Eighty years ago, San Francisco’s waterfront was a domestic war scene. But from the bloody events of that conflict arose historic changes to the relationship between workers and owners.

HARVEY SCHWARTZ, Historian, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)

ROBERT CHERNY, History Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University

JOHN CASTANHO, Member, ILWU Local 10 and Coast Benefits Specialist

CARL NOLTE, Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle

MELVIN MACKAY, President of ILWU Local 10 (Program Chair)

TIM PAULSON, Executive Director, San Francisco Labor Council – Moderator

 

MELVIN MACKAY: This year marks the 80th anniversary of the 1934 Pacific Coast maritime strike to protest miserable hiring practices and poor working conditions. The strike [took place] up and down the West Coast, from Bellingham to San Diego. [This year also marks] the 80th anniversary of Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, when clashes between San Francisco police [and] picketers resulted in two strike supporters being killed and hundreds wounded. In the aftermath of Bloody Thursday, 127,000 workers representing 160 unions walked off their jobs in protest. During their landmark general strike, they shut down San Francisco for three days. These events helped bring about the national legislation in 1935 that established collective bargaining and set up the National Labor Relations Board.

The Commonwealth Club will soon occupy the building that was a longshoreman’s union hall at the time of the 1934 strike. This fall, San Francisco spent up to $160 million on a new cruise ship terminal named after veteran labor leader James Herman, a one-time port commissioner and head of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). This portends a new era of economic activities and jobs on the waterfront throughout the city.

What is the legacy of 1934 and what are the lasting contributions and legacies of union leaders such as Harry Bridges? Today, we’re pleased to take a special look at labor history.

TIM PAULSON: Give an overview of what you think the legacy and the importance is of the 1934 strike and what it means for San Francisco.

HARRY SCHWARTZ: First of all, let’s take a look at the pre-strike conditions: What were the problems on the waterfront? Well, there had been a big strike in 1919 that had been lost, and control of the waterfront was really in the hands of the steamship owners, and also an organization which was a company-controlled group. It was called the Blue Book by nickname, because of the color of its book. It functioned as a way to control workers and to make sure that they didn’t have real collective bargaining or real worker-controlled unionism.

On the waterfront by 1934 people “shaped up” right by the Ferry Building to get jobs. And there, you sometimes had to pay for your job. That is to say you had to pay a “kickback.” It could be booze, it could be money or various things. There were many, many things that were difficult and wrong on the ‘front. The loads were excessively heavy, the equipment could be rotten; it could be unsafe; there was something called the “speedup,” which meant you made people work really really fast to increase productivity. They even had ethnic gangs that were forced by the bosses to compete with one another for speed. The result was a very high number of accidents on the waterfront. There were certain degrading issues. Sometimes a worker had to paint the house of a boss on the weekend. Sometimes you had to put money into a lottery for which there were no prizes.

And this one I think is a bit of a zinger. There’s a longshoreman from Los Angeles and the port down there who told me in the 1980s, if you were looking for a job, if you had a nice-looking sister and liquor, and a wife that would put out, you had a job on the waterfront. [He said,] I’ve seen this here on these docks. And that’s a direct quote. So you see, the conditions were really terrible.

One of the main demands of the strike was for a better hiring system. There were lots of famous aspects of the strike. The employers tried to force open the port – that’s literally force open the port – utilizing volunteers from companies who had tear gas to demonstrate; they gassed the workers so they could show the police force that this stuff really worked. There were beatings; there were shootings. All kinds of things went on. It looked like a warzone on the waterfront. It culminated in Bloody Thursday, July 5 when a couple of guys were killed [and] several sent to the hospital in a big confrontation. From there, you had a big funeral parade on Market Street on July 9, [followed by] the general strike which was a protest strike between the 16th and the 19th of July. The employers faced a strike again in 1936. They did not try to use violence, because they’d learned the hard way that it didn’t work the first time.

There are additional famous things about that situation in 1934. The rise of Harry Bridges as leader was one of them. He insisted on a coast-wide contract that would keep different ports from working on each other when there were strikes. He insisted that black workers come into the union. This was way before there was a civil rights movement, 20 to 25 years before that. He went into the black churches in San Francisco and said, This time, guys, the black community is going to get a shot. They had been discriminated against in a prior union situation before 1919. The union retained this kind of humane perspective; it also inspired other people to organize. They fought for civil liberties over the years. They fought against various wars like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. They joined the civil rights movement, or supported it greatly, in the 1960s. They supported Cesar Chavez – the legacy is extremely long.

It might be emphasized that in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, the waterfront was a place where a lot of San Franciscans worked; many, many more people were involved in the ‘front either on the waterfront [itself] or in spin-off jobs of one sort or another. With the mechanization, which really goes by the name of containerization, the workforce on the waterfront declined. But still, in all, this long legacy of the ILWU has survived ever since.

ROBERT CHERNY: I’m going to focus especially on the immediate outcomes of the 1934 strike for those who were working on the waterfront at that time, and then look at the somewhat bigger picture, the way in which that strike and other events in 1934 affected national policy. But I want to begin with the longshoremen, the men who were on strike in 1934. Out of that strike, they built a strong union, a strong organization along the coast from Bellingham to San Diego with a very good system of communication among those local [chapters].

The strike was settled through arbitration. Initially there had been a lot of opposition to arbitration, but in the end, there was a vote of all of the striking longshoremen, and they agreed to accept arbitration. Arbitration turned out to be a very good thing. It gave them almost everything they wanted. It gave them a coast-wide contract so that there were the same wages, hours and working conditions in every port. As a result, ports could not compete against each other by reducing working conditions. They got wages of $0.95 an hour, a 10-cents-an-hour increase, and they got a six-hour day – a two-hour decrease from what they had had – and a 30-hour week, which sounds unusual to many of us today, but it’s something that stayed in that contract ever since then. They got a union dispatcher, which was an absolutely crucial element in their success.

Harvey [Schwartz] described the “shape up,” the way in which men went to the Ferry Building at 7 a.m. and tried to get a job for the day. That strike changed that process of hiring forever, because arbitration gave them a dispatcher elected by union members. One of the changes that resulted from this was the concept of “low man out.” Control of dispatching permitted the union to implement a system that was designed to equalize pay among all union members. So union members, who became known as A-men, had first priority in being dispatched for jobs. Jobs were assigned on the principle of low man out, which meant that the longshoremen on the A-list who had worked the fewest hours were assigned first. This was a way of spreading the work equally among the union so that no one would be favored with more work by a generous foreman or a foreman who felt that there had been some kind of a payoff. Controlling the dispatcher also meant that there would be no discrimination in hiring. Because they controlled dispatching and they applied the rule of low man out, there would be no discrimination on the basis of race or politics. In the San Francisco local [chapter], they voted to prohibit segregated work gangs in the mid-1930s.

Gang size was a safety issue: Were there enough men working in the hold? Were there enough men working on the pier to handle those loads? The dispatch system gave the union a great increase in control over those key working conditions, because if a gang was dispatched to a job where they felt the working conditions were unsafe, they’d refuse to work and they’d be sent back to the hiring hall. The dispatcher would send another gang and that gang would refuse to work under unsafe conditions. Sooner or later the foremen and the companies got the message that they weren’t going to get any work done under unsafe conditions. And they communicated among all the local [union chapters] on the coast as to what they were doing, so that they were all aiming at the same working conditions. Eventually, the companies got the message and wrote these [conditions] into the contract.

The 1940 contract created a process for the immediate arbitration of disputes over working conditions, so the contract recognized the right of men to stop work that endangered their health or safety. But in that circumstance, a port arbitrator was immediately sent to the sight, made a decision on the spot, and the decision was binding for both the workers and the employers. The arbitrators were chosen in equal numbers from the companies and the unions.

There were a lot of strikes in 1934. The strike here was not the only one; there were strikes all over the country. In some part, this was the reflection of the failure of a law that had passed in 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was designed to recognize the right of workers to join unions and to encourage unions and companies to sit down together and agree on working conditions. But as it turned out, the companies weren’t particularly interested in sitting down with workers, and the result was a strike wave all across the country in 1934, which led Senator Robert Wagner of New York to propose legislation in 1935 which became the National Labor Relations Act. That law is still the basic law governing labor relations today, though it’s been amended a number of times.

CARL NOLTE: I think the first thing you should consider is, how was the strike perceived by the public in 1934? It sounds like from what you said it was a famous victory and all kinds of wonderful things happened. One would think that the public would be eager to accept such a resolution. Of course we all, like myself, believe that there are two sides to every story and that must be true today, right? Just tune into Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow to see if that’s the case. But in 1934, social media had not come into existence, television was not invented, and radio news was just an adjunct to entertainment.

So that left the print newspapers. There were four in San Francisco – the Chronicle, the Examiner, the Call Bulletin, the San Francisco News – and two in Oakland – the Tribune and the Post Inquirer. Two of the newspapers, the Examiner and the Call Bulletin, were owned by the Hearst Corporation, which also owned the Post Inquirer in Oakland. The other Oakland paper was owned by the Knowland family, a stalwart of the Republican party. So these newspapers represented a point of view. Their point of view was – and they were not reluctant to share it with everyone – that they were in favor of the establishment. The establishment was about 176 percent against the 1934 strike in every way. Until, of course, Bloody Thursday happened. When it became clear that the situation had escalated out of control and the police had killed two people and wounded several others. So even the opinions in the paper swung around toward the strikers, especially after the big funeral march up Market Street.

But the strikers regarded the reporters who set out to cover the strike as agents of the cops and the scabs. One of the photographers for the San Francisco News was beaten so badly by the strikers he ended up in the hospital. He was Joe Rosenthal. You may remember him from the famous picture he took on Iwo Jima. He once said that what he saw in World War II did not compare to the violence he saw on the San Francisco waterfront in 1934. But later, when the opinion swung around, the Hearst papers still insisted that the leader of the strike, Harry Bridges, was a communist agent and tried to get him deported for...how long did this go on?

CHERNY: ’Til at least 1955.

NOLTE: So when you hear about what they say now, you see that that was perceived somewhat differently in 1934 and later and that that was the message that the people of San Francisco saw filtered through the media at the time.

JOHN CASTANHO: As the least senior person up here, I guess you can tell I belong to a union. So, 80 years later, I am three generations removed from the ’34 strike. What does this all mean today? I think there are some things more readily visible today than others. [One thing that] was won in the ’34 strike, was recognition of the ILA [International Longshoremen’s Association] as the sole bargaining unit for the longshoreman, which is not the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Before then, there were other unions that were trying to represent the longshore workers, and it was a race to the bottom. Everyone was trying to cut a better contract with lower wages so they could have their workforce represented.

But I think that there are some things that are not very readily seen that are also very pervasive today. It was mentioned earlier that African-Americans were integrated into our workforce, and that’s very evident today. My local [chapter], Local 10, is over 65 percent African-American.

I was 19 when I started on the Waterfront – and you guys remember when you were 19. We all thought we knew everything, [but] I got an education on the waterfront that I couldn’t get in any classroom.

My father taught me the value of hard work, but I was taught things about politics that you could never learn in a classroom. You know, things that were going on in other countries. Apartheid was a really big deal when I was starting on the waterfront. I learned the importance of looking out for each other, moral lessons, the importance of sharing with one another. And when you talk about these things today, it just sounds so counter to corporate America. I’m proud to say that I belong to an organization that still tries to do that and [those values] were instilled in me at a very young age.

My grandfather started in 1945, and he was part of the march inland. He came here from Portugal, didn’t speak any English, and believe it or not, there were times and places in this country where if you were a non-English speaker, you were not welcomed to work in a lot of places. But the ILWU welcomed my grandfather. He worked at Albers Grain Mill in Oakland, which is now TraPac Terminal, for those of you who know the Port of Oakland. My father emigrated here in 1963 as a non-English speaker. He was welcomed into ILWU Local 10, and for many years he worked in the break-bulk gang, he worked in gang 43, and this was before the advent of containerization. Now when containers came around, this changed the waterfront and a lot of the work moved to Oakland. But as far as the San Francisco landscape went, I’m pretty much living proof of someone who reaps the benefits of many of the battles that were fought for and won in the 1934 strike.

PAULSON: It was acknowledged that The Commonwealth Club was going to be developing a building on the waterfront that has a history with the ILWU and the Longshore Workers Union. They immediately called the ILWU.  John or Harvey, [do you have a] comment on the significance of that building and what The Commonwealth Club is going to be doing.

SCWARTZ: Well, The Commonwealth Club is purchasing the old building which is located on the waterfront at Mission and Steuart, which was headquarters in 1934 of the organization. At that time its name was the International Longshoremen’s Association, the ILA. So the old ILA headquarters during the big strike has been purchased. It hasn’t been used for a long, long time; the inside of it is very different. The Commonwealth Club has agreed to make the facade that faces Steuart Street, look like it did in the 1930s. They’ve also agreed to put up a plaque outside, and they’ve actually asked us to draft it. They’re also going to have some display material on the inside in the lobby area, so all kinds of people that visit Commonwealth Club happenings will pass by information on the material on the legacy of labor and the ILWU in San Francisco.

There’s a side that faces in the other direction, that faces the Embarcadero, which is not the side that you see in the photos in 1934, and that side, the facade has to be changed because the Club needs room to hold its meetings. It’s going to have a couple of [auditoriums], one for 300 people, one for 150; it’s going to be quite something. So it seems to me that this is going to be the best possible resolution for the long-term life of this building. It will be recognition of its historical legacy there.

CASTANHO: It wasn’t just an ILA office building. If we’re looking at July 5, 1934, and the events that happened that day, we also have to recall that there was a battle that took place between maritime workers and the police, and people were clubbed and hit with bricks, sticks and even shot. The wounded maritime workers were taken to this hall, this very same building that we’re talking about, and were treated there. There were two maritime workers that were killed, Howard Sperry and Nicholas Bordois. Both of these gentlemen had their bodies brought to this building, and they laid there and stayed until July 9, the day of the funeral.

So there is a very important significance, historically, beyond the fact that it was just an ILA building.