KVIG Informative

Nevada’s construction workforce today can organize, strike and sue under federal labor law. None of that existed for the roughly 21,000 people who built Hoover Dam under a private contractor’s total control of their jobs, their housing and their town. When Six Companies’ workers walked off the job in August 1931, the federal government’s response was to deputize marshals, not to open a bargaining table.

Six Companies, Inc. was a joint venture of six construction firms — Utah Construction Co. of Ogden, Utah; the paired Henry J. Kaiser and W.A. Bechtel Co. of Oakland, California; McDonald & Kahn Ltd. of Los Angeles; Morrison-Knudsen Co. of Boise, Idaho; J.F. Shea Co. of Portland, Oregon; and Pacific Bridge Co., also of Portland — formed to bid on the federal contract to build the dam, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s own history of the project. The joint venture’s $48,890,995 bid was the lowest submitted, and the Bureau of Reclamation awarded it the contract on March 11, 1931, with the order to begin construction issued five weeks later, on April 16, the agency’s history says. Six Companies named Frank T. Crowe as general superintendent, according to the same source.

Six Companies paid laborers roughly 50 cents to $1.25 an hour depending on the job, according to a Bureau of Reclamation history of dam-era wages, and deducted $1.60 a day from single employees’ pay for a private room, bedding, three meals, packed lunches and transportation, the agency’s project history says. Married employees paid $15 to $30 a month in rent for company housing, the same history says.

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The government built Boulder City about seven miles from the dam site to house Six Companies’ workers and officials alongside Bureau of Reclamation staff, according to the agency’s history of the Hoover Dam Police Department. At the time of the strike, the town sat on a federal reservation patrolled by Reclamation’s own police rather than any elected local government.

Six Companies’ workers walked off the job in August 1931, months after construction began, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s history of the Hoover Dam Police Department. The walkout lasted five days. In response, the U.S. Attorney General authorized Reclamation to deputize 15 to 20 men, with the option to expand the force further in an emergency, the agency’s history says. Once the strike ended, Reclamation stood up a standing force of nine deputized U.S. marshals to guard government property and keep order at the site, with identity checks at the reservation’s gateways as thousands of unemployed men arrived from around the country looking for work, according to the same history. Bud Bodell served as Boulder City’s police chief and Claude Williams as chief ranger for the wider reservation, the agency’s history says. The following year, Crowe and construction engineer Walker Young pressed the government for more police resources at the site, according to the same source.

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More than 21,000 people worked on Hoover Dam’s construction, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s own workforce records, with the largest shares coming from Nevada (5,522), California (5,055), Utah (1,165), Texas (604), Oklahoma (581) and Idaho (599), plus 116 workers from outside the country. The dam’s death toll is a matter Reclamation’s own records treat with some caution: the agency’s official industrial fatality count is 96 deaths between 1931 and 1935, a figure that excludes deaths from heat, pneumonia and heart trouble, according to the agency’s fatalities history. A separate, more comprehensive Reclamation accounting through 1935 puts total deaths at 213, including 16 from heat prostration, most of them before 1935, 42 from pneumonia and 36 from other natural causes, alongside industrial deaths from being struck by equipment or machinery (30), falls (26), falling material (20) and blasting (12), the same source says. Reclamation’s own history notes that other counts reach as high as 112 by folding in deaths during the project’s pre-construction survey years, dating to 1922, and deaths unrelated to the work itself.

Six Companies never recognized a union at the dam site, and no federal law required it to. The National Labor Relations Act, which gave most private-sector workers in the country a legal right to organize and bargain collectively, was still four years away when the strike ended. The tens of thousands of people who built one of the largest public works projects in American history did it on a federal reservation where the company that employed them also controlled their housing, and where a five-day walkout was answered with deputized federal marshals rather than a seat at the table.