-communism that followed World War II. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Law required union members to sign non-communist affidavits. Along with Harry Bridges, president of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union and western regional CIO leader, Daugherty resisted the assault on the left CIO unions, several of which were expelled from the CIO. The charter of the California CIO was revoked by the national CIO in 1949.

After the debacle of the CIO, Daugherty worked as an organizer for the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, leading several Mine Mill shops into the UE. Laid off from UE, Daugherty eventually returned to Los Angeles. Retired from the labor movement, he continued to make himself available to young labor activists and assisted Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research founder Emil Freed in expanding the library's labor holdings.

In 1991, the UCLA Oral History Program made an oral history interview with Daugherty conducted by Myrna Donahoe in 1987 and 1988, available for research. The transcript of it, James L. Daugherty: Utilities Workers, the UE, and the CIO, is deposited in the Special Collections Department of the UCLA University Research Library. Researchers will want to consult that for a more detailed biography of Daugherty's life of labor activism, his involvement with the Communist Party (CP), and his view of the relationship between the CP and the organized labor movement.

From the guide to the James Daugherty Collection, 1937-1980, (Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research.)