International Longshore and Warehouse Union

Longshoremen on the West Coast ports had either been unorganized or represented by company unions since the years immediately after World War I, when the shipping companies and stevedoring firms had imposed the open shop after a series of failed strikes. Longshoremen in San Francisco, then the major port on the coast, were required to go through a hiring hall operated by a company union, known as the "blue book" system for the color of the union's membership book.

The Industrial Workers of the World had attempted to organize longshoremen, sailors and fishermen in the 1920s. A number of former IWW members and other militants, such as Harry Bridges, an Australian-born sailor who became a longshoreman after coming to the United States, soon joined the International Longshoremen's Association, when passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 led to an explosion in union membership in the ILA among West Coast longshoremen.

Those activists, known as the "Albion Hall group" after their usual meeting place in San Francisco, made contacts with like-minded activists at other ports. They pressed demands for a coastwide contract, a union-run hiring hall and an industrywide waterfront federation and led the membership in rejecting the weak "gentlemen's agreement" that the conservative ILA leadership had negotiated with the employers. When the employers offered to arbitrate, but only on the condition that the union agree to the open shop, the union struck every West Coast port on May 9, 1934.

The strike was a violent one: When strikers attacked the stockade in which the employers were housing strikebreakers in San Pedro, California on May 15, the employers' private guards shot and killed two strikers. Similar battles broke out in San Francisco and Oakland, California, Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. When the employers made a show of force in order to reopen the port in San Francisco, a pitched battle broke out on the Embarcadero in San Francisco between police and strikers. Two strikers were killed on July 5 by a policeman's shotgun blast into a crowd of picketers and onlookers. This incident is known as Bloody Thursday and is commemorated every year by ILWU members.

When the National Guard moved in to patrol the waterfront, the picketers pulled back. The San Francisco and Alameda County Central Labor Councils voted to call a general strike in support of the longshoremen, shutting down much of San Francisco and the Bay Area for four days, ending with the union's agreement to arbitrate the remaining issues in dispute.

The union won most of its demands in that arbitration proceeding. Those it did not win outright it gained through hundreds of job actions after the strikers returned to work, as the union gradually wrested control over the pace of work and the employer's power to hire and fire from the shipping and stevedoring companies through the mechanism of hiring halls.[5][6] Union members also engaged in a number of sympathy strikes in support of other maritime unions' demands.

The ILWU admitted African Americans in the 1930s, and during World War II its San Francisco section alone had an estimated 800 black members, at a time when most San Francisco unions excluded black workers and resisted implementation of President Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 (1941) against racial discrimination in the US defense industry.[7] However, "black union members were a minuscule group within the ILWU [leadership] hierarchy", with the few exceptions concentrated in the Oakland locale, which had an even larger black membership than San Francisco.[7] Also, by the own admission of Richard Lynden, the San Francisco locale's president, the ILWU failed to work on the upgrading (promotion) of its black members.[7] Still, in the judgement of historian Albert S. Broussard, "as far as blacks were concerned, the ILWU stood head and shoulders above other Bay Area locals in virtually every respect" during World War II.[7]

The union commenced the "March Inland", in which it organized the many warehouses that received the goods that longshoremen handled, both in the ports themselves and further removed from them, shortly after the successful conclusion of the 1934 strike. The union eventually organized warehouses throughout the United States. This "March Inland" was crucial in improving the working conditions and quality of life with each union it assimilated. For example, the Weighers' and Warehousemens' Union was one such union based in Oakland, California, that became a part of the ILWU, and prior to the assimilation "warehouse workers suffered low wages, high job insecurity and frequent speed-ups."[8]

On August 11, 1937, the Pacific Coast district, with the exception of three locals in the Northwest, formally seceded from the ILA, renaming itself the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, after the ILA attempted to reorganize the existing locals, abandon representation of warehousemen and reverse the unions' policies on issues such as unemployment insurance. Harry Bridges was elected President of the new union, which quickly affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Bridges became the West Coast Director for the CIO shortly thereafter.

Bridges' star within the CIO began to wane, however, as the Communist Party began to lose ground within the CIO. When the CPUSA began to attack Roosevelt in the months after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, the CIO responded by abolishing the position of West Coast director of the CIO, limiting Bridges' authority to California.

The United States government lost every effort it made to deport Bridges, revoke his naturalization, or prosecute him for denying that he was a member. The CIO, on the other hand, did not consider itself bound by the decisions of the courts or administrative agencies on this issue; after Bridges came out, along with other CP-allied labor leaders, against the Marshall Plan and for Henry A. Wallace's presidential campaign, the CIO expelled the ILWU in 1950 for being dominated by communists.

Expulsion had no real effect, however, on either the ILWU or Bridges' power within it. The organization continued to negotiate agreements, with less strife than in the 1930s and 1940s, and Bridges continued to be reelected without serious opposition. The union negotiated a groundbreaking agreement in 1960 that permitted the extensive mechanization of the docks, significantly reducing the number of longshore workers in return for generous job guarantees and benefits for those displaced by the changes.

The agreement, however, highlighted the lesser status that less senior members, known as "B-men," enjoyed. Bridges reacted uncharacteristically defensively to these workers' complaints, which were given additional sting by the fact that many of the "B-men" were black. The additional longshore work produced by the Vietnam War allowed Bridges to meet the challenge by opening up more jobs and making determined efforts to recruit black applicants. The ILWU later faced similar challenges from women, who found it even harder to enter the industry and the union.

ILWU headquarters in San Francisco

Bridges had difficulty giving up his position in the ILWU, even though he explored the possibility of merging it with the ILA or the Teamsters in the early 1970s. He finally retired in 1977, but only after ensuring that Louis Goldblatt, the long-time Secretary-Treasurer of the union and his logical successor, was denied the opportunity to replace him.

The Inlandboatmen's Union, whose members operate tugs, barges, passenger ferries and other vessels on the West Coast, and who had formerly been part of the Seafarers International Union of North America, merged with the ILWU in 1980. The ILWU rejoined the AFL–CIO in 1988, and disaffiliated with it in 2013.[9]

The ILWU represents 42,000 members in over 60 local unions in the states of California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Hawaii. An additional 4,000 members belong to the Inlandboatmen's Union of the Pacific, which constitutes the Union's Marine Division. Another 14,000 members belong to the autonomous ILWU Canada. With respect to employment in West Coast ports the employer and the union maintain the hiring halls gained through an arbitration following the strike of 1934. According to the union:

[...] the principles embodied in the ILWU hiring hall have bound together workers who have sought equal opportunity to work under safe conditions at a fair wage. The hiring hall has always been more than a place where jobs are dispatched. It is where earnings and work opportunity are equalized, and jobs are distributed in a fair and democratic system untarnished by prejudice or favoritism.[5]

2008 May Day work stoppage

Longshore worker and crane operator Al Webster joined the Seattle march on May 1, 2007 to call for an end to the Iraq war.

In protest of the Iraq War, the ILWU encouraged longshore workers to "shut down all West Coast ports" by walking off the job on May 1, 2008, to "make May Day a 'No Peace, No Work' holiday." On May 1, more than 10,000 ILWU members from all 29 West Coast ports voluntarily stopped work, with some attending rallies held by the ILWU where the union called for working-class people to withhold their labor to protest the war. The employer, the Pacific Maritime Association, filed a complaint against the Union for conducting what it saw as an illegal work stoppage. The court agreed with the PMA and determined that the ILWU had conducted a "secondary boycott" against the PMA, which is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.[13]

• Los Angeles Port Police Association
• Waterfront Workers History Project

• Bernstein, Irvin. The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941. Paperback edition. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1970. ISBN 0-395-11778-X. (Originally published 1969.)
• Holusha, John (May 2, 2008). "Dockworkers Protest Iraq War". The New York Times.
• Kimeldorf, Howard. Reds or Rackets?: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992. ISBN 0-520-07886-1.
• Larrowe, Charles. Harry Bridges, The Rise and Fall of Radical Labor in the U.S. Rev. ed. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1977. ISBN 0-88208-032-6.
• Nelson, Bruce. Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen and Unionism in the 1930s. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1988. ISBN 0-252-06144-6.
• Quin, Mike. The Big Strike. New York: International Publishers Company, 1996. ISBN 0-7178-0504-2.
• Selvin, David F. A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8143-2610-2.

• Official website
• Longshore Workers and Their Unions, from the Waterfront Workers History Project, focuses on the ILWU and the US West Coast.
• Collection Guide to the 1934 International Longshoremen's Association and General Strikes of San Francisco at The Bancroft Library
• The Pacific Longshoreman (1935–1937), newspaper on the Labor Press Project