The ILWU Story
Origins
This is the story of a union. It concerns workers of all races and beliefs who came together with one single purpose: to achieve a better life for themselves and their families. It is the story of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, known worldwide as the ILWU. The history of the ILWU, the record of its origins and traditions, is about workers who built a union that is democratic, militant and dedicated to the idea that solidarity with other workers and other unions is the key to achieving economic security and a peaceful world.
The origins of the ILWU lie in the longshore industry of the Pacific Coast – the work of loading and unloading ships’ cargoes. In the old days of clipper ships, sailings were frequently unscheduled and labor was often recruited at the last minute by shoreside criers calling: “Men along the shore!” – giving rise to the term “longshoremen.” The work was brutal, conditions unsafe, employment irregular, and the pay too low to support a family.
The first longshore unions on the West Coast were founded in the 19th century. By 1902 the longshoremen were loosely affiliated with the American Federation of Labor’s International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). But their ties to national headquarters were weak, and most returned or lost their charters within a few a years.
Over the next decade the longshore unions grew slowly. Each local was protective of its geographical jurisdiction and limited work opportunities, and none was eager to give up its autonomy to any federation. But in 1909, at a convention in Portland, Oregon, a loose-knit federation was established. They drew together primarily to fight the seamen who were doing more and more longshore work, and whose 1902 contract promised the shipoweners that seamen would work any ship whether or not the longshoremen who worked the vessel were unionized.
At the 1910 convention of this federation in San Francisco, the longshoremen decided to re-affiliate with the ILA – but only after T.V. O’Connor, then president of the ILA, made a personal plea for re-affiliation, and guaranteed autonomy for the newly chartered Pacific Coast District of the ILA. The locals were autonomous within the District and the District was autonomous within the International union.
Autonomy extended to local-by-local strike action and strike settlement, and the employers were able to capitalize on the divisions between the local union. They imported African Americans as strikebreakers against the white trade unionists, or diverted cargo away from a struck port to be worked by members of a different local. With the help of coordinated employers’ groups and cooperative police agencies, the shipowners used these tactics to divide and destroy longshore unions on the Pacific Coast in the strikes of 1916, 1919 and 1921. Genuine unionism was smashed for more than a decade.
These were the days of the shape-up, kickback, blacklist, goon squads, wage cuts, speed-up and staggering accident rate. Among the lessons the longshoremen learned from these defeats, to be recalled when they rebuilt their union in 1933, was that any discrimination weakens a union organization. They also came to understand the wisdom of the principles of worker unity, internal democracy, and international solidarity advocated by members of the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – principles summed up in the famous IWW slogan that the new union would adopt, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
The New Union
In 1933 the economic depression that started in 1929 hit the nation full-force. West Coast longshoremen, who had long suffered their own special kind of depression through chronic job insecurity, now experienced even deeper hardship. Genuine union organization became a matter of survival. The longshoremen once again applied for and obtained a charter from the ILA – but this time they established their organization as a single unit on a coastwise and industry-wide basis, thus avoiding the mistakes of the past.
Their demands were simple: a union-controlled hiring hall that would end all forms of discrimination and favoritism in hiring and equalize work opportunities; a coastwise contract, with all workers on the Pacific Coast receiving the same basic wages and working under the same protected hours and conditions; and a six-hour work day with a fair hourly wage.
The shipowners consistently refused each demand, determined to divide and destroy the unions in each port. The members of both longshore and seafaring unions voted to strike in May 1934. In response, the employers mobilized private industry, state and local governments, and police agencies to smash the unions and their picket lines.
The ranks held firm throughout the historic strike. They held up against unprovoked police violence, and withstood attempts by the ILA national leaders to cave in to employer demands for a return to business as usual. They elected new regional leaders to push the strike forward in defiance of both the employers and the ILA officials. Prominent among the new faces was a San Francisco longshoreman named Harry Bridges, who was later elected president of the ILA’s Pacific Coast District and then president of the ILWU.
In July of 1934, when it was clear the longshoremen and their seafaring allies were not going to give up their struggle for justice on the waterfront, the employers decided to open the struck piers using guns, goon squads, tear gas, and the National Guard. They provoked pitched battles in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and San Pedro. Hundreds of strikers – and bystanders – were arrested and injured. On July 5, know ever after as Bloody Thursday, two workers were shot and killed. A total of six workers were shot or beaten to death on the West Coast by police or company goons during the course of the strike.
Rather than breaking the strike, these terrible events galvanized public support, and prompted the unions of San Francisco to declare a brief but historic General Strike to support the longshore and maritime unions and protest strikebreaking by employers and police. The most conservative leaders of the San Francisco labor movement headed the General Strike, and called it off July 16 after just four days. Still, business and government now knew the maritime strikers had the overwhelming support of the Bay Area’s rank and file trade unionists.
Overseas support for the strikers also helped impress the employers with the impossibility of beating the strike with scab longshoremen and scab crews. And for the first time, most minority workers refused to scab, thanks to the longshoremen’s developing policy against racial discrimination. After the federal government intervened, the union agreed to arbitrate all issues – and won, in principle, each of its major demands.
The union made great organizing gains as the result of the opportunity it gave to the average worker to unite and fight. It sparked the creation of new unions in every industry up and down the Pacific Coast, and the formation of the first multi-employer collective bargaining unit covering an entire industry.
The unity between longshoremen and seafarers also led to the formation of the Maritime Federation of the Pacific, composed of a majority of the waterfront and seagoing unions. Alarmed by the workers’ growing solidarity, the shipowners in 1936 sought a test of strength over the unions’ gains of 1934. For the first time in the history of any American waterfront the struggle was carried out without a single incident of violence or attempt by the employers to use strikebreakers. The result was a large measure of gains for the seamen, gains which the longshoremen had already won in 1934, including a union-controlled hiring hall. Coast unionism was secure and ready to expand.
The success of the new union came from its solidarity and from its complete democracy. Members stood together and sacrificed together, and they controlled every aspect of the union’s life. Self-imposed discipline came from membership participation in every decision, with a shared understanding of every issue.
The Pacific Coast District of the ILA, soon to become the ILWU, also led the campaign for industrial unionism, which would unite all the workers in an industry in one strong union. Craft unionism, practiced by most unions in the American Federation of Labor at that time, divided workers in an industry according to the type of work they did. The AFL, once an aid to the union’s growth, became an obstacle by opposing the new industrial unionism taking hold in its ranks as the Committee for the Industrial Organization, spearheaded by the United Mine Workers’ John L. Lewis.
The traditional AFL leadership finally expelled the CIO unions from the Federation. Pressures mounted on the West Coast longshore workers – and their new affiliates in warehousing – to join the CIO. The organizing successes of the Pacific Coast District thrust the new union into a leadership role in the campaign for industrial unionism.
The leadership of the Pacific Coast District moved slowly, insisting on full discussion up and own the coast and, ultimately, on a secret referendum ballot by the entire membership. By the time the vote was taken in late summer, 1937, the AFL and ILA had started assigning the newly organized warehouse workers to other AFL unions, imposed a dues assessment to finance the fight against the CIO, and reaffirmed conservative AFL positions on social programs – including opposition to federal unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and minimum wage laws. Still the Pacific Coast District tried to resolve their differences without a formal split, and sought an ILA-wide referendum on the issues. But the ILA leadership refused, so the Pacific Coast District held its own referendum. The members voted overwhelmingly to disaffiliate from the ILA – and the ILWU was born.
Almost immediately, the ILWU membership vote to affiliate with the new CIO, whose program of industrial unionism, opposition to discrimination and genuine non-partisan political action on behalf of working people exactly matched their own.
But the vote for disaffiliation was not unanimous, and three Northwest locals remained with the ILA and the AFL for many years. In Tacoma, Washington, for example, longshoremen did not vote to become ILWU Local 23 until 1958, when shrinking work opportunity motivated them to affiliate so they could travel to nearby ILWU ports for additional work. Their 20 years of steadfast independence arose from many factors, including strong traditions of regional independence and close cooperation with many area AFL unions. They had also maintained strong internal discipline over the years, and had prided themselves on attracting and keeping work in the port by emphasizing productivity on the job. Many union longshoremen therefore felt they could take care of themselves – as they had after the setbacks of 1919 – without deferring to the San Francisco-based leadership of the new union or the CIO. The last Pacific Coast outpost of the ILA, Grainliners’ Local 1892 near Longview, Washington, did not vote to join the ILWU’s Local 21 until 1981.
Meanwhile, the ILWU’s brand of rank-and-file unionism spread under the banner of the CIO, paying off in more gains and greater security for the members of the ILWU and for all American workers. In the decade between 1938 and 1948, the ILWU used its power to help build new CIO unions in processing, manufacturing, service and entertainment industries located far from its waterfront and warehouse bases.
The organizing principles were simple. First, initiate new organization where the local union was willing to participate fully in the campaign. This meant that the local’s members and officers took on many of the actual organizing tasks, such as contacting unorganized workers. The International then mobilized financial and staff resources to support the local’s effort. Typical organizing target were non-union businesses that competed with unionized enterprises.
The second basic principle of successful ILWU organizing was to consolidate the union’s organization throughout an area, amalgamating small locals into coordinated larger locals, as happened, for example, in Hawaii, Alaska, and Northern California. This proved more efficient administratively, and resulted in greater solidarity among the membership – and greater participation by rank-and-file members in organizing.
But the union’s achievements were challenged soon after World War II. Flush with wartime profits, the maritime employers resolved to roll back the economic and social gains won by organized labor.
Anticipating an anti-labor labor drive, the ILWU played a leading role in forming the Committee for Maritime Unity (CMU) in 1946. The successor to the Maritime Federation and the Pacific, the CMU included the ILWU and maritime unions on both coasts.
When the CMU opened unprecedented national negotiations in Washington, D.C. on May 30, 1946, a national railroad strike had just been broken. President Truman had ordered the Army to take over the railroads and the workers were forced to abandon their strike under threat of being drafted into the Army. This new strikebreaking tactic worked so perfectly that Truman decided to use it against the maritime workers. He announced that in the event the CMU struck June 15, as scheduled, the Navy would man the ships and the Army would load them.
The CMU immediately called on its friends and allies in foreign countries to support the American workers in what promised to be a struggle between labor and the armed might of the government. Within hours the telegrams pledging support began to stream in from maritime unions all over the world: New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, France, England, Poland, Japan, the Scandinavian countries, and others. In each instance the workers abroad warned that any ships loaded by the Army and manned by the Navy to break the CMU strike would be declared scab ships and tied up the instant they entered foreign ports.
President Truman and his advisors smashed the railroad strike, but they couldn’t get the U.S. Army and Navy to handle ships in foreign ports. The admirals, the generals, and the President beat a hasty retreat. The CMU negotiating committee, with ILWU president Harry Bridges as spokesman, achieved a great victory for maritime workers all over the country as wages and benefits were improved, and the union hiring hall was again preserved.
Another test of longshore strength came in 1948 when the heavy players in the Waterfront Employers Association decided the time had come to pressure President Truman to use the new Taft-Hartley law to deprive the ILWU of all of its gains. An anti-labor Congress passed Taft-Hartley, also known as the Labor-Management Relations Act, over President Truman’s veto in 1947. The act outlawed the hiring hall, preferential hiring for union members, secondary boycotts, and strikes over jurisdictional issues, knocking down may of the building blocks for union strength. It also eroded the right to strike by giving the NLRB power to issue injunctions against boycotts and strikes it deemed illegal, and allowing the President to impose an 80 day “cooling-off” period during strikes deemed harmful to the “national interest.” In another inroad on workers’ rights and liberties, the Act required elected union leaders to sign affidavits stating they were not Communists before they could hold office (a provision the ILWU later successfully challenged in court).
Armed with these federal statues, the employers entered contract talks demanding that the ILWU give up the hiring hall on the grounds that it was “illegal.” The union countered with a demand to continue the hall, as well as a series of contract changes, including higher wages, shorter hours, revised vacation rules and improved safety conditions.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decided to try out another part of the Taft-Hartley law for the first time, and force the workers to vote on the employers’ “last offer.”
The ILWU’s Coast Longshore Caucus recommended that the rank and file boycott the NLRB poll to protest government restrictions on the union’s bargaining power. The result of the vote, as certified by the NLRB after three days of attempted polling, was an unprecedented show of union strength and solidarity: of the 26,965 employees eligible to vote, each and every one heeded the union’s call to boycott and not one ballot was cast.
The employers withdrew all their previous offers and announced there was really but one issue in the strike: “Communist leadership.” The union refused to be divided by this issue, and the strike began on September 2.
Then the break came. Leadership was changed, but not as demanded by the shipowners. The longshoremen stood by their leaders to a man – the shipowners changed theirs. They reorganized, called the union back to the bargaining table and announced, “Gentlemen, there is a new a look!”
And there was a “New Look.” Gone were the union-busters and red-baiters on the employer side of the table, and after 95 days on the bricks one of the finest trade union agreements ever made was negotiated in the new atmosphere. The hiring hall continued as it was; wages were increased, union security was reaffirmed and improvement were made in the hours and vacation provisions. Neither Taft-Hartley nor the NLRB was any more successful than the federal government’s threats to use the Army and Navy to break the union.
The next turning point in the history of the Longshore Division came in the late 1950s as the workers confronted technological change on the waterfront – the relentless introduction of machinery by the employers to increase productivity and profits. After several years of debates in coastwise caucuses, special conferences, and membership meetings, the rank and file ratified the historic – and controversial – Modernization and Mechanization Agreement of 1960 (M&M).
By 1959 the shipping industry was confronting difficult operational problems. Post-war construction costs skyrocketed the investment needed to build and maintain ships. The price of fuel, wharfage fees, and wages for seafaring personnel all moved up with the times.
The only way to offset these rising costs was to speed cargo handling and ship turnaround time. Speedier loading and discharge not only improves the ship’s turnaround time, it also increases the number of trips the vessel can make each year. Increased earnings resulting from the introduction of new machinery and new methods of cargo handling could well enable the industry to remain profitable.
Meanwhile, the union concluded that new methods and machines would be introduced no matter how great members’ resistance to change. As employers had the contractual right to make changes in operations, the best the union could hope for was to retain the old rules governing size of gangs, methods of cargo handling and related contract guarantees, as long as possible. New ideas for cargo handling, revolutionary ship design, the introduction of strapped loads, large-scale use of containers, and numerous other devices would sooner or later bypass the existing rules. Proposed legislation would also outlaw may of the guarantees and safeguards afforded by the old contract, leaving the workers with no new forms of security or protection in exchange.
Clearly the time had come to reexamine labor relations in the light of the mechanization and modernization of West Coast longshoring. The union and the employers decided they were better off tackling the issues as a whole, and agreed the following principles would shape the 1960 contract: the shipowners and stevedoring contractors were freed from restrictions on the introduction of labor-saving devices, relieved of the use of unnecessary workers, and assured of the elimination of work practices which impeded the efficient flow of cargo.
The union made these guarantees to industry in exchange for an unprecedented series of benefits for the workers, designed to protect them against the negative impact of machines on their daily work and job security. The agreement provided that:
- The current workforce would not be laid off. If the unhindered introduction of new machinery and methods of work resulted in the loss of work opportunity so that the work force had to be reduced, it would shrink from the top, with an innovative voluntary early retirement program instead of layoffs. If employers later needed to cut the workforce further, they could invoke a compulsory retirement provision with a higher pension benefit.
- Increased profits would be shared with the workers in the form of increased wages and benefits.
- Machines and labor-saving devices would be introduced wherever possible to lighten the burden of hard and hazardous work.
During longshore bargaining in 1966, the principle of M&M were extended under union pressure to “preserve the present registered force of longshoremen as the basic work force in the industry, and to share with that work force a portion of the net labor cost savings to be effected by the introduction of mechanical innovations, removal of contractual restrictions, or any other means.” Significantly, these innovations were to implemented without causing a speedup for the individual worker, indiscriminate layoffs, or a violation of safety codes or rules.
Problems arose, of course, in the implementation and interpretation of the two five-year contracts negotiated to bring the new program to life in a period of stable labor relations. Rank and file support for M&M had never been unanimous, and growing concerns about threats to ILWU jurisdiction, to the equalization of earnings, and to work opportunity gave rise to a new militancy among the younger generation of longshore workers in 1971.
Contract negotiations in 1971 centered on the consequences of containerization. When talks reached an impasse over union jurisdiction, wage parity and work rules, the resulting strike vote was a resounding 96.4 percent “yes” – a measure of the solidarity that sustained the longest coastwise longshore strike in U.S. history.
For many members, especially in San Francisco’s Local 10, the central issue was whether or not the employers would be able to redefine work rules and job categories to create a new class of workers for container operations, ‘steady men’ who would report to the same company every day instead of going to the hiring hall for jobs.
After 134 days on strike, the members accepted a new agreement by a 71 percent “yes” vote. The settlement contained some improved language on container jurisdiction, new dental benefits, the first five paid no-work holidays, and a new “Pay Guarantee Plan” that made significant steps towards establishing a guaranteed annual income for registered longshoremen whose work opportunity declined due to mechanization and other economic factors.
But the settlement terms were not far different from the employers’ last proposal before the strike started. And it began the long process that transformed longshore work along the entire coast, especially in Southern California, by the spread of “steady” equipment operators who rarely went to the union hall for their job assignments.
The 1971 strike also brought the ILWU face to face with the combined effect of technological innovations and the integration of international economies. Containerization enabled employers to avoid struck ports by offloading U.S. cargo through Canadian and Mexican ports and trucking it into the country.
Increased solidarity among the workers somewhat offset this advantage. ILWU and Teamster members halted movement of diverted cargo to and from the Mexican port of Ensenada by U.S. drivers (both unions recognized the enormous legal and financial pressures placed on Mexican nationals by their own government and employers to drive diverted cargo across the border, and did not blockade those vehicles).
To the north, the ILWU Canadian Area voted not to handle diverted U.S. cargo, despite threats of heavy fines and imprisonment. They soon called off this boycott, however, to avoid a potentially fatal showdown with the Canadian government after British Columbia court rulings against the union. Ultimately the Canadian ILWU escaped penalties, because the court ruled the union boycott was enacted in good faith to prevent union members from being forced to work as strikebreakers – and because the longshore workers in Vancouver had handled Canadian cargo as needed.
Since the 1971 strike, the Longshore Division has steadily defended and organized its jurisdiction. Employers provoked several skirmishes over new longshore operations, usually by attempting to whittle away at existing ILWU jurisdiction. The union has also had to protect its jurisdiction in the face of constant technological change in the computerized era of intermodal transportation.
The ILWU responded to these threats with organizing campaigns to bring all unorganized waterfront workers into the union, including office clerical workers employed by shipping and stevedoring companies, workers at new intermodal rail yards, and mechanics engaged in the maintenance and repair of containers and related cargo-handling equipment.
In the 1970s, for example, newly organized office workers at Zim-American Israeli Shipping and Matson Navigation joined clerical units in either Ship Clerks Local 63 in Southern California, or Local 34 in the San Francisco Bay Area, and yard workers at Southern Pacific’s Intermodal Containers Transfer Facility (ICTF) voted in 1987 to join the new Allied Division of Southern California’s Longshore Local 13.
And in 1995, a major organizing drive among vessel planners – who determine the load, weight, and balance of a ship’s cargo – was initiated in Southern California by Local 63’s office clericals and marine clerks units, with longshore support from Local 13. By the end of the 1996, the successful drive – strengthened by new jurisdictional language in the 1996 longshore contract settlement – expanded northward to planners in Northern California, Tacoma, and Seattle.
These organizing successes did not come easily, and many employers have not only resisted unionization, but have also sought to bypass or curtail traditional ILWU jurisdiction on the waterfront. When this has happened, the entire Longshore Division, along with the Warehouse Division, mobilized to defend its jurisdiction and right to organize. The number of these struggles increased in the late 1980s, as waterfront employers appeared emboldened by the anti-labor climate in the nation’s capital.
More than 12,000 trade unionist joined the demonstration. For the next four years the ILWU worked closely with organized labor and environmental groups to hold USS-POSCO (a joint venture between U.S. Steel Corporation and POSCO, a Korean conglomerate) accountable for its anti-union policies and the threat its Pittsburg facility posed to environmental safety in the region. In 1992 the ILWU signed an agreement with USS-POSCO ending the dispute. The pact fell short of total victory, but it did protect the ILWU’s jurisdiction should the facility be used by other companies, and provided for significant fines should USS-POSCO pollute the environment. Perhaps just as important, the four-year campaign brought the environmental and labor movements closer together.
Between 1987 and 1989 ILWU members in the Northwest defended longshore jurisdiction against attempts by the giant ITT-Rayonnier corporation to use non-union operations to barge and ship logs for export. Union members eventually shut down all Washington and Oregon ports to participate in a 1989 meeting and demonstration against Rayonnier – and assured future operations would be handled by ILWU labor.
In 1989 the ILWU was also able to win an important fight against foreign seamen doing ILWU longshore work when the union’s attorneys successfully intervened against Canadian shipowners who tried to use crew members to operate cranes in log loading operations while in Northwest U.S. ports.
In 1993 the entire ILWU was forced to fight a major battle with Peavey, a ConAgra subsidiary, when Locals 21 and 40 tackled the grain giant at its grain elevator in Kalama, Washington. The IWLU gained community support – and government attention – when it exposed Peavey’s illegal practice of soaking grain, which increased its weight and thereby brought a higher price for the cargo. The union also mobilized international support, most successfully in Japan, against the company’s proposed cuts in manning levels and plans to impose other substandard conditions. The company was forced to compromise on its contract proposals, and also ended up paying a major fine in 1997 for its grain-soaking practices.
While there have also been setbacks, times when the combined power of the rank and file could not prevail against the employer – most notable in the bitter and sometimes bloody fight from 1992-1995 to maintain ILWU jurisdiction at Southern Pacific’s Intermodal Container Transfer Facility in Southern California, — the union became even more determined to protect its jurisdiction.
This determination backed up by coastwise unity, was in large part reponsible for the major gains achieved in the 1996 Pacific Coast Longshore contract. Not only did the contract clarify and nail down ILWU jurisdiction over on-dock intermodal rail yards, it also forced employer acceptance of ILWU jurisdiction over intra-port drayage of containers, container maintenance and repair operations, and vessel planning. Just as important, the longshore membership took on and eliminated the employers’ “side deals” with individual skilled equipment and crane operators – the divisive practice whereby an employer paid bonuses to some workers to work steady for that employer.
The Warehouse Industry
The new kind of unionism born of the 1934 maritime strike was not confined to the docks. The warehouse workers, with their close ties to the waterfront that in the early days of the union came from working near the docks and handling cargo brought on and off the ships by longshoremen, also helped build the ILWU and they too shared in its achievements.
Today the Warehouse Division of the ILWU is a dynamic section of the union, tested and fortified by rank-and-file sacrifices and victories. Its members, men and women of all races and beliefs, are employed in public warehouses, coffee and spice warehouses, liquor and bottling plants, laboratories, open pit mines, hospitals, sugar refineries and chemical plants, flour and feed mills, food processing establishments and grocery and hardware warehouses. Some work in large establishments, others in companies with but a handful of employees.
Warehousing involves the storage, processing and distribution of goods, as well as some manufacturing. Though warehouse workers suffered low wages, high job insecurity and frequent speed-ups, the old AFL craft unions never considered organizing the men and women who earned a precarious living in the distribution centers up and down the West Coast. But under the impetus of the successful 1934 maritime strike, the warehousemen organized. In August 1934 new members of Weighers, Warehousemen’s and Cereal Workers Union Local 38-44 (later to become ILWU Local 6 in the San Francisco Bay Area) re-activated the local’s ILA charter, which had been inactive since 1923, and immediately started a vigorous organizing campaign.
In this they had the full support of the longshoremen. The leaders of the newly re-organized longshore union realized that unless the warehousemen-who often worked near the docks-also enjoyed union conditions, and worked under a union contract, they could undermine longshore standards and be a source of cheap labor, even strikebreakers.
By the spring of 1935 the new union, was firmly established on the waterfront and already moving uptown and ‘marching inland.” By the end of the year, dramatic signs of the union’s growth were evident: warehouse workers at the huge C&H sugar refinery in Crockett, California broke the company’s stranglehold on the town and the work force to sign up with ILA Local 38-44; and warehouse workers rapidly organized in the anti-labor valley around Sacramento, California, and established ILA Local 38-118 (later ILWU Local 17). By 1943 some 85 percent of the warehouse workers in Sacramento belonged to the new union.
But these organizing efforts were brutally opposed by the warehouse employers and by AFL officials who insisted that the uptown warehouses, as well as those on the waterfront, were their exclusive jurisdiction. All through 1935 in the San Francisco Bay Area employers, police and AFL vigilantes waged pitched battles against the organizing and bargaining efforts of Local 38-44. From Crockett to Stockton, where strike leader Ray Morency was killed, warehousemen politically and physically defended their organization and their affiliation with the longshoremen.
Organizing efforts elsewhere met equal resistance — and equal success. The Seattle warehouse local that became ILWU Local 9 cut its teeth on an October 1935 strike against Fisher Mills that became a symbolic fight throughout the Northwest. The Chamber of Commerce brought financial support and strikebreakers to open the mill. The newly formed union marshaled the entire labor movement of the area to its defense. After four months of hardship and suffering the warehousemen’s strike and boycott produced an outstanding victory. In fact, the boycott of Fisher Mills products was one of the most effective in labor history. Bakery workers struck as far away as Richmond, Virginia. In Gulf cities, loggers shut down their camps. Longshore gangs and ships’ crews all over the world walked off ships rather than handle Fisher flour.
Portland, Los Angeles and other port cities also saw successful organizing drives. The “march inland’ took on real organizational emphasis in early 1936, and in June the warehousemen held their first coastwise conference to develop a West Coast membership drive.
The San Francisco Bay Area warehousemen struck with the maritime unions in October 1936, and emerged with gains in organizing as well as bargaining. After 67 days out the warehousemen won one of the most unusual victories in American labor history. To protect themselves during the strike the warehousemen aggressively organized workers in nearby non-union warehouses and ended up almost doubling their membership in the process. Moreover, through the strike action they won the union hiring hall, a substantial wage increase, paid vacations, and seniority rights in place of the continuous turnover that had always characterized the industry.
The warehousemen returned to work on January 5, 1937, but the maritime crafts were still out. In a demonstration of solidarity, the San Francisco Bay Area warehousemen contributed $1,000 each week to the joint strike fund until the maritime strike ended successfully on February 4. This victory in the San Francisco Bay Area inspired warehousemen up and down the coast. New organizations spread widely in every port city and later in many key communities in the interior of the United States and on the East and Gulf Coasts as well.
At the prompting of the head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Dave Beck and ILA leader Joe Ryan, the national AFL tried to strip the West Coast longshore union of its warehouse affiliates in 1937. Warehousemen and longshoremen alike fought back. The longshoremen recognized that the loss of the warehousemen would not only have ended effective union organization in that industry but weakened the waterfront unions as well.
Later that year the Pacific Coast district of the ILA joined the CIO, in part because members realized that the longshoremen and warehousemen had to remain in a single organization for their mutual advantage and benefit. So the successor organization became in name what it had long been in fact, a union of longshoremen and warehousemen: the ILWU, affiliated to the CIO.
But the warehouse workers’ struggle was not over. In the months following CIO affiliation, they fought time and time again to preserve their union against raids by the Teamsters and other unions-and to maintain their close relationship with the longshoremen.
Teamster chief Dave Beck pulled a blockade and boycott of the port of San Francisco in the fall of 1937, and threatened to close down the whole coast to force the longshoremen to give up their warehouse membership. The boycott fizzled in the face of daily mobilizations by hundreds of ILWU members, who stood up to assaults and threats by IBT-led goon squads.
The next spring, just as the ILWU was to hold its first convention in 1938, AFL goons attacked striking warehousemen in Crockett, California with rubber hoses, trying to break the strike and drive the warehousemen from the ILWU. But the pickets took refuge in the union hall ‘ where they remained until union members arrived from San Francisco the next day and routed the thugs.
The warehouse employers in San Francisco made a major effort to weaken Local 6′s bargaining ability in mid-August 1938 by deliberately locking out Bay Area warehousemen who refused to work on a boxcar loaded by strikebreakers. This “hot box car” was deliberately moved from warehouse to warehouse, and workers at more than 100 sites were eventually ordered off the job when they refused to load it.
The employers flooded the city with statements about union conspiracies and Communist plots. But the ILWU warehousemen refused to be intimidated. They maintained their unity and publicized their cause with mass picket lines, soup kitchens, radio broadcasts, and community cultural events. Their solidarity finally paid off and they returned to work with substantial wage gains plus a master contract covering more than 200 warehouses in San Francisco and Oakland-the first industry-wide area agreement ever signed in the warehouse industry.
Meanwhile, the “march inland” of the warehousemen had proceeded beyond the docks to the uptown warehouses and to distribution centers far from the port cities of the West Coast. The ILWU started organizing warehouse workers in the Midwest and Southeast. But it found that it could not successfully mobilize from its West Coast base against either raids by other unions or employers’ assaults-nor could it overcome the inability to bring Pacific Coast longshore leverage to bear on faraway inland struggles. Dozens of distant warehouses organized by the ILWU during World War II eventually ended up in other unions or lost their union representation.
Still, the March Inland achieved important milestones in addition to union representation for thousands of workers on the West Coast. In 1936 and 1937 the ILWU successfully knocked down municipal anti-picketing ordinances in Oakland and Berkeley, California. A number of arrests of ILWU pickets, and students who supported them, resulted in jury trials and appeals which ended with the ordinances being, ruled unconstitutional. Another precedent-setting case occurred when the ILWU loaned its law firm to a besieged union of lettuce workers in Salinas, California in 1939. After breaking the workers’ strike and wrecking the union, the employers unleashed a reign of terror and established a blacklist. Responding to arguments by ILIN-U attorneys, Federal Judge Adolphus St. Sure issued an injunction holding blacklisting to be illegal. It was the first such injunction in legal history, and it later enabled the lettuce workers to re-form their ranks.
The inland organizing drives also achieved recognition of the elected union steward’s authority in the workplace. Acceptance of the steward as a key figure in the administration of contracts, played an important part in the larger fight for membership control over conditions of work. Dramatic as these changes were, few longshore locals in the ILWU faced the kind of pressure warehouse workers lived with for years: the ever-present threats of plant closure or relocation to a non-union setting, frequent attempted raids by other unions and employer attacks on workers’ rights.
An exciting and profitable development for the ILWU, and particularly the warehouse members, was the healing of the breach between the union and the IBT which came about when James Hoffa succeeded Dave Beck as IBT president. Active cooperation on contract negotiations between ILWU and IBT warehousemen began on a limited basis in 1958 in Northern California under the leadership of the ILWU’s Lou Goldblatt and the IBT’s George Mock. In 1960, when they agreed to present joint demands, pursue joint negotiations and strike jointly, the cooperation paid off handsomely with vastly improved wages, benefits and conditions.
The pattern of bitterly fighting to organize, to survive, and to win and defend improvements recurred in every area where ILWU warehouse workers built their unions. But they persevered, and in the 60 years after their founding would organize a huge range of sites, from cotton compress workers in the 1930s to airport workers in the 1990s.
Local 26, for example, built a secure organization, continuously improved wages and successfully combated racial discrimination on the job in the city of Los Angeles, once notorious as the toughest anti-union city on the West Coast. Local 26 jurisdiction over the years grew through aggressive organizing to include scrap yards and cotton compress workers.
Cotton compressing, reducing the size of 500-pound cotton bales for shipment and storage, was brutal work in the 1930s. Bales were hand-trucked to the “block,” which held a huge compressor. Specialized workers like cotton cutters, or samplers; lever pullers, who activated the press; and cotton sewers and band shovers, who handled sturdy bale holders, worked quickly and skillfully. Almost all of these workers were African American or Mexican American. Prior to unionization, California’s cotton compress workers suffered conditions similar to those of the abused and under-paid migrant workers who worked the nearby cotton fields.
In the wake of the 1934 longshore strike, the ILA set up a cotton compress local at San Pedro in 1936. To protect that local from non-union operations in the San Joaquin Valley, the CIO organized compresses in the Fresno and Bakersfield area in 1937 and ’38. When the CIO purged its most progressive unions for alleged Communist influence in 1949 and ’50, the ILWU and the Bakersfield compressmen’s international, the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers (FTA) were among those ousted. The FTA was devastated, but the ILWU remained strong and aided the isolated Bakersfield unionists. Local 6 briefly serviced them in early 1951, and they were organized later into Local 26 on a permanent basis.
Unionizing the compress industry was never easy. Many of the employers also operated in Southern right-to-work states, and fought hard to re-establish nonunion conditions in California. The ILWU held on, but contract improvements came slowly-compress workers didn’t win health and welfare coverage until the 1960s, for example.
Other compress workers in the Valley were represented by the International Chemical Workers Union. In the 1950s the ILWU suggested joint negotiations with the ICWU to reduce wasteful inter-union rivalries and achieve better conditions for all compress workers. The ICWU compress workers and seed oil pressers were taken with the ILWU’s militancy and internal democracy and eventually voted to affiliate with the ILWU as Locals 57 and 78. Local 57 has since merged operations with Local 26, and Local 78 merged with Local 6 in 1994.
This pattern of organized workers who belong to another union choosing to come into the ILWU has been repeated often since the 1950s. In 1964, for example, workers at US Borax in Boron, California, who had been in Chemical Workers Local 85, voted to affiliate with the ILWU as Local 30, Mine, Mineral and Processing Workers. More recently, new ILWU locals were formed in 1995-1996 from the Los Angeles Harbor Pilots-now Local 68-and the Los Angeles Port Police, now affiliated with the ILWU as Local 65.
At the same time, the unending efforts of warehouse division employers to downsize, relocate, or completely close down profitable warehouses and manufacturing facilities has wreaked havoc and hardship among the membership. Gone are the employers’ traditional complaints of not making money. Now their complaint is that they are not making enough money. The continuing tide of corporate mergers and acquisitions creates ever larger mountains of corporate debt that must be repaid by maximizing profits by any means necessary-whatever the human cost.
The ILWU has responded to these developments in several ways: first, by mobilizing community campaigns to keep the business open, as happened at Miles Laboratories in Berkeley, California; second – when Closure or relocation can’t be stopped – by negotiating the best possible protections, severance payments, and re-training benefits for the displaced workers; third, by strengthening alliances with other unions for collective bargaining, as at the 1992 Summit Hospital strike in Oakland, California, when the ILWU x-ray and laboratory technicians joined with the nurses and other health care workers to successfully protect the right to honor each other’s picket lines; and fourth by stepping up the union’s efforts to organize the unorganized.