San Francisco Waterfront History
San Francisco Waterfront History
The San Francisco Waterfront
The Social
Consequences of Industrial Modernization
Part One; "The Good Old Days"
By Herb Mills
Page 8
The discussion will now move to the third set of
circumstances which underwrote the emergence and stability of this community-the
nature and structure of the work which its
members performed.
The Hiring Hall. The central demand of the long and bitter West Coast longshore strike of 1934 focused upon "the shape-up"-the practice of hiring men from amongst those who showed up each morning at one or another of the pierheads.
The union sought-and won "a hiring hall" jointly administered and operated by the employers and union through a "labor relations committee." As countless union publications subsequently put it, 'The ILWU is the hiring hall."
The reasons for this demand were simple enough-the shape-up was riddled with favoritism, discrimination, corruption, and pay-offs in the hiring of men. On the job, it was distinguished by a relentless, exhausting, and hazardous speed-up which was in turn very effectively enforced by capricious and arbitrary firings.
By contrast, the hiring hall meant the preferential dispatch of union men. While promoting union membership directly, this also reduced the number of firings simply because the man who was fired was almost always replaced by another union man. The second basic and fundamentally important feature of the hall was its "low-man-out" system of job dispatch.
This meant that, in any given job category, the man who had worked the least number of hours during the current quarter had the right to be dispatched first. 4. The hiring hall also meant a centralized and scheduled dispatch, thus obviating the need to travel from pier to pier in an oftentimes endless search for work. In these ways, the degrading evils of the shape-up were to be precluded.
By equalizing their work opportunity, the low-man-out system also helped to equalize the income of the men in each job category. Another source of explosive competition was eliminated when the principle of seniority was firmly incorporated into the employer union machinery for promoting men from one job category to another. Eventually, the dispatch of gangs was also based upon a "low-gang-out" system.
