ILWU Oral History Project
Volume IV, Part I

Edited by Harvey Schwartz
Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection

This is the first of a new three-part series of articles featuring Harry R. Bridges's recollections of break-bulk longshoring in the pre-ILWU 1920s and early 1930s, the origins of the union movement that ultimately became the ILWU, and the 1934 strike. The series is based on 20 hours of taped interviews conducted in 1978 by Bridges' wife, Noriko ("Nikki") Sawada Bridges, now Noriko ("Nikki") Sawada Bridges Flynn.

We are all greatly indebted to Nikki for her extraordinary foresight and for her outstanding contribution to ILWU history in recording these priceless conversations. The Dispatcher also wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Professor Robert W. Cherny of the History Department at San Francisco State University. Professor Cherny, who is working on a scholarly biography of Bridges, helped provide guidance and access to the tapes during the preparation of these essays.

In this first article, Bridges delivers a riveting account of his career as a struggling young longshoreman and erstwhile unionist in the decade before the 1934 strike. His story is a reminder of how much the pioneers of the ILWU had to overcome, and of how much progress the union has made since its early days.

Here, in vivid detail, Bridges describes how a notorious company union known as the Blue Book controlled and degraded waterfront workers in San Francisco between 1919 and 1934. He also explains how the infamous shape-up hiring system worked on the San Francisco waterfront in the same era.

Bridges does not go into depth about all of the abuses of the shape-up system, for he assumes that we already know something about the favoritism and kickbacks that characterized it, and that we are familiar with the extremely long hours, the brutal speed-ups, and the ship owners' complete neglect of safety provi­sions for longshore workers before 1934.

Toward the end of the article, Bridges recalls the revival in 1933 of the Pacific Coast District of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) that would represent waterfront workers during the 1934 strike. This was the organization that became the ILWU four years later.

Harry Bridges was a 21-year old, Australian-born ex-sailor when he went to work on the San Francisco waterfront at Matson Navigation Company in 1922. He had been a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, and had participated in the 1921 seamen's strike. Thus he already had a union background in 1924, when he joined an effort to revive the defunct ILA local at the Bay Area port. That is where we pick up his story.

HARRY BRIDGES

We set up for the ILA union in 1924, prior to Labor Day, because we did march in the Labor Day parade. We had a membership of about 400. No contracts, 'cause we had a company union. It was set up after the 1919 longshore strike that was lost. You had to be a member of the company union to get work. It was a closed shop. We used to dodge paying as much as we could.

So we joined the Labor Day parade--they always had a Labor Day parade from the Ferry Building up Market Street to City Hall--and the company and union officers stood on the sidelines and marked down all the names they could. I don't know how they got mine; I wasn't anything special.

I was blacklisted, but I had enough to get by on, what with the Japanese lines, an occasional tramp ship that was gonna go to, say, Japan or Australia, the Alaska Packer Line, and some luck in the card games. Various shipping groups, like the Japanese lines, did not have to go along with the company union. We'd load their drums of lubricating oil, mostly from Richmond. We'd load cans of gasoline and kerosene in woodwork cases with two five-gallon cans in each case. Goddamn right they were heavy!

The ship'd be up there in Richmond a week, usually, loading top to bottom. See, if you caught one of them, that would be good for a pretty good payday. You make 50 or 60 bucks on a ship like that alone. We traveled and stayed up there. You'd have travel time to go up and your fare. They put you up at the boarding house, you see. They fed you. When you'd get paid, you'd knock off for lunch, and if you didn't have a box lunch you'd go ashore and eat in the boarding house. We used to eat like pigs.

It was awfully hard with the goddamn company union officials, but they were so busy watching card games and catching the chicks and making dough that they couldn't take care of these other things, like the tramp ships. They had a good enough thing without that.

Later on I was in the company union and I was no longer blacklisted. I used to work on the San Francisco waterfront then for California Stevedore and Ballast--that was the biggest stevedore company. I used to work the steel ships, the Argonaut Line, and a whole slew of things.

On paper, some of the company union conditions were very good. It was like some of the labor laws of Mexico; they were wonderful laws, but they weren't enforced.

The company union officials would come down to knock you off the job for not paying dues. They weren't bothering too much, but when they caught up with you, then you had to pay a year's dues, see--nine bucks. And that's all you got out of that; you didn't get nothing out of the union. The ones that were in the know went along with it and did get some service from the business agents.

But if you had a beef against the company, everybody knew in advance that if you went to the company union and made a beef, you lost your job.

I broke my foot in '29 working in the hold. I was standing there on a pile, and we let a load go out, and my foot got jammed between two cases that came together. I worked for a couple days with it--couldn't afford to lay off, you see? But it swelled up so high that I couldn't work down there, so the boss put me on the deck. I couldn't even stand that.

At that time you were so afraid of reporting an injury that you stayed away. This is also part of the company union thing. You cost the company money by claims for injury and the company's insurance rates went up. So the word was around that you didn't go and make a claim for injury. That's the reason I waited for two or three days, but the foot got swollen so badly I couldn't limp around anymore.

When I did go on disability I was getting 25 bucks a week under worker's compensation. Finally the doctor ordered me back to work. I didn't want to go. Twenty-five dollars for doing nothing was more than I would make on the waterfront the way it was, see?

When the 1929 crash came, and the whole real Depression set in, what we were doing on the waterfront was struggling to make a buck, just trying to get a day's work. At that time I was married to Agnes and we were losing our house. Couldn't afford to keep it anymore. After that we moved down to a little flat on Harrison Street, and when that got too expensive--25 bucks a month--we moved next door for 15.

In '32 there was a program put together for city relief where you could go to work on certain projects for one week and you got three weeks of groceries. You got a box of groceries a week. And you got some small things like a couple of bucks to pay a contribution toward rent, or gas and lights or something like that.

I entered the city relief program and went to work at the foot of Seventh Street tearing down some old stables--they'd gone a way back to horse and buggy days. The foreman saw I was pretty handy as a rigger. He said he needed me, so I actually stayed on and worked about a month, which set me up for three months of supplies at a bag of groceries every week.

The shape-up for longshore hiring back then was right there at the Ferry Building, on the block between Market and Mission Streets. The streetcars used to turn around there. On the other side of Market, right on the corner there where that viaduct went over, there was another part of the shape-up. Certain longshore gangs used to shape-up the

After 7:30, when there was no more picking up, then you'd go around and stand in front of the docks--you'd know where the ships were--in the hope that they'd need a few extra men. There was a smaller shape-up in front of the docks, see?

In the big shape-up, you just stood there and waited for the gang boss. If you were in a gang, when you knocked off the day before, the order from the gang boss was, "Ferry Building in the morning." And that meant you'd be right across the street from the Ferry Building at 6:30, 7:00 to get your order to get on at work, or the boss would come around and say, "Such and such a dock, 8:00." Or 12:00, or whatever it was.

Otherwise, they'd say, "Okay, go home. Nothing today." Then, if your boss said that, you might go around seeing if some other boss needed some extras, see? After that was done, you'd hang around in the shape-up and see if you could go to work somewhere else. And if you couldn't, then you'd go down beside the docks where there were ships, and there was a possibility of a few extra men needed.

In those tough times, once you got a job in a gang, you stayed there, because they were valuable jobs. There's about 16 men in a gang. I was working in a steady gang for American Hawaiian Steamship Company just before the 1934 strike. We was the "star gang" at pier 26; we worked number two hatch. There were steady gangs and what we called "fou fous," or casuals. Every company had a nucleus of steady gangs that worked all the time.

Along the waterfront near the shape-up there were bootleg joints, bookmaking joints, and poolrooms. There was even a shooting gallery right there. These were places we hung out at. We'd hang out at Paddy Hurley's bootleg joint, just drink there, and chew the rag.

We'd cash our checks at Paddy Hurley's. At one period, I kept on going about once every week, borrowing money from Paddy. He'd scream like hell. I was into him for about 60 or 70 dollars. I'd get ten bucks a week, and that was what we lived on. That was the same period I lost the house. I think I eventually paid him off.

Hurley used to do business with the company union, cashing brass checks. When you got a job, and you went to work, the boss had a bunch of brass checks. He'd give you a brass check and he'd put his name on it. That was to show it was a payroll check. It was a brass check with a number on it, you see. It had a hole in the top so you could put it on a key chain or something. You could take it down to the bootlegger and cash it in.

The bootleg joint didn't take nothing out of your check before drinks. But you had to spend at least 50 cents. When you spent 50 cents, you got two shots of bootleg at 25 cents each and then one on the house. Then the bootlegger used the company union agent to go down and collect his money from the stevedoring company. There was other guys that used to cash in brass checks down there too, and take a 20 per cent payment.

In the latter part of '32, at the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt being elected president, all over the country there was the beginning of talk about labor unions, the right of workers to organize, and all that jazz. On the waterfront there was a lot of talk on the job. The Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) was talked about. That was a national Communist Party union. It had been organizing and was doing a pretty good job

At the end of '32, early '33, we started to meet down at the Albion Hall. It was just a rank-and-file group. Later we called ourselves the Committee of 500. It was more or less under the direction of the MWIU and more or less indirectly under Party leadership. But that did not mean that all members of the group were members of the Party.

We were just a bunch of rank and filers with what experience we had. There were not many around at that time who'd been involved in these strikes and things. We used to have all kinds of people at the meetings. Everybody was welcome. Of course, later on the charge was that it was a Party group, but it was really a fraction that included non-Party members.

In '33 we took over the MWIU paper, The Waterfront Worker. The MWIU was putting out The Waterfront Worker for the longshoremen. We used to read it, too. But it was mostly concerned with seamen and international affairs, like revolutions overseas. So, it did not fit the situation. The decision was made to concentrate on the longshoremen.

When we started to print The Waterfront Worker it was a tremendous success. Everybody who worked on or near the waterfront read it. It didn't come out on the nose every two weeks. Eventually we got to publishing it every week.

We'd grind The Waterfront Worker out. All of us worked on it--John Shoemaker, Shoemaker's wife, who was a typist and a stenographer, Henry Schmidt and I and others. B. B. Jones, too. Some of the guys could type--including me, with one finger. We made a stencil each time and hand cranked the paper out from a mimeograph machine.

All we said on the top of the paper was, "Put out by a group of rank-and-file longshoremen." It was anonymous--we were afraid of being attacked and of being blacklisted again--but most everybody was getting an inkling of who was running the goddamn thing. We did name the bosses, the finks and so forth, and report their speedups, chiseling, forcing payoffs and things like that.

We had young guys from Skid Row--they were kids on welfare or something--that would come down and distribute or sell the paper. At first it was a penny--then the price was raised a hundred percent to two cents. The guys'd get about 50 cents for the job they did. They'd sell the paper during the shape-up and then around the docks.

The Waterfront Worker was clumsy and amateurish, but it had an important role in organizing the waterfront. And it played a tremendous role in getting the workers organized coastwise, or industry-wide. The guys in the other ports that were in cahoots with us would watch for the papers. They would distribute them in the so-called fink halls, which were waterfront employer hiring halls that existed in all the other ports. That made it easy to distribute, because that was the central place where all the longshoremen gathered, like the shape-up here.

See, The Waterfront Worker was loaded aboard vessels. There were some mailed out, very few; we didn't have enough money. But you'd put bundles aboard the ships. We'd just leave them in the hull. There'd be a bundle for the guys in the other ports to pick up and read. There was a handful of guys in all the ports that knew the score. They would go aboard the ships and look for the papers. Then they would distribute them.

The first issue that came up was to urge the guys to join the ILA. Now this created a collision with the MWIU. We said, the MWIU is one union of seamen, longshoremen, everything; that's not good, it won't work. We should forget the idea of the MWIU and having the longshoremen and seamen in one union. Instead, we should go along and build the union of longshore on an industry-wide basis like the pattern of the East Coast ILA.

I used my experience as a former Wobbly and member of the seamen's union, a veteran of the '21 sailors' strike, and being an Australian to get one union of longshoremen only. Being Australian helped because, especially on the waterfront here, Australia was well known as a union country. The one group of seaman and longshoremen that supported the 1919 San Francisco longshore strike which was lost was the Australian unionists.

Our difficulty was urging guys to join the ILA even though we took nothing back attacking it. It was a lousy, rotten, racketeering organization. We said, "We don't deny that, but let's join it. Just get in there and change it. Let's go in and take it over." The guys thought I was crazy, but we did. We took it over on the West Coast.

The ILA Pacific Coast District had autonomy. There'd been a battle back around 1908 when the whole ILA was organized on the West Coast, and the West Coast got autonomy within the ILA International structure. Technically speaking, we were in full command. We eventually proved it. We prevailed.

So in '33, we're out to sea. We had a meeting at the Labor Temple in San Francisco and we were sworn into the union with the oath of obligation. We were in the ILA, District 38, San Francisco Local 79. The initiation fee to join the union, I think, was 50 cents. Dues were a dollar a month. And as long as you signed up, you could delay paying the dues, see.

I recall a meeting that must have been later on in '33 with a report from Henry Melnikow, a Pacific Coast Labor Bureau economist who represented us. It was about these National Recovery Administration (NRA) code hearings in Washington, D.C. This was settling the thing by government decree. We, down below, said that's another lot of bullshit. The only thing that'll do the goddamn trick is to get organized, see, and negotiate--and strike if need be.