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Shipping found containment after Bridges
By Carl Heintze
It's hard to believe now, but there was a time when open warfare was no farther away than San Francisco, not halfway across the world in Afghanistan. It wasn't over terrorism or territory; it was over the right to work, and most of its battles took place on the San Francisco waterfront.
One of the war's principal protagonists was the late Harry Bridges, leader of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (the ILWU), which organized the men who unloaded the ships at San Francisco piers. Bridges and the ILWU wanted better wages and working conditions. They were up against the various shipping companies whose ships docked in San Francisco in those days.
The ILWU's really big beef was over how men were hired. Being a longshoreman was, and still is, a kind of casual job. You can work when you want, but you don't have to if you don't want to. If you want to work, you report to the docks. If you don't you can stay home and do other things.
It's an ideal existence for writers. For example, the late Eric Hofer, author of The True Believer, one of the great books of the 20th century, was a longshoreman. He worked and wrote in alternate streaks. The problem in the '30s was that men were hired by what was called "the shapeup."
This system appears to have started on the docks of the East Coast. However it began, it worked like this: When a ship was to be unloaded, longshoremen gathered at the docks. Foremen came out and "shaped up" a gang, picking the men they wanted to work a particular ship.
Those who didn't get hired--because they didn't find favor with the foremen--didn't work. The power to work was in the hands of the foremen, with the tacit acceptance of the shipping company owners. (Actually, I'm simplifying the picture somewhat. Union and national politics and a lot of other things also were involved.)
To reform the system, Bridges and the ILWU proposed a union-run hiring hall where men would slip their names up on a board. Their names would move up as jobs were completed. Once your name got to the top of the board, you worked and then your name went back to the bottom of the list.
It was a fair way to share the work and still preserve the casual method of longshoring.
Unfortunately, the hiring hall did not go over well with the shipping companies; nor, for that matter, did Bridges. Bridges, not an easy man with whom to get along, was an alien from Australia. The son of a middle-class real estate agent, he had applied for U.S. citizenship but had not yet been naturalized.
And, as it turned out, it took him a long time to become a legal American.
The shipping companies alleged Bridges was secretly a Communist. He said he wasn't, though he certainly had acquaintances who were, and he leaned leftward himself. Over the years, repeated efforts were made to deport him, none of them successful. He was hauled before various congressional committees, but he never got kicked out of the country.
The situation was made worse when the union called a strike that escalated into a general strike in San Francisco. For two days nothing moved in the city. A couple of men were killed on what the union called Bloody Thursday.
The National Guard was called out to patrol the waterfront and to help put down the strike. Strikebreakers were ferried across the bay to unload ships. For a few months, San Francisco looked as if it were about to be split by civil war.
But, in the end, the employers joined in the reforms and what has become the shipping system of both this century and last--containers.
Containers are big uniform sized boxes that are filled with goods to be loaded and unloaded by machines, mostly cranes.
The system revolutionized shipping not only in San Francisco, but everywhere. It turned the ILWU from a union of laborers into one of skilled labor. Labor strife pretty much became a thing of the past.
The battle moved on to Hawaii, also dependent on shipping, where the ILWU organized not only the docks of Honolulu, but also the pineapple fields. For a time the ILWU had a throttle hold on much of island life.
Eventually, though, Hawaii's pineapple production declined and the ILWU's influence waned, although it is still a factor in the islands.
Through it all, Bridges, still cantankerous, remained an icon of West Coast labor, revered by members of his union, looked upon as a radical by many conservatives and eventually as a sort of benign figure who cropped up in Herb Caen's newspaper column now and then.
He lived out the rest of his life as a senior statesman in the labor movement. The ILWU became one of the more wealthy trade unions.
Membership became, and still is, coveted. But partly as a result of all the strife and partly for other reasons, San Francisco as a shipping port declined and gave way to other places.
The Embarcadero, where marches and violence once took place, where the National Guard sat behind machine guns, gave way to the Delancy Street Foundation, upscale restaurants and redevelopment.
Bridges died, a venerated retiree.
You can't help wondering what Bridges might have thought of this century, in which trade unionism is a shadow of its former self, but in which someone as talented as Eric Hofer may even now be working and writing and waiting to be discovered.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor. A collection of his earlier essays can be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. He can be reached by email at feodorh@juno.com.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
