Harry Bridges addresses a mass meeting in San Francisco to support a union boycott of Alabama in protest of the state’s segregation policies in 1965.
CREDIT: Associated Press
IN THE 1930s working on the docks, like mining and lumberjacking, was one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. Longshoremen needed powerful arms, a strong back, remarkable endurance, and incredible agility to avoid serious injuries when they loaded and unloaded heavy cargo. Dock work also required intricate cooperation among the workers, because a mistake by any one of them could put the others in danger. The shipowners expected longshoremen to work at a fast pace, but they made few concessions to improve safety.
In San Francisco, men would show up at seven in the morning in front of the Ferry Building, not knowing how many longshoremen were needed that day because that depended on the number of ships in port, the types of cargo, and the weather. The companies hired men for a day or a job in a dehumanizing process called the “shape-up.” Each work crew of about sixteen men was run by a gang boss, some of whom solicited kickbacks in exchange for a job that day. Workers who complained about job conditions—or who expressed any union sympathies—were blacklisted. The Depression made the competition for jobs fiercer.
By May 1934 conditions had gotten so brutal that longshoremen, led by rank-and-file activist Harry Bridges, went out on strike, not only in San Francisco but along the entire West Coast, from San Diego, California, to Seattle, Washington. They demanded that the shipowners replace the shape-up with a hiring hall operated by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), the struggling dockworkers’ union. The shippers tried to import scabs, but the Teamsters (the truckdrivers’ union), in solidarity with the longshoremen, refused to haul any goods to or from the docks. A few thousand crewmen on the cargo ships refused to work, too.
Without goods moving in and out of the port, the city’s economy—already imperiled by the Depression—sank into chaos. The business elite, with the support of police, tried to reopen the docks with replacements, but strikers held their ground, thwarting the police escorts, seizing the trucks, and dumping the cargo into the streets. Two strikers were killed, and dozens of longshoremen and cops were injured in the waterfront battle called “Bloody Thursday.” The governor called in the National Guard, who restored order, but the calm was only temporary. The shipowners had not made any concessions, and the longshoremen were now angrier than ever.
A dramatic silent funeral procession down Market Street swung public opinion in favor of the strikers. Bridges urged the dockworkers to avoid further violence with police or soldiers. Instead, he called for a general strike, which he hoped would bring the shipowners to the negotiating table. The longshoremen shut down the docks. The Teamsters expanded their sympathy strike from the waterfront to the rest of the city. In total, about fifty other unions rallied to the dockworkers’ side, and at least 125,000 San Francisco workers joined the general strike—the first general strike since the Seattle walkout in 1919.
The city came to a standstill. The papers called the strike a “civil war” and a “Communist-led insurrection.” City and state officials asked the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to send in federal troops to end the citywide shutdown, which the media warned could spread to other cities. U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were ready to grant the request, but Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins urged the president to show restraint. “I thought it unwise to begin the Roosevelt administration by shooting it out with working people who were only exercising their rights to organize and demand collective bargaining,” she wrote in her memoirs. FDR listened to Perkins.
Pressured by the city’s business leaders, the shipowners sat down with the ILA and negotiated a settlement. By October, the union won recognition, a five-cent-an-hour raise, and union hiring halls to replace the hated shape-up, using a rotation system that spread the work among the longshoremen.
Bridges emerged from the strike a national figure, a hero to workers and progressives and an enemy to the business community and conservatives. He quickly rose to president of the local ILA and then to president of its West Coast region. In 1937 he led the West Coast ILA out of the American Federation of Labor and into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Bridges became president of the new organization, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). On July 17, 1937, Time magazine put a photo of Bridges on its cover over the caption “Labor’s Harry Bridges: A Trotsky to Lewis’ Stalin?” referring to CIO head John L. Lewis. The economic importance of the ports gave the ILWU, and Bridges, significant influence. The union’s members—which reached a peak at 62,100 in 1949—reelected Bridges president for forty years, until he retired in 1977.
The longshoremen went from being “wharf rats” to “lords of the docks.” They gained safer conditions, paid holidays and vacations, and good health and retirement benefits, and they were among the highest-paid hourly workers in the country. Bridges developed a tactic, the “quickie strike,” in which union members would stop work immediately to protest a violation of their contract. It usually got results. The ILWU’s constitution gives rank-and-file members significant control over contracts and public positions.
Under Bridges’s leadership, the union became an influential force within the labor movement and in the broader progressive world. The ILWU extended its jurisdiction to most waterfront workers on the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada and had a strong presence in Hawaii. Bridges used the ILWU’s base to support union drives by other CIO unions throughout the West.
Testifying before Congress in 1950, he called himself “an officer of a left-wing union.” Asked what he meant, he said it was “a union that believes in a lot of rank-and-file democracy and control. . . . It’s also a union that recognizes that from time to time it’s got to stand up and fight for certain things that might not necessarily be only wages, hours, and conditions. Civil liberties, racial equality, and things like that.”
Under Bridges’s leadership, the ILWU was one of the first unions to be thoroughly racially integrated. In 1945, when the ILWU’s Stockton, California, warehouse unit refused to admit a Japanese American into its ranks, Bridges and other officers suspended the unit until each member signed a nondiscrimination pledge. The ILWU has typically been among the country’s most socially conscious unions, taking public stands on a wide range of issues, including nuclear disarmament, opposition to the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, and workers’ rights around the world. Members often backed up their opposition to oppressive regimes abroad by refusing to handle cargo bound for or coming from those countries. The ILWU used its pension funds to finance construction of what the union calls “cooperative, affordable, integrated working-class housing” in San Francisco’s St. Francis Square.
Bridges was born into a middle-class family in Kensington, Australia. As a teenager he worked for his father, a realtor, collecting rents and serving eviction notices. He saw how desperately poor some of the tenants were and hated taking their rent money. At sixteen he went to sea, traveling the world and seeing first-hand the miserable slums in India, East Asia, and London. He recalled, “The more I saw the more I knew that there was something wrong with the system.” His uncle’s prolabor political views, his travel experiences, and his participation in a rally in support of Australian strikers in 1917 led Bridges toward socialism. He was in the crew of a ship that arrived in New Orleans during a strike. He reported for picket duty and was put in charge of a picket squad. He was arrested and jailed overnight, which prompted him to join the Industrial Workers of the World, whose motto—“An injury to one is an injury to all”—he agreed with.
In 1920 he jumped ship in San Francisco after an argument with the captain over the treatment of seamen. He gave up seafaring and went to work along the San Francisco docks and eventually became the leader of the West Coast longshoremen’s union.
After the 1934 general strike and until 1955, business leaders, right-wing groups such as the American Legion, and conservative politicians tried to get Bridges deported to Australia for his union activism and his radical views. Bridges was constantly under investigation by the FBI, local police departments, and Congress, who tried to prove that he was a Communist or that he had lied about being a Communist. In 1940 the US House of Representatives voted 330–42 to deport him as an “undesirable alien.” The US Supreme Court heard two cases about Bridges—one charging he was a Communist, the other that he had lied when he said he had never been a member of the Communist Party. Both times the Court ruled in Bridges’s favor, blocking his deportation. Its rulings enabled Bridges to become a US citizen in 1945.
Bridges always denied that he was a member of the Communist Party, although he acknowledged working with party members on union and other issues. Party members formed the core of Bridges’s militant faction that led the 1934 strike and created the ILWU. In 1950, at the height of the Cold War, the CIO expelled the ILWU on the grounds that it was “Communist dominated.”
ILWU members viewed Bridges as honest and incorruptible. He refused to take a salary any higher than that of the highest-paid member. When he traveled, he stayed in cheap hotels. He was consistently reelected president with more than 80 percent of the members’ vote. Whereas the ILWU was a powerful voice for rank-and-file workers, the ILA, which represented dockworkers on the East Coast, was repeatedly charged with corruption and with taking employer payoffs. The 1954 Academy Award–winning film On the Waterfront depicts the mob influence of the ILA on the New Jersey docks. The movie’s opening scene shows the workers still competing for jobs during a shape-up.
From within the union, the biggest controversy Bridges faced concerned automation. As shipowners mechanized the docks, Bridges saw that the number of jobs would inevitably decline. In 1961 the ILWU fought for and won the “mechanization and modernization agreement,” which allowed cargo to be handled with mechanical loaders and to be shipped in prepacked containers, reducing labor costs and improving productivity and profits. In return, the union received generous wage and pension guarantees and no layoffs of existing workers. In 1960 it took about 16,000 longshoremen, clerks, watchmen, and foremen to move 74 million tons of cargo. By 1982 just 11,000 were able to handle 109 million tons. The agreement upset some union members, who saw the gradual decline of waterfront jobs as a loss of union influence. Others, however, viewed it as a way to share and redistribute shippers’ profits with the workers as well as to make their jobs easier with labor-saving equipment.
In July 2001 the public square in front of San Francisco’s Ferry Building—where dockworkers once assembled for the despised shape-up—was officially named Harry Bridges Plaza.