Thu Feb 09 2012

The big strike
by Dick Meister
April 25, 2009

It's the 75th anniversary of what's known in labor lore as "The Big Strike" -- the remarkable event that brought open warfare to San Francisco's waterfront, led to one of the very few general strikes in U.S. history and played a key role in spreading unionization nationwide.

It began in May of the dark Depression year of 1934 when longshoremen walked off the job to protest the truly wretched working conditions on West Coast docks.

Longshoremen were not even guaranteed jobs, no matter how skilled or experienced they might be. They had to report to the docks every morning and hope a hiring boss would pick them from among the thousands of desperate job-seekers who jammed the waterfront for the daily "shapeup."

Bosses rarely chose those who raised serious complaints about pay and working conditions or otherwise challenged them, but were quite partial to those who slipped them bribes or bought them drinks at nearby bars.

Even those who were hired often weren't sure how long they'd work. They might be needed for only a few hours or for as many as l8, sometimes even more, usually worked at top speed without breaks. .

For all that, they were paid a mere 85 cents an hour. That brought the average longshoreman about $10 a week, low pay even by Depression standards.

What the longshoremen wanted above all was to end the indignity and insecurity of the "shapeup." They wanted to decide for themselves how the dock work should be allocated, with pay and working conditions determined in negotiations between their union and employers.

The 32,000 dock workers and their leaders -- Harry Bridges, a young Australian sailor turned longshoreman the most prominent among them -- were denounced by conservative union leaders, employers, politicians and by the press as Communists bent on violent revolution.

But despite the heavy opposition, the longshoremen managed to shut down every port along the 1,900 miles of coastline between San Diego and Seattle.

After 57 days, employers, backed by state and local government officials, issued an ultimatum: Call off the strike or they would bring in strikebreakers under police escort to forcibly open the ports.

Which is what employers tried to do on July 5, 1934 -- a day known in West Coast ports since then as "Bloody Thursday." The major attempt was launched in San Francisco, where nearly 1,000 heavily armed policemen battled several thousand longshoremen and supporters.

The fighting ended only after 2,000 National Guardsmen in full battle-dress, armed with bayoneted-rifles and machine guns, marched in at the governor's order to occupy the battle zone. The fighting had ceased, but by then two men were dead, killed by police bullets, and more than 100 wounded or seriously injured, and 800 under arrest.

Four others were killed, hundreds of others hurt and arrested at ports in the Pacific Northwest and southern California. But it was San Francisco that drew the most attention, and a great public outpouring of sympathy for the strikers.

More than 40,000 San Franciscans joined in a two-mile-long funeral cortege for the men who had been killed on their city's docks. They marched slowly up the city's main downtown street, men, women and children eight to ten abreast behind the coffins laid on crepe-draped, flower-strewn flatbed trucks.

Public support continued to mount, until a week later it erupted into a citywide general strike. Emergency services continued, but otherwise San Francisco came to a virtual standstill.

The state was about to declare martial law, but after four days, government officials and the conservative leaders of the American Federation of Labor who controlled the city's union hierarchy prevailed and the general strike was called off.

The strikers nevertheless scored one of the most important victories in U.S. labor history.

Victory came through President Franklin Roosevelt, who appointed an arbitration panel that settled the longshoremen's strike by granting the strikers almost all they sought.

Employers were required to formally recognize and bargain with the dock workers' union, raise pay, establish a standard workweek and abolish the "shapeup." All hiring was to be done through union-operated hiring halls, with jobs handed out in rotation so work could be shared equally.

Soon after that, the longshoremen merged with the warehousemen who worked closely with them. Their International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union became one of the most powerful, democratic, progressive and influential of all unions.

The longshoremen's union victorious struggle to create the union -- their Big Strike -- strike was an extremely important signal to the nation. It showed what could be done by workers united in a common cause, however powerful and violent the opposition. It showed that they could win the crucial rights so long denied them.

---
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based journalist who has covered labor issues for a half-century as a print and broadcast reporter, editor and commentator. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.

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