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The Remarkable Harry Bridges
By Dick Meister
He died 15 years ago this month, but I can still see him, a wiry, gray-haired,
hawk-nosed man. I see him pacing restlessly back and forth behind the podium at
union meetings, nervously twirling a gavel, puffing incessantly on a cigarette.
I can hear him. I hear him calling on members in the broad accent of his native
Australia, actually encouraging debate and dissent.
He died in San Francisco at the age of 88 -- Harry Bridges, co-founder and for
40 years president of one of the most influential organizations in this or any
other country, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
Bridges often was irritating to the ILWU's friends and foes alike. He was
irascible and obstinate. But he was unquestionably one of the century's greatest
leaders.
Bridges was not in it for money. He retired in 1977 with a pension of merely
$15,000 a year, never having made more than $27,OOO a year, far less than he
would have made had he remained a working longshoreman. Bridges was in it
because of his unswerving belief in "the rank-and-file," as he once
told me, a naive and inquisitive young reporter -- "the goddamn working
stiff, that's who! Can you understand that?"
I understood, eventually. And though I and others sometimes harshly questioned
Bridges' specific notions of what was needed by working people, none could
legitimately question his incredible commitment, skill and integrity.
"The basic thing about this lousy capitalist system," Bridges
declared,"is that the workers create the wealth, but those who own it, the
rich, keep getting richer and the poor get poorer."
Harry Bridges' lifelong task, then, was to shift the wealth from those who owned
it to those who created it. He began the task in earnest in 1934, leading his
fellow workers in forming a longshoremen's union that demanded collective
bargaining rights from West Coast shipowners.
"The shipowners said no," Bridges' biographer Charles Larrowe
recalled, "said it with tear gas, vigilantes and billy clubs wielded by
cops who thought they were in the front line against a communist takeover. Up
and down the coast, the waterfront was turned into a battlefield."
Ten men were killed by police bullets during the three-month strike that also
prompted a four-day general strike in San Francisco. The longshoremen eventually
scored a downright revolutionary victory, the clear right to effective union
representation and an end to the notorious system of job allocation known as the
"shape-up."
Previously, jobs were parceled out by hiring bosses in exchange for kickbacks
from the longshoremen who lined up on the docks every morning clamoring for
work. That system continued to be used in New York and other eastern and Gulf
Coast ports for many years, but the West Coast longshoremen won the crucial
right to have job assignments made by an elected union dispatcher at a union
controlled hiring hall, using a rotation system that spread the work evenly
among longshoremen.
Within two years of the strike victory, Lou Goldblatt, the brilliant young
leader of the warehousemen who worked closely with the longshoremen on the
docks, had joined Bridges. They brought the two groups into a single powerful
union under the banner of the newly established Congress of Industrial
Organizations, ultimately extending the ILWU's jurisdiction to virtually all
waterfront workers on the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada.
Bridges and Goldblatt used their potent base to help lead drives by other CIO
unions that spread unionization from the waterfront to a wide variety of other
industries throughout the West at a time when employers treated workers as
chattel, giving them little choice but to accept near-starvation wages and
whatever else the employers demanded.
Included was the remarkable drive that brought ILWU representation to workers
throughout multi-racial Hawaii -- not just to those on the waterfront, but also
to those in agriculture and just about every other industry on the islands.
That drive transformed Hawaii from a feudal territory controlled by a handful of
giant financial interests into today's modern pluralistic state, in which
working people and their unions play a principal economic and political role.
For the ILWU, Bridges and Goldblatt drafted a union constitution that still is
unique in the control it grants members. Many union constitutions give members
very little beyond the right of paying dues in exchange for the services
provided them by the union's securely entrenched bureaucrats. But the ILWU
constitution guarantees that nothing of importance can be done without direct
vote of the rank-and-file.
No one can take ILWU office except through a vote of the entire membership; no
agreement with employers can be approved except by a vote of all members; the
union cannot take a position on anything without membership approval.
Thanks in large part to Bridges, the ILWU also was one of the first unions to be
thoroughly integrated racially. The union has always been probably the country's
most socially conscious union. As the ILWU's official history records
accurately, it is "the most outspoken among trade unions on civil rights,
civil liberties, general welfare, and international amity, disarmament and
peace.
The union strongly opposed the actions of government officials and others who
tried to deny constitutional rights to many -- Bridges included -- by labeling
them as communists, establishing important precedents that enhanced the civil
liberties of everyone. The union's efforts included an eight-year battle against
attempts to deport Bridges to Australia that finally ended with a Supreme Court
ruling that enabled him to become a U.S. citizen in 1945.
The ILWU under Bridges was an outspoken foe of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, even
at a time when most other unions enthusiastically supported involvement. And
members backed their opposition to oppressive regimes abroad by refusing to
handle cargo bound for or coming from their countries.
Closer to home, the ILWU used its pension funds to finance construction of
low-rent apartments in San Francisco's St. Francis Square, an extremely rare
example of what the union calls "cooperative, affordable, integrated
working-class housing." The union also has been unusual in abandoning the
worker's traditional fight against job-stealing (but productivity- and
profit-increasing) machinery -- in exchange for unheard-of benefits.
The ILWU agreed in 1960 that employers could bring in a much labor-saving
machinery as they wished -- if they guaranteed full paychecks to all registered
longshoremen, even if full-time work wasn't available to them, and extra
payments to those agreeing to retire.
This is not to say there haven't been problems on the docks in recent years --
primarily the shrinking of the work force as more machinery has been introduced
and more longshoremen have retired. But the agreement stands as one of the first
and relatively few successful attempts to settle the fundamental conflict of
worker versus machine. It has been a model for other industries everywhere, just
as the ILWU's actions generally have been a model for unions and social
reformers everywhere.
All that, all that has been done by the ILWU, has been done only with the
agreement and deep involvement of the union's rank-and-file. That's how Harry
Bridges wanted it, and how very fortunate we are that he did. Few organizations
anywhere have done more for the "working stiffs" to whom he devoted
his life.
Copyright © 2005 Dick Meister, a freelance columnist in San Francisco who has
covered labor issues for four decades as a newspaper and broadcast reporter,
editor and commentator. Email him at dickmeistersf@earthlink.net or visit his
website www.dickmeister.com.
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