What was it all about?
The Dispatcher
Page 12A
by Harry Bridges
ILWU International President Emeritus
July 6, 1984

Something special happened in the spring and summer of 1934. Maritime workers who had been considered little more than ignorant roustabouts took history into their own hands. They built a powerful new movement from the ground up, waged a complex and bitter stroke along the length of the Pacific seaboard, and conducted the only successful General Strike in the country’s history.

They proved that they could win, and win big. Their success stimulated hundreds of thousands of other workers to organize. In the long run they raised the standard of living of nearly every man, woman and child on the coast, and created working conditions which became the envy of millions of workers in the rest of the nation.

Today we are inclined to take these victories more or less for granted. It’s hard for us to keep in mind just how hard they came. It’s hard to imagine a time when unions had no legal standing, when it was practically illegal to picket, when workers were absolutely at the mercy of their employers. As bad as things have gotten for unions these days we’re still not back to where we were before 1934.

It’s also interesting to recall how hard it was for people, who should have known better, to understand what was going on. Take the daily press for example. The editorial policy of virtually every newspaper on the coast was to write the whole thing off as a communist plot.

The Chronicle published a front-page editorial saying that the strike was not a legitimate labor-management dispute but an effort by a bunch of reds, under direct orders from Moscow, to cripple trade, create anarchy and eventually seize the government.

They were forever appealing to the real American leaders of labor to wake up and toss out this Bridges character and his bunch. (The fact is that the only newspapers which supported us were the Catholic Monitor and the Western Worker, ancestor of today’s Peoples World.)

The shipping employers and the whole crowd in the Chamber of Commerce and the Industrial Association also missed the boat. They thought that they could hire scabs to do our work. 

They thought they could starve us out. And finally, when it came down to it, they thought they could use the police and the National Guard to beat us and shoot us and intimidate us into submission. After all, these tactics had worked in the past.

But the real story, which they all missed, was the tremendous understanding of the members of our union and their families, the members of the AFL unions, and most of the labor leadership those real Americans that the papers were always talking about.

Take a guy like Michael Casey, International Vice-President of the Teamsters and one of the most respected labor leaders in San Francisco. Casey was in most ways a very conservative man. But he more than 30 years in the labor movement, in good times and terrible times, and his loyalties ran deep. His cooperation, despite the enormous amount of pressure placed on him by the employers, made our victory possible.

The same gut solidarity pulled us through after Bloody Thursday, when Nick Bordoise and Howard Sperry were killed. We never meant for anyone to lose his life. Many of the members of our strike committee figured we were licked. We’d given a pretty good accounting of ourselves, but we knew we couldn’t go on fighting the police every day, let alone the National Guard.

The logical result of Bloody Thursday—as has happened so many times before—was that the union would be broken and the men would slowly trickle back to work. But we counted on people like Mike Casey, and so many other people like him. Sure, most of them didn’t agree with us on many things.

We had some pretty wild ideas. But they understood that if they allowed the police to shoot down strikers, or resolve labor problems by bringing in the National Guard, we were all done for. Their loyalty and support laid the groundwork for victory. We’ve come along way since then. Imagine trying to explain pensions, and health and welfare, let alone a guarantee, to one of our guys back then.

Imagine his reaction to some of the wage increases we’ve won. And try telling him about women working on the docks! But also you’ve got to imagine telling the same guy that the movie actor he saw galloping across the screen on Saturday afternoon would on day be president and the most bitterly anti-worker president in the history of the country.

Imagine his reaction to some of the shenanigans of the courts and the NLRB. Imagine trying to explain containers and computers. The problems of the modern worker are so much more complex, so much more puzzling. And so they ask, 50 years later, what was it really all about? First of all, it was about power.

We showed the world that when working people get together and stick together there’s little they can’t do. Second, it was about democracy. We said that the rank and file had the right to decide, and that if you gave them the facts, they’d make the right decision. Finally, it was about how people treat on another, it was about human dignity.

We forced the employers to treat us as equals, to sit down and talk to us about the work we do, how we do it, and what we get paid for it. Pretty basic stuff. But all those gains are today under the most sustained and vicious attack we’ve seen in more than a generation.

The employers, with the connivance of the Reagan administration, have made mincemeat out of the rights guaranteed to us by the legislation passed under the New Deal. It looks as though they’ve decided that the sky’s the limit, and that now is the time to take full advantage of the newly favorable climate.

But I believe that the principles for which we fought in 1934 are still useful. Whether your job is pushing a four-wheeler or programming a computer, I don’t know of any way for working people to win basic economic justice and dignity except by being organized into a solid, democratic union. Sure, we may be taking a beating now, as we were in the years before 1934, but that’s nothing new.

What saved us then was our faith in each other, standing together despite what the employer did to intimidate and divide us, and to discredit our leadership. We showed the world that united working people could stand up against guns and tear gas, against the press and the courts, against whatever they threw at us.

We can do it again.