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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.
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