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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.
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.
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.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident. He can be reached at feodorh@juno.com.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
