Maritime Solidarity. Pacific Coast Unionism. Ottilie Markholt.
Published by Pacific Maritime History Committee, Tacoma, Wa., 1998.

Markholt dedicates her book to her late husband, Bud, who was a member of the AFL Teachers Local in Seattle. It is also dedicated to "all working people who believed in and fought for a better world." She is also a member of the Maritime History Committee whose other members include some people well known in Seattle labor circles - the late Shaun Maloney, Phil Lelli, Dallas DeLay and John Ely.

The book begins with a description of work conditions on the Pacific coast waterfronts in the late twenties. She speaks of the fink halls which were used to recruit both sailors and longshoremen - these were dispatch halls run by the employers. They used blacklists for known union men, and used all kinds of preferential hiring shape ups by employer representatives and kick-backs for jobs were the order of the day.

The author illustrates her book with photographs taken during these times - pictures of deadlines, picket actions, and unemployment demonstrations. There is even a rare photo of a Hooverville, the shacks ad upgraded chicken coops bordering Seattle's tide flats where the homeless and unemployed congregated during the early depression years.

There is also a photo inset of a P.I. reporter's article describing a May, 1934 job action. This rather hostile story how two thousand Seattle longshoremen smashed police barricades and removed scabs from the ships,

"Unrestrained by the police, they swarmed aboard twelve ships, hauling strike breakers from their work - in some cases in the face of ships officer's with drawn revolvers. The article related how a scab foreman was thrown into the brink and had to swim ashore.
John Dore, Seattle's mayor at the time and obviously partial to the cause of the employers, screamed that "Seattle was ruled by a Soviet of longshoremen" and sent messages to forty other mayor in the state in order to have a conference on how to handle the situation. 

Only four showed up. Moreover Governor Martin refused to comply with Dore's request for state troopers to break the strike.
Dore did manage to send some sixty-five Seattle policemen to confront the strike. But some of the policemen joined the strikers as they "stormed from dock to dock to evict the scabs."
This book provides details for several actions such as this up and down the coast. It is well written, well documented and provides a research haven for students wishing to study the history of maritime labor on the West coast.